--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

orthodoxy ::: n. --> Soundness of faith; a belief in the doctrines taught in the Scriptures, or in some established standard of faith; -- opposed to heterodoxy or to heresy.
Consonance to genuine Scriptural doctrines; -- said of moral doctrines and beliefs; as, the orthodoxy of a creed.
By extension, said of any correct doctrine or belief.

orthodoxy ::: n. --> Soundness of faith; a belief in the doctrines taught in the Scriptures, or in some established standard of faith; -- opposed to heterodoxy or to heresy.
Consonance to genuine Scriptural doctrines; -- said of moral doctrines and beliefs; as, the orthodoxy of a creed.
By extension, said of any correct doctrine or belief.

--- QUOTES [3 / 3 - 419 / 419] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

KEYS (10k)

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   4 Thomas Huxley

   4 Manly P Hall
   4 Jane Mayer

   4 Gilbert K Chesterton

   4 Francis A Schaeffer

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   3 Peter Kreeft

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   3 Kirsten Powers

   3 Karen Armstrong

   3 Ha Joon Chang

   3 G K Chesterton
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   3 Eric Metaxas

   3 Eric Hoffer

   3 Bertrand Russell

   3 Arthur Koestler

   2 William O Douglas

   2 Umberto Eco

   2 Timothy J Keller

   2 Thomas Nagel

   2 Terry Tempest Williams

   2 Sue Monk Kidd

   2 Sinclair B Ferguson

   2 Siddhartha Mukherjee

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   2 Robert Green Ingersoll

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   2 Pervez Hoodbhoy

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   2 Julian Barnes

   2 Jamie Arpin Ricci

   2 Irvin D Yalom

   2 Ibrahim Ibrahim

   2 Helen Keller

   2 Helen Foster Snow

   2 Glenn Greenwald

   2 Frithjof Schuon

   2 Elbert Hubbard

   2 David Simon

   2 David Ogilvy

   2 David Hare

   2 Dan Eaton

   2 Dallas Willard

   2 Chinua Achebe

   2 Brian Zahnd

   2 Brennan Manning

   2 Barbara W Tuchman

   2 Andre Gide

   2 Aldous Huxley

1:As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. ~ G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy ,

2:Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision. ~ G K Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution " Orthodoxy,

3:Because children have abounding vitality,because they are in spirit fierce and free,therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.They always say, "Do it again";and the grown-up person does it againuntil he is nearly dead.For grown-up people are not strong enoughto exult in monotony.But perhaps God is strong enoughto exult in monotony.It is possible that God says every morning,"Do it again"to the sun; and every evening,"Do it again" to the moon.It may not be automatic necessitythat makes all daisies alike;it may be that God makes every daisy separately,but has never got tired of making them.It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;for we have sinned and grown old,and our Father is younger than we." ~ G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy ,

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1:Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ~ George Orwell

2:Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence. ~ Bertrand Russell

3:Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

4:Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead. ~ Elbert Hubbard

5:It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy. ~ Richard Rohr

6:The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. ~ Helen Keller

7:Orthodoxy cannot afford to put out the fires of hell. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

8:Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death. ~ Joseph Campbell

9:The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next. ~ Edith Hamilton

10:Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other. ~ Blaise Pascal

11:By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy; ~ Will Durant

12:In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left ~ Peter Kreeft

13:Ray Jennings was to orthodoxy what King Herod was to child-minding. ~ Michael Atherton

14:Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear. ~ N T Wright

15:To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions ~ George Orwell

16:Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché. ~ Richard Dawkins

17:Anti-clericalism and non-belief, have their bigots just as orthodoxy does. ~ Julien Green

18:Originality is putting its pants on while orthodoxy is ready to deliver. ~ Santosh Kalwar

19:Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it. ~ George Orwell

20:Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity. ~ Chinua Achebe

21:Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart. ~ Edward Abbey

22:Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be. ~ Bertrand Russell

23:Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ~ Anonymous

24:The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

25:Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ~ George Orwell

26:Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world. ~ Francis A Schaeffer

