Linda Vester Quotes

Some people turn from God because they cannot understand how a good God can permit evil in the world.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

'Preacher' - what it's saying is not just blasphemy and good, fun violence. It's asking, 'Where is God?' If he is there, what's he doing?

Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

God made us. He's in charge of everything, right? If He didn't like us, why didn't he change us?

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don't know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

I took two or three months and I came up with a reason that I thought was enough and I went with it: if there is a God he's definitely not benevolent. We should mean less to him than ants. And if there is a God or there are gods they would value, more than anything, free will.

If 'everything happens for a reason,' then every act of evil is ultimately God's doing.

I'm honest enough to say I don't know everything. You know, I don't. I don't understand all of God. I don't understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

I would say that I am a poor Christian; I'm not a believer. It was this idea very early in my life that life on Earth, nature or man could not be a creation of a merciful God.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children

The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple.

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love.

If I were God, I would just be up there scratching my head, thinking, 'What the hell am I supposed to do with this?' For everyone helping an old lady across the street, there's someone else bludgeoning a person to death. And sometimes they're the same. How can He separate us all out?

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

I do not believe that God tortures any person simply for its own sake. I believe that God enables all things to work for the greater good.

Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist.