In the Footsteps of the Wise Men

Here are some of their notable statements:

Carl Sagan:
• It is a height of human arrogance to imagine that this planet is the only habitable world.

• No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them… Through technological advances in communication our planet is in the final stages of being bound up at breakneck pace into a single global society. If we can accomplish the integration of the Earth without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing… Thanks to the courage and intelligence, we found only some sections of roads which our ancestors walked.

•••

Joseph Campbell

• The universe is a bunch of exploding atomic furnaces like our sun. Maybe it will be the end of life on this planet, but that is not the end of the universe. It is just a bungled explosion in terms of all the explosions that are going on in all the suns of the universe. So this is just a little imitation of the whole big job.

• Life is good, but this world is bad, and no one has ever managed to mend it.

• Today’s dominant religions accept as the ultimate truth something that is only rudimentary, no longer serves life. They belong to another time, another era and should have died, each one of them, together with their epochs.

• Mythology is a map of the trails of life experience and the song of the heavenly spheres.

• Theology puts frames on things that can’t be fit in any frames, thereby it kills the song of the cosmos.

• The ancient gods were mostly the carriers of divine powers, not their source.

•••

Morgan Freeman

• There are plenty of definitions of God. The word “God” means so many things to so many people.

•••

Charles Darwin

• I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problem. The mistery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I, for one, must be content to remain an agnostic.

•••

Michael Wood – TV serial “Legacy”

The history of the christian West is something completely new in the world history. More than any other, it has always swung, like a pendulum, caught between two poles – a barbarian savagery and a religious idealism; contradiction apparently deeply rooted in our character and history… An idea of an ultimate truth was completely foreign to Eastern civilisations.

•••

Anonymous

How do you know that this life isn’t another world’s hell?

•••

Polish Professor Maria Szyszkowska

• Unfortunately, we Poles are a little known nation. Our influence upon the world’s affairs is slim. • Human life resembles the fate of a prisoner waiting for his death sentence in a cell.

•••

Akbar I, emperor of Mughal (1556 to 1605)

• Now it becomes clear to me that it cannot be wisdom to assert the truth of one faith over another. In our troubled world, so full of contradictions, the wise person makes justice his god and learns from all. Perhaps in this way the door may be open again for those whose key has been lost.

***

Jerzy Sędziak

• The energy of the soul does not die at the moment of death, but goes into another state. As a result, the body also takes on a different form. This is a true and healthy teaching. But the teaching of the ressurection in the same body and the final judgment are erronous simplifications. It is a pity that so many people have been fooled and followed it.

• The Bible is not God’s word, but the voice of fallen angels, who passed it down it through priests to limit human consciousness, keep it low level, and thus inhibit human development. For this reason, biblical fundamentalism is a slavery to spirit and mind.