Neale Donald Walsch Quotes

We delude ourselves into believing that morality comes from somewhere else, whereas in reality we behave as we've been told to behave.

Isn't it a remarkable coincidence almost everyone has the same religion as their parents ? And it always just happens to be the right religion. Religions run in families. If we'd been brought up in ancient Greece we would all be worshiping Zeus and Apollo. If we had been born Vikings we would be worshiping Wotan and Thor. How does this come about ? Through childhood indoctrination.

All your beliefs, they're just that. They're nothing. They're how you were taught and raised. That doesn't make 'em real.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.

Everyone just did what their parents did. So that immediately made me skeptical of the whole religion thing, even as a kid. So I never was really into religion as a concept.

In the battle for preserving sound social and moral norms, many religious institutions can no longer be counted as allies.

Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.

A thing is only right or wrong because you say it is. A thing is not right or wrong intrinsically.

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

Practically the whole human race is hypnotized because it thinks what somebody else told it to think.

The fact that some people are opposed on religious grounds mainly, well, that doesn't bother me as long as they're not allowed to influence other people by force or by whatever other means.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself....The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.

I do not make decisions [as governor] based on what have I learned through my Bible studies, what have I learned in my religious classes in school. I'm a big believer in separation of church and state, and I think that's what . . . the law is.

But you weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

I barely got out of school, I got out of school, mainly, because I was a champ, and I actually didn't pass. I won't name the teachers that put me through, but I want. If I was not a Muslim, or a follower of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed I couldn't talk to somebody for two minutes. I believe I can hold my own as an intelligent conversation, but it all come from the Honorable Elijah Mohammed.

The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

You understand Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and ibexes.

Thinking is hard. Making value judgments is difficult. It places you at pure creation, because there are so many times you'll have to say, "I don't know. I just don't know." Yet still you'll have to decide. And so you'll have to choose. You'll have to make an arbitrary choice. Such a choice - a decision coming from no previous personal knowledge - is called pure creation. And the individual is aware, deeply aware, that in the making of such decisions is the Self created.

Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents.