Quotes about disbelief

Laura Davis - Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

Many survivors struggle to believe the abuse happened. They don’t want to believe it. It’s too painful to think about. They don’t want to accuse family members or face the terrible loss involved in realizing “a loved one” hurt them they don’t want to rock the boat.

Israelmore Ayivor - Shaping the dream

Walk in faith. Do not let your doubts take the lead ahead of you they will show you the wrong path. Being a pessimist is a failure plan uncompleted.

Israelmore Ayivor - Shaping the dream

Don't be a patron of disbelief nobody fights and wins battles in the hand gloves of doubts.

Kate Morton - The Forgotten Garden

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant.

Floyd C. Forsberg - The Toughest Prison of All

Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended.

Michael Salter -

During a period in which women and children’s testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned “ritual abuse” as the new frontier of disbelief. The term “ritual abuse” arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of “recovered memories”, “false allegations”

A.A. Milne -

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

E.A. Bucchianeri - Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World: Volume I

(Marlowe's) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a 'place' invented by men.

Graeme Galton - Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder

Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about i

Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind

Congratulations, he said. "That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen." His expression was a mix of awe and disbelief. "Ever.

Gabriel García Márquez - Of Love and Other Demons

This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.

Natascha Kampusch - 096 Days

people do not emphasize with victims and give them limitless sympathy, but can very quickly switch to aggression and rejection

Natascha Kampusch - 096 Days

...victims of violent crime are not always believed...[referring to victim testimony at serial killer and pedophile Marc Detroux's trial]

J.S.B. Morse - Now and at the Hour of Our Death

It seems the more we know, the less we believe.

Michael Salter - Organised Sexual Abuse

Chapter 4,‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Zizek’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexua

Charles L. Bailey Jr. - In the Shadow of the Cross

The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the t

Malorie Blackman - Noble Conflict

I mean you're cute, but not that cute. Would Rhea really risk life in a maximum security detention unit just so that she could press herself against your manly body?

Aphrodite Matsakis - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

Aphrodite Matsakis - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences.

Alison Miller - Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

We worked through the “alien abduction” memory and discovered that the “spaceship” was parked in the courtyard of the cult training centre. An insider had been instructed that if the survivor began to remember the ritual abuse, she was to make her remember the alien abduction, so that nobody would believe her account of the ritual abuse. This programme did not work in this case, but you can imagine the larger consequences of such a ruse.

Darin Strauss - Half a Life

What I want to write is that I lay there until morning, with tear-stained eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register? I slept soundly.

Nicole Waller - Contradictory Violence: Revolution and Subversion in the Caribbean

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.

Johnnie Dent Jr. -

Denial exists when three beliefs intersect:1. It cannot happen. 2. It cannot happen to you.3. It cannot happen to you now.

Erin Merryn - Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness

She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose lives were changed forever. The two cannot even be compared, yet when someone is in denial about what happened, they cannot perceive what is true. It seemed too hard for her to let her mind go there and believe her grandson could do such terrible things.

Renee Fredrickson - Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse

You may experience waves of disbelief after each memory you retrieve. Whether as a phase or waves, the disbelief is usually accompanied by massive self-hate and guilt. ‘How can I even think such a thing? I must really be warped,’ you tell yourself.

Thomm Quackenbush - Artificial Gods

Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal.

Aphrodite Matsakis - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

However, if you do not believe your clients, they may sense your doubt and never fully trust you. As Bruce Goderez (1986), director of a PTSD inpatient unit says, "It is important for the clinician and counselor to be willing to be made a fool." In other words, it is better that you believe a client who is lying or distorting the truth than to disbelieve a hurting trauma survivor who may never seek help again if your attitude is one of disbelief or disdain. Even if that client were to continue i

Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho

This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence sig

Amy Bloom - A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been su

Aphrodite Matsakis - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Some of the experiences endured by human beings on this earth are virtually unbelievable.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana - Sweet Destiny

Cyber bullying occurs online daily. Most don't consider their actions or words to be bullying. Here's a few clues that you're a cyber bully.(1) You post information about someone in order to ruin their character.(2) You post threats to someone.(3) You tag someone in vulgar degrading posts.(4) You post any information intended to harm or shame another individual seeking to gain attention.Then, you are a cyber bully and need to get some help.

