Quotes about Choice

The good news about hell is this: It wasn't intended for you, and you weren't intended for it. You don't have to go there. Choose otherwise.

The purpose of continuous repentance in the life of a quality man is not a return to the crisis of salvation but part of what the Bible calls sanctification. Repentance is the choice to embrace the Holy Spirit's daily work of convicting us about ongoing sin. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

All change begins with a change of mind the Bible calls repentance. Repentance is detecting and destroying the rationalizations that led to me checking the sinful choice box in the first place. Repentance is what every biblical prophet was calling for because that is where a man begins to move from depravity to quality.

A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come to think that whatever they do they must do.

One does not cross over from Manichaeism to Christianity, or from Lamarckianism to Darwinism, by a mere adjustment of views. True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.

By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one's own boundaries of play. Infinite players recognize choice in all aspects of sexuality. They may see in themselves and in others, for example, the infant's desire to compete for the mother, but they also see that there is neither physiological nor societal destiny in sexual patterns. Who chooses to compete with another can also choose to play with another.

Fathering and mothering are roles freely assumed but always with the design of showing them to be theatrical. It is the intention of parents in such families to make it plain to their children that they all play cultural and societal roles, that they are only roles, and that they are all truly concrete persons behind them. Therefore, children also learn that they have a family only by choosing to have it, by a collective act to be a family with each other.

For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

If you want it your own way, God will let you have it. Hell is the enjoyment of your own way forever.

Here again, the souls 'have what they chose'; they enjoy that kind of after-life which they themselves imagined for the virtuous dead; their failure lay in not imagining better. They are lost because they 'had not faith' — primarily the Christian faith, but also, more generally, faith in the nature of things.

They knew, with the painful conviction of experience, what it meant to say, "I see and approve the better, but follow the worse.