Joseph Wright

“Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“When the point of education becomes the production of credentials rather than the cultivation of knowledge, it forfeits the motive recognized by Aristotle: "All human beings by nature desire to know.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

“A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God
who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is
seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that
relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a
being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so
different from earthly dictators who make everything and
everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism
that rejects such a God is amply justified.”
― Karen Armstrong