Israelmore Ayivor - Daily Drive 365

Your doubts do nothing than pouring cold water on your enviable dreams. Just keep doubts away from you and you will not dilute your success story!

Israelmore Ayivor - Shaping the dream

Hope greets your desires warmly while doubts insult your efforts bitterly!

Israelmore Ayivor - Shaping the dream

The shape of your dreams will not hold if you believe that disbelief is the mending glue. You will only turn back to see the pieces of your dreams if you have the impossibility mindset.

Morgan Rhodes -

I haven't believed in magic because I don't believe in anything that I haven't seen with my own eyes. Therefore, I must go to Paelsia as soon as I can and learn the truth for myself

Joyce Rachelle - Sewing Figs

But that was just a shadow of what would come to pass:When one appointed season Christ came to die at last.And in the name of justice they flogged him like a thief,But willing was the victim of human disbelief.

Drexel Deal - The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father

My thoughts were interrupted when I heard someone got slapped. By the sound alone, one could tell that it was a hard one. I figured whoever got slapped had to be close by, so I spun around in search of this person who had just gotten the daylights slapped out of them, only to discover that the person was me.

David Yeung -

It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim’s response.

C. JoyBell C. -

Humanity does not suffer from the disease of wrong beliefs but humanity suffers from the contagious nature of the lack of belief. If you have no magic with you it is not because magic does not exist but it is because you do not believe in it. Even if the sun shines brightly upon your skin every day, if you do not believe in the sunlight, the sunlight for you does not exist.

Shannon L. Alder -

The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.

Thomas Paine - The Age of Reason

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

L.M. Browning - Seasons of Contemplation: A Book of Midnight Meditations

Question everything—no matter how beloved, or how long-held, or how exalted—without apology. Only those who build their world upon lies need fear an inquisitive mind. The truth will remain, even after a storm of doubt and revolution has washed over it. Only illusions need be protected. The truth need not be defended; it existed before us and will continue to exist after us.

Abraham H. Maslow -

We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.

Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

The sound of thunder awake me, and when I got up, my feet sank into muddy water up to my ankles. Mother took Buster and Helen to high ground to pray, but I stayed behind with Apache and Lupe. We barricaded the door with the rug and started bailing water out the window. Mother came back and begged us to go pray with her on the hilltop. "To heck with praying!" I shouted. "Bail, dammit, bail!"Mom look mortified. I could tell she thought I'd probably doomed us all with my blasphemy, and I was a litt

Patrick White - Three Uneasy Pieces

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?

Thomas Paine - The Age of Reason

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

Israelmore Ayivor - Leaders' Ladder

Leaders don't fall in gutters of fear; only negative ideas flow in that canal. There, you will see filthy things like doubts and disbelief.

Israelmore Ayivor - Leaders' Ladder

Leaders scan the future so it can be free of doubts and fear. They do so by not living a double standard life in the present.

Charlotte Featherstone - Sinful

She saw how he was staring at it, the bright red hue beneath her bonnet. She could not bear to see the way he was looking at her—right through her—without seeing her. He did not see a woman. He did not see Jane, the woman he had been so passionate with two days before. He saw… Jane swallowed hard and lookedaway, hating the weakness of her spirit. She was more than this, a wilting flower. She was stronger than this. But damn it, this hurt.It hurt because he was the man responsible for making her

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have b

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ri

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that w

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sens

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. Th

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow,

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing t

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tappi

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clot

Annie Dillard -

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty,

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intrica

Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to di

H.G. Wells - The Time Machine

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand

Dominic Riccitello -

He said he was going to fix everything and I believed him. But I believed him before and again some. And I guess I got lost in the resentment of disbelief.

