In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace a...t Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will... be slaves on earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a ...direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. A cult differs from a formal religion in many significant ways. It is in the nature of a cult to claim some esoteric knowledge which has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time but has now suddenly been illuminated. There is often some heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox, who presents these new teachings. There are communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act out impulses that had hitherto been repressed. In the cult, one feels as though one were exploring novel or hitherto taboo modes of conduct. What defines a cult, therefore, is its implicit emphasis on magic rather than theology, on the personal tie to a guru or to the group, rather than to an institution or a creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates Change horses, making history change its tune,... Then spur away o'er empires and o'er states, Leaving at last not much besides chronology, Excepting the post-obits of theology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rationally considered, nothing can be more absurd than the baptism of infants under any circumstances. No statement, no matter by ...whom it may be said to have been uttered, can make that true which is radically false. If an innocent child, unconscious of good or evil, irresponsible to God and man, incapable of thought or action, is not already, in accordance with Christian theology, a member of Christ, then no vicarious promise or priestly ablution can make him one. For if this were so, a similar ceremony under devil worship could make him a member of Satan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the generation of the 20's was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We ...are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was a disease in the liver, the ...man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »