The more people anticipate the elimination of suffering the less strength they have actually to oppose it. Whoever deals with his personal suffering only in the way our society has taught him - through illusion, minimization, suppression, apathy - will deal with societal suffering in the same way.

Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition.

Really living like Christ will not mean reward, social recognition, and an assured income, but difficulties, discrimination, solitude, anxiety. Here, too, the basic experience of the cross applies: the wider we open our hearts to others, the more audibly we intervene against the injustice that rules over us, the more difficult our lives in the rich unjust society will become.

To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.

With the disappearance of God the Ego moves forward to become the sole divinity.

God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God's, that will comfort them.

Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allow to starve.