Religious people should support LGBT equality, not despite religion but because of it.
Merry Xmas.
"Jews and Christians are different in a lot of ways. Some Christian people will actually have religious bumper stickers on their cars. Like ‘Jesus is King,’ ‘The Lord Jesus Saves.’ Jews don’t do that. You’ll never see, ‘Honk if you love Moses.’"
— Gregg Rogell, comedian
"The word amen, which found its way from Judaism into Christianity and Islam, crossing cultures and continents, borders and chasms, is in fact an acronym of the Hebrew phrase ‘el melech ne’eman.’ Spoken in response to a blessing, it means: the words of the blessing are true and may they come to pass…Since that word is so universal, it symbolizes for me, much as literature does, everything that we, all of humanity, have in common despite the differences in our way of thinking, in our faith, and our inner and outer landscapes, the living, quivering hope of every human being for forgiveness, salvation, mercy. And so I think that even the very fact of its existence is comforting, although all our wishes may not come true."
— Zeruya Shalev, Israeli author
“The power of readers lies not in their ability to gather information, in their ordering and cataloguing capability, but in their gift to interpret, associate and transform their reading. For the Talmudic schools, as for those of Islam, a scholar can turn religious faith into an active power through the craft of reading, since the knowledge acquired through books is a gift from God. According to an early hadith, or Islamic tradition, one scholar is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worshippers. For these cultures of the Book, knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information, nor in the object of the book itself, but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience, in the words reflected both in the outside world and in the reader’s own being.”-Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Photo by Ben Leto
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