27:In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy. ~ Peter Kreeft

28:They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common sense. ~ G K Chesterton

29:Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism. ~ Abraham Kuyper

30:Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget. ~ Aldous Huxley

31:The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines. ~ Irvin D Yalom

32:If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble. ~ Chaim Potok

33:If Mere Christianity helps make Christianity comprehensible, Orthodoxy makes it weird again. ~ Leah Libresco

34:By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance. ~ Desiderius Erasmus

35:There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion. ~ Francis A Schaeffer

36:self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. ~ A W Tozer

37:Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day. ~ Brian D McLaren

38:The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. ~ Eric Hoffer

39:Knowledge without devotion is cold, dead orthodoxy. Devotion without knowledge is irrational instability. ~ Anonymous

40:the Council of Constantinople that made Nicene orthodoxy the official religion of the empire in 381. ~ Karen Armstrong

41:As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. ~ G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy,

42:It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. ~ David Simon

43:One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street. ~ David Hare

44:Mankind’s most successful discipline has grown by challenging orthodoxy and by subjecting ideas to testing. ~ Matthew Syed

45:The Central Empires represented Roman Catholicism, the Allies Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Let them unite. ~ Ford Madox Ford

46:Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

47:Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one. ~ Elbert Hubbard

48:You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it. ~ Mark Twain

49:It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department. Captains ~ David Simon

50:   13. Moderation is dull. (Read G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday to refute that cliché.) ~ Peter Kreeft

51:As Schaeffer once wrote, there is nothing uglier than theological orthodoxy without understanding or compassion. ~ Nancy R Pearcey

52:I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches on it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. ~ G K Chesterton

53:Orthodoxy, my Lord,: said Bishop Warburton, in a whisper, — orthodoxy is my doxy, — heterodoxy is another man's doxy. ~ Joseph Priestley

54:I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. It ~ G K Chesterton

55:The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

56:I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. ~ G K Chesterton

57:How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. ~ Christopher Hitchens

58:Donald Trump didn't emerge from the orthodoxy of the Republican Party. And so there's going to be bigger differences than normal. ~ David Brooks

59:Hitler didn't travel. Stalin didn't travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn't want to have their orthodoxy challenged. ~ Howard Gardner

60:If your orthodoxy doesn't fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all. ~ Jamie Arpin Ricci

61:I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton

62:Is it possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening "Do it again" to the moon." from Orthodoxy. ~ G K Chesterton

63:As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war. ~ B H Liddell Hart

64:The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need there is for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy. ~ Irvin D Yalom

65:When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy. ~ George Bernard Shaw

66:I think "punk" should really be defined as paving your own way creatively and by defying any sort of orthodoxy or commercial pressure. ~ Shepard Fairey

67:At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts. ~ George Orwell

68:After the evil spirit of a narrow Scholastic orthodoxy has been driven out, in the end seven much more wicked spirits return in its place. ~ Benedict XVI

69:At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. ~ George Orwell

70:I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely. ~ G K Chesterton

71:Freedom to think requires not only freedom of expression but also freedom from the threat of orthodoxy and being outcast and ostracized. ~ Helen Foster Snow

72:The great scholars of Islam were often endangered not by Mongol hordes or infidel Christians but, instead, by homegrown religious orthodoxy. ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy

73:(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then. ~ Rachel Held Evans

74:Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship. ~ Andre Gide

75:Donald Trump does not stick to Republican orthodoxy, which, you know, and this is always supposed to have been his downfall. Maybe it's his strength. ~ Chuck Todd

76:Surely the better way is to pursue a generous orthodoxy, seeing disagreements in the context of the greater agreements which bind us together. ~ Alister E McGrath

77:Strict orthodoxy can cost too much if it has to be bought at the price of love. All the orthodoxy in the world will never take the place of love. ~ William Barclay

78:Modern Orthodoxy has a highly positive attitude toward the State of Israel. Our Ultra-Orthodox brethren recognize only the Holy Land, but not the state. ~ Norman Lamm

79:Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical. ~ Brian Zahnd

80:Some campuses are so devoted to tolerance and diversity that no one dares to voice thoughts that clash with the narrow ultraorthodoxy that this devotion dictates ~ Rob Reid

81:Universal orthodoxy is enriched by every new discovery of truth: what at first appeared universal, by wishing to stand still, sooner or later becomes a sect. ~ Edgar Quinet

82:The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. ~ George Orwell

83:If an economy in the doldrums could drift indefinitely, the price of government inaction might be graver by far than the consequences of bold unorthodoxy. ~ Robert Heilbroner

84:I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fullness and in Him alone. ~ Martyn Lloyd Jones

85:The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations. ~ Helen Keller

86:I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fulness and in Him alone. ~ D Martyn Lloyd Jones

87:Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision. ~ G K Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution," Orthodoxy,

88:Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity. ~ Chinua Achebe

89:I rarely accept things on blind faith, especially the orthodoxy of any given practice, or any given practicum. I'm like, "Oh come on. Is this the way to do things?" ~ Lucas Neff

90:The only bright feature of cultural relativism's triumph is that it has become establishment orthodoxy and will thus one day be derided, resisted and overthrown. ~ Jonathan Meades

91:The public declaration and confession of Orthodoxy is usually encountered among dull-witted, cruel and immoral people who tend to consider themselves very important. ~ Leo Tolstoy

92:When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation. ~ Harold Bloom

93:I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy. ~ Thomas Huxley

94:I don't think we've got the gospel right yet.I don't think the liberals have it right. But I don't think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy. ~ Brian D McLaren

95:Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully. ~ Jacob Burckhardt

96:Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing. ~ George Orwell

97:The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their character. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it. ~ David Ogilvy

98:A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy. ~ Joan Robinson

99:Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. ~ George Orwell

100:It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality. ~ Eric Hoffer

101:Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves. ~ James Black

102:Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. ~ George Orwell

103:The difficulty comes from this, that Christianity (Christian orthodoxy) is exclusive and that belief in its truth excludes belief in any other truth. It does not absorb; it repulses. ~ Andre Gide

104:The orthodoxy of America is as rigid as that of Soviet Russia. There is one point of view allowed. If you start a conversation from another point of view, the words dry in your mouth. ~ David Hare

105:To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment. ~ George Orwell

106:Whatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay ~ Bob Shacochis

107:Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society. ~ Jonathan Haidt

108:The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ~ George Orwell

109:A [New Yorker ] is what it has always been. It combines those who pursue the truth with those who pursue the rewards of orthodoxy and those who pursue what is comfortable to the rich. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

110:The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically ~ Gilbert K Chesterton

111:But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference. ~ Karl Rahner

112:On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms. ~ David Papineau

113:I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but what we did. ~ Benjamin Franklin

114:I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet. ~ Harriet Martineau

115:one of the best ways of learning orthodoxy is by learning what is false. In fact, heresy historically has forced the church to be precise, to define its doctrines and differentiate truth from falsehood. ~ R C Sproul

116:I have always had an intolerance of orthodoxy, even when I agreed with it, and I was interested in producing a lively page full of unexpected insights rather than simply rote repetitions of the party line. ~ Max Boot

117:It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense. ~ Thomas Nagel

118:The conservatism of a religion—its orthodoxy—is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. A rising religious movement is all change and experiment—open to new views and techniques from all quarters. ~ Eric Hoffer

119:The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism – no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. ~ S ren Kierkegaard

120:But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense. ~ Thomas Nagel

121:The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. ~ G K Chesterton

122:The word “heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. ~ G K Chesterton

123:Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; ~ Barbara W Tuchman

124:The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don’t believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it. ~ Julian Barnes

125:Spirituality is rebellion; religiousness is orthodoxy. Spirituality is individuality; religiousness is just remaining part of the crowd psychology. Religiousness keeps you a sheep, and spirituality is a