Walter Terence Stace - Religion Quotes

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Religion can probably out live any scientific discoveries which could be made. It can accommodate itself to them. The root cause of the decay of faith has not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the general spirit of science and certain basic assumptions upon which modern science, from the seventeenth century onwards, has proceeded.

Walter Terence Stace
It must now be added that these attempts at proof not only fail of their purpose, and so do no good to religion, but that they positively degrade it.

Walter Terence Stace
How is it possible for both naturalism and religion - atheism and theism, if you prefer it - to be but two sides of one truth, is the same as the problem how God can be both being and non-being, as one of the most ancient religious and mystical insights proclaims he is, or how he can be both the Eternal Yes and the Eternal Nay, as Böhme affirmed.

Walter Terence Stace
Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.

Walter Terence Stace
Thus we see that mysticism naturally, though not necessarily, becomes intimately associated with whatever is the religion of the culture in which it appears.

Walter Terence Stace
All religious thought and speech are through and through symbolic. And this fundamental insight is perhaps as old as religion itself.

Walter Terence Stace
No scientific argument — by which I mean an argument drawn from the phenomena of nature — can ever have the slightest tendency either to prove or disprove the existence of God... science is irrelevant to religion.

Walter Terence Stace