Quotes about Interpretation

That's what's great about America: that our freedom of religion allows me to interpret the Bible exactly how it fits my worldview already.

model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics. To deal with such paradoxes we shall adopt an approach that we call model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Everything has two handles,--one by which it may be borne another by which it cannot.

They (theological liberals) seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

But since logic dictates that God could have saved the Israelites from Pharaoh's army in an infinity of ways, and in ways infinitely subtler than parting the Red Sea, it is obvious that he didn't part the Red Sea to save the Israelites as much as he parted the Red Sea to communicate himself to the Israelites.

History comprises the subjective accounts of human beings; and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an "objective" truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective.

Yes, I think that when the Bible refers to a horse or a horseman, that's exactly what it means.

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?