Cupitt Quotes & Sayings

The reason why Jesus got into such severe trouble was that he tried to bring into the present a construction of the world, of God and of the self that belonged to a still-remote future. He was much too far ahead of his time, and suffered accordingly. — Don Cupitt

To love is to be vulnerable: if God loves, then God is mortal. — Don Cupitt

Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial. — Don Cupitt

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was. — Don Cupitt

Scientific knowledge is advanced by the systematic criticism and purging of what currently passes for knowledge, so in religion too we need to criticize and expel all the illusory and dysfunctional religious material we have inherited. — Don Cupitt

I believe in the near future we will 3D print our buildings and houses. — Neri Oxman

There are always things that you see that are pretty tough, sure. But what keeps you going is when you see people rise above toughness and rise above really hard conditions, and make something of it. — Michael Elliott

The glow of inspiration warms us; this holy rapture springs from the seeds of the Divine mind sown in man. — Ovid

As soon as a man stands up and says he is right or his church is right, and all others are wrong, he is himself all wrong. He does not know that upon the proof of all the others depends the proof of his own. Love and charity for the whole human race, that is the test of true religiousness. I do not mean the sentimental statement that all men are brothers, but that one must feel the oneness of human life. — Swami Vivekananda

Nothing out there tells us how we must live: we and we alone can now with confidence knowingly trust our own hearts, and admit that we do and must invent our own ethics. — Don Cupitt

Will there be cake? — Anthony Cupitt

Presently the newly awakened psychology will gradually accomplish what pure religious devotion might have done: throw out Paul, and let Jesus in! — Jan Willem Kaiser

To say that God is love is in effect to say simply that love is God. — Don Cupitt

Our old religious and moral traditions," writes Cupitt in The Great Questions of Life (2005), "have faded away, and nothing can resuscitate them. That is why a tiny handful of us are not liberal, but radical, theologians. We say that the new culture is so different from anything that existed in the past that religion has to be completely reinvented. Unfortunately, the new style of religious thinking that we are trying to introduce is so queer and so new that most people have great difficulty in recognizing it as religion at all. — Stephen Batchelor

We should be empty of clutching, empty of self, empty of all the old ideas of substance. We should be 'lost in the objectivity of world-love', as I have elsewhere put it; or, perhaps better, we should let ourselves be only an empty space filled with brightness. Life lived like that is 'eternal' life. — Don Cupitt

I'm just naturally quite toned. My dad was like a body builder, so I've got my dad's body. Not all of it, thank God. — Rebecca Mader

Within your physical atoms the origins of all consciousness still sings. — Jane Roberts

Mystical writing was indeed the forerunner of today's radical theology and deconstruction ...
Jacques Derrida can be described as an intellectual subversive whose work leads to the view that any text may be interpreted to mean almost anything, and as a mystic will.
Well, yes, mystical writing is indeed politically and linguistically subversive and always was so the mystic seeks to create an effect of religious happiness by liberating religious language from the Babylonian captivity of metaphysics. When the writing does succeed in melting God and the soul down into each other, the effect of happiness is astonishing. — Don Cupitt

For it was only via the idea of God that we were able to develop all our ideas about a unified self, reason, a unified law-governed cosmos, sovereignty, property, supervision (Providence) and management, long-term purposes and action to attain them and so on. God taught us everything, so that we are eternally grateful to God even as we now leave him behind. — Don Cupitt

One should not attend even the end of the world without a good breakfast. — Robert A. Heinlein

Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity. — Don Cupitt

Religious ideas such as the idea of God have functioned as regulative ideals for us to aspire after: we too could become unified and capable subjects; we too could learn how to know the world and reshape our environment to meet our own needs. — Don Cupitt

If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think. — Walter Kirn

I am suggesting that we can and do regain eternity when we are so immersed in life, in moral action, or in aesthetic contemplation, that we completely forget about time and anxiety. — Don Cupitt

A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held. — Don Cupitt

I just want to sleep, and eat, and learn about what's going on in the world. — Debra Winger

It is not the intellect but the wisdom of love that will reveal the beauty of life. — Debasish Mridha

Capital T truth is dead. — Don Cupitt

The little Durands were there, I conclude," said she, "with their mouths open to catch the music; like unfledged sparrows ready to be fed. They never miss a concert. — Jane Austen

Those who first acquired language and tried to think the human situation were utterly overwhelmed. They could cope only by imagining that there were greater invisible beings who could and did understand and control both the human psyche and the world. 'I can't make sense of it, but I have to believe that there is a larger perspective within which it all makes sense. — Don Cupitt

I'm not sure if Cupitt himself still uses this term, but it's useful in suggesting that, actually, there are more choices than the choice between nihilism and faith. In fact, the issue may not be faith as such but the fact that for millennia, Christianity has buttressed itself with a particular kind of metaphysics that has now seemingly reached the end of its life-span. But perhaps Buddhist metaphysics could provide an alternative here - or, at least, offer a direction of travel. — George Pattison

The Servant who really studies his Master gradually becomes like his master; gradually learns that he himself is the one who in the end does all the work and has all the power. — Don Cupitt