Andrew James Pritchard - Sukiyaki

I couldn’t believe it; my deepest darkest fantasy of a cute school girl slowly stripping in front of me was finally unbelievingly coming true! Furthermore, it wasn’t just any school girl, but one from my school, that was the icing on the cake, or at least it should have been. Because, at the same time that my fantasy was becoming reality, I felt that I was being very badly cheated. Why couldn’t it have been sixteen year old Heather Johnson or fifteen year old Pamela wade stripping before me, ins

Murray J. McAlister -

Sometimes, this disapproval of how you are managing your pain crosses over to disbelief that you are in as much pain as you say you are. They don’t believe that your pain is a legitimate enough reason to rest or nap or cry or take narcotic medications or not go to work or to go to the doctor. They might think that you are making too big of a deal out of it. They doubt the legitimacy of the pain itself.This kind of stigma is the source of the dreaded accusation that chronic pain is “all in your h

Erin Merryn - Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness

Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through so much pain and hurt and have to live with the scars every day, I get angry knowing that others think it is all made up or they brush it off because my cousin was a teenager. I was ten when I was first sexually abused by my cousin, and a majority of my relatives have taken the perpetrator's side. I

Cheryl Hersha - Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country

Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told — even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that — they were not disjointed They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just she'd someone trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with them again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done

Markus Zusak - Getting the Girl

Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.

Michael Salter - Organised Sexual Abuse

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony

Katherine Rundell -

Sometimes it seemed difficult for the adults in Sophie's life to tell between 'carried away' and 'absolutely correct but unbelieved.

Israelmore Ayivor - Daily Drive 365

Impossibilitarians are defeated before the battle even begins. The best attitude that accommodates failure is disbelief. You can't do it because you believe you can't! You can do it because you believe you can!

Stephen Batchelor - Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

Alison Miller - Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

Besides stage magic props and settings, ritually abusing groups use technology, such as that described by Katz and Fotheringham. Military/political groups have the most sophisticated technologies, and much training or programming is now done with virtual reality equipment. Movies and holograms are used to deceive a child into believing in things that are unreal. When a client says to you “I don't know if it's real; how can it be real?” remember that there are several options, not just two: (1) I

W.E.B. Du Bois -

[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.

Flannery O'Connor - Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern. He says with Swinburne, "Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of things," or with Steinbeck, "In the end was the word and the word was with men." For him, man has his own natural spirit of courage

Michael Marshall Smith - Stories: All-New Tales

When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?”“I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.”“Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.

Michael Marshall Smith - Stories: All-New Tales

Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.

Plutarch -

The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.

J.S.B. Morse - Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Ironically, the only people anyone believes these days are the skeptics.

Alison Miller - Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

In my client who had confessed her “alien abduction” experience, an alter had been instructed that if she began to remember the ritual abuse she was to remember the alien abduction, so that nobody would believe her account of the ritual abuse. This program did not work with us, but you can imagine the larger consequences of such a ruse.p55

Cormac McCarthy - No Country for Old Men

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

Craig D. Lounsbrough -

Faith is the resplendent key that liberates me from the impregnable confines meticulously constructed from the raw material of my disbelief.

Sadhguru - Life and Death in One Breath

Even if I say something, do not believe this nonsense, but do not disbelieve it either. Just see, "Someone is willing to sit in front of so many people and talk absolute nonsense, something that is totally absurd. Let me see what this is about." If you keep that much openness, the possibility is alive in your life. If you believe it, you will kill it. If you disbelieve it, you will kill it.

Frederick Barthelme - Elroy Nights

There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.

Sarah E. Olson - Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

I've been depressed all day. I feel like such a fraud. People say how special and wonderful I am. I think,"Can't they tell? "—Nita, September 18, 1984

H. Kirk Rainer - A Once and Always Father

In the depression, was I ever suicidal; or in other words, did I ever think about taking my life? I’m not sure if I ever pondered this act but, honestly, I did not care whether I lived or died; for to me, death had already taken place—and it seemed to be worse as disbelief gave way to shock…and then reality.

Shannon L. Alder -

Whenever you can’t balance what you see with what you believe you have conflict.