S-Abelard > S-Abelard's Quotes

“Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves—as Jews who had found God's messiah—we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.”
― Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

“Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Times of mourning displace us from ordinary life.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story--a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we'd wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, "I can't imagine how you felt, what that was like." I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, "Like being burned alive.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later." Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Self-ignorance is also a form of self-destruction. According to the Dialogue of the Savior, whoever does not understand the elements of the universe, and of himself, is bound for annihilation:  … If one does not [understand] how the fire came to be, he will burn in it, because he does not know his root. If one does not first understand the water, he does not know anything.… If one does not understand how the wind that blows came to be, he will run with it. If one does not understand how the body that he wears came to be, he will perish with it.… Whoever does not understand how he came will not understand how he will go …”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate . . .’73”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“Thunder, Perfect Mind

'I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am (the mother) and the daughter... I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband... I am knowing, and ignorance... I am shameless; I am ashamed. I am strength, and I am fear... I am foolish, and I am wise... I am godless, and I am one whose God is great.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.
[...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Contrary to orthodox sources, which interpret Christ’s death as a sacrifice redeeming humanity from guilt and sin, this gnostic gospel sees the crucifixion as the occasion for discovering the divine self within.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“...although being "angry at God"--or at myself, or him, or anyone else--made no sense to me, I was often overwhelmed by sudden, intense bursts of anger that had no outlet, no appropriate target.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“For those who find suffering inevitable--in other words, for any of us who can't dodge and pretend it's not there--acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich recently drew a similar distinction between the God we imagine when we hear the term, and the “God beyond God,” that is, the “ground of being” that underlies all our concepts and images.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“Yet their metaphor indicates that the gnostics were neither relativists nor skeptics. Like the orthodox, they sought the “one sole truth.” But gnostics tended to regard all doctrines, speculations, and myths—their own as well as others’—only as approaches to truth.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Throughout those nameless days, my temper exploded at slight frustrations. Trembling, sitting in my stomach,m would spread until my whole body was shaking.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“Meanwhile there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And though I'd flared with anger when the priest at Heinz's funeral had warned not to be "angry at God" because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story

“The prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for example, often used the metaphors of adultery and prostitution to indict those they accused of being “unfaithful” to God’s covenant.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical. Second, the “living Jesus” of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus of the New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal—even identical.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

“guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it.”
― Elaine Pagels, Why Religion?: A Personal Story

“[W]hat made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers; and this brought some of them into direct and total opposition to the temporal as well as the divine authorities - to the emperors and to their divine patrons, the gods.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer