Quotations

John 1:11–13 (NRSV): He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

John 1:1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

My Sonya is dead … She was ill only a week; she died of inflammation of the lungs. … That poor little darling creature, scarcely three months old, was already an individual and a person for me. … And now people say to comfort me that I shall have other children. But where is Sonya? Where is the little creature for whom I would, believe me, gladly have suffered death upon the cross, if she could have remained alive?

John 6:53–57 (NRSV): So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.”

The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types.

Ephesians 4:11–16 (NRSV): The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.

1 John 5:18–21 (NRSV): We know that those who are born of God do not sin, but the one who was born of God protects them, and the evil one does not touch them. We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.

Proverbs 29:18: Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

Doctrine and Covenants 34:3: Who so loved the world that he gave his own life, that as many as would believe might become the sons of God.