You're not on your own. You're doing things with other people. This is very important for me.
Learning to be silent is far more difficult and far more important than learning to recite prayers.
We call for an end to the killing of one another, and we denounce the violence and fanaticism that threatens life. The victory of the resurrection must be experienced as a victory of life, of brotherhood, of the future, of hope.
Taking away the peace of a people, committing every act of violence, or consenting to such acts, especially when directed against the weakest and defenseless, is a profoundly grave sin against God.
. . . the ecological problem of our times demands a radical reevaluation of how we see the entire world; it demands a different interpretation of matter and the world, a new attitude of humankind toward nature, and a new understanding of how we acquire and make use of our material goods.
Man has sought to take from the natural world not only that which is necessary for his stability and survival, but often seeks to satisfy his perceived and ultimately false psychological needs, such as his need for self-display, luxuries and the like. Twenty percent of humanity consumes eighty percent of the world's wealth and is accountable for an equal percentage of the world's ecological catastrophes.
Consider the willful scorching of the earth, over-fishing, wasteful hunting, excessive and dangerous recycling of resources, and other similar "injustices" against the ways of nature share in the responsibility for this ecological spiraling down.
If you can find something that you're really passionate about, whether you're a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.
That's all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
I think you should enjoy this life that you are given on this earth because we really don't know what it is in the afterlife. We can definitely prove that this life is this life here because we wake up every day and do the same thing that we do. The afterlife I'm not so sure about. So, I don't understand why you'd want to hurt other people in thinking that you'll go on in the afterlife to have bliss. I just don't understand it.
As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prarie-dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits.