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Atheists.—What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult, to be born or to rise again; that what has never been should be, or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us; want of habit makes the other impossible. A popular way of thinking! Why cannot a virgin bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? What distinguishes these outwardly from others? And who has told us that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock? 222

 

Blaise Pascal

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In the case of the cosmos, [...] even if we don’t understand how it came about, it’s not helpful to postulate a creator, because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation - and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin of the universe came into being - how matter and energy, how one or two physical constants came into existence - although it’s difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a God comes into existence - difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence, and even more difficult to think of - how a Christian God, who actually cares about things like sin and gets Himself born of a virgin.

 

Richard Dawkins

 

An orthodox thunders against the egotism of atheists, “who do not want to enter into God’s kingdom like little children but want to be something.” Here the category is correct, but now he is going to make his discourse weightier and appeals to that Bible passage [Matthew 18:2], literally understood, about being a little child (literally understood). Can one blame the atheist for assuming His Reverence to be a bit lunatic, quite literally understood? The difficult discourse with which the orthodox began has become balderdash, because for a little child it is not at all difficult, and for an adult it is impossible. In a certain sense, to be something and to want to be something is the condition (the negative condition) for entering the kingdom of heaven as a little child-if it is supposed to be difficult-otherwise it is no wonder that one remains outside when one has become forty years old. So, then, the atheist perhaps wants to mock Christianity, and yet there is no one who makes it more ludicrous as the orthodox.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.

 

Henry Brougham

 

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

 

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!

 

Orson Scott Card