The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Now the word of truth is sent from God … For being sent with authority, it were not fit that it should be required to produce proof of what is said; since neither is there any proof beyond itself, which is God.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">It was because we were weak and unable to find the truth by pure reason that we needed the authority of sacred scriptures; and so I began to see that you [God] would not have endowed them with such authority among all nations unless you had willed human beings to believe in you and seek you through them. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… as in the case of visible objects which we have not seen, we trust those who have … so in the case of things that are perceived by mind and spirit (which are remote from our own interior sense), it behooves us to trust those who have seen them …&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The reason why we believe he [Jesus] was born of the Virgin Mary is not because he could not exist in true flesh, and be seen by men in any other way, but because it is so written in Scripture, which unless we believe, we can neither be Christians, nor be saved. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears to us to be white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There is still another temptation, one more fraught with danger.&nbsp; In addition to the [lust] of the flesh, which lures us to indulge in the pleasures of all the senses and brings disaster on its slaves who flee far from you, there is also a [lust] of the mind, a frivolous, avid curiosity … It masquerades as a zeal for knowledge and learning, and since the eyes are paramount among the senses in acquiring information, the inquisitive tendency is called in holy scripture [lust] of the eyes … From the same motive, efforts are made to scrutinize the natural world that lie beyond our sight; knowledge of these is of no profit, yet people want to know them simply for the sake of knowing.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Since, therefore, we are considering what ought to be believed in the sphere of religion, we do not need to inquire into the nature of things as did those whom the Greeks call physikoi [pre-Socratic philosophers of Ionia], nor need we fear that the Christian is ignorant of something they have discovered or think they have discovered concerning the properties and number of the elements, the movement and order and phases of the stars, the shape of the heavens … the measurement of time and space, the indications of imminent storms and hundreds of other such things.&nbsp; This is because they themselves have not discovered everything … and in those matters which they boast of having discovered, much is a matter of opinion rather than knowledge.&nbsp; For a Christian, it is enough to believe the cause of created things, whether in heaven or on earth, visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the creator who is the one true God … and that he is a Trinity, that is, a Father, the Son begotten of the Father, and a Holy Spirit who proceeds from the same Father and is one and the same Spirit of Father and Son. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">My attitude at the time was that it is not necessary to know how an automobile works in order to drive one; nor is it imperative to become a biblical scholar or theologian in order to save souls from damnation.&nbsp; All of that could be left to the experts who, I believed, had already figured it all out and who could provide the historical, rational, documentary archaeological evidences if anyone ever asked.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I cannot sit under a clergyman who addresses his congregation as though he had taken a return ticket to heaven and back.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others.&nbsp; Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty.&nbsp; At the crossroads of the choice between “I know” and “They say,” he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think.&nbsp; Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.&nbsp; … From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings.&nbsp; His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness …</em></p>