Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

if there is a god, he sure hates people

Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts - there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.

In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.

I ask why your Omnipotent God does not hold a man back when he is about to commit a sin or offence. It is child’s play for God. Why did He not kill war lords? Why did He not remove the fury of war from their minds? In this way God could have saved humanity from great calamity and horror.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

Safety is a basic human need. People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals will generate great ideas.

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me - the raving of insanity, superstition gone to seed! I want no part of such a God.

Next to grace, I bet God thinks making us need each other was one of His best ideas.

I think God isn't interested in intervening every time some little bad thing happens. God is interested in getting the message of good news and love and comfort and hope across through people like us, ordinary people, or extraordinary people like Bono.

Before man's fall the rose was born,St. Ambrose says, without the thorn;But for man's fault then was the thornWithout the fragrant rose-bud born; But ne'er the rose without the thorn.

When we contemplate the world of Epicurus, and conceive the universe to be a fortuitous jumble of atoms, there is nothing grand in this idea. The clashing of atoms by blind chance has nothing in it fit to raise our conceptions, or to elevate the mind. But the regular structure of a vast system of beings, produced by creating power, and governed by the best laws which perfect wisdom and goodness could contrive, is a spectacle which elevates the understanding, and fills the soul with devout admiration.

God is the Creator God, he doesn't want to say, "Okay, creation was very good, but I'm scrapping it." He wants to say, "Creation is so good that I'm going to rescue it."

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.

Nothing can be more consoling to the man of God, than the conviction that the Lord who made the world governs the world; and that every event, great and small, prosperous and adverse, is under the absolute disposal of Him who doth all things well, and who regulates all things for the good of his people.

God allows us to feel pain for a reason: to protect us.

God made all the animals in a single day; he could have swept them all away in the flood and re-created them in one day when they were again needed. Therefore it was an odd idea to save specimens of them for eleven months in the ark, whilst aware that eight persons could not feed or water them by any human possibility. If they were to be preserved by miracle, the ark was not necessary - to let them swim would have answered the purpose and been more indubitably miraculous.

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'

At first laying down, as a fact fundamental, That nothing with God can be accidental.

When God's people are removed from this earth, you might as well try to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks as to stem the flood of lawlessness that will engulf mankind. Thank God for the restraining Spirit today!

I wish the world would become what God wanted it to be in the first place, before we tampered with it.

Somewhere in the infinite that He occupies, God advances and withdraws the pawns of the other games He plays, but it is too soon to worry about this one, all He need do for the present is allow things to take their natural course, apart from the occasional adjustment with the tip of His little finger to make sure some stray thought or action does not interfere with the harmony of destinies.

We are human, and we suffer, and unlike the animals on the farm, we are self-aware, and we know that we suffer, and it doesn't hurt more or less if God caused it or could stop it, at least for me. I am definitely of the school that believes God has bigger stuff to worry about than me.

Coincidences are glimpses in to the creative mind of the universe.

God is the Great Engineer, creating circumstances to bring about moments in our lives of divine importance, leading us to divine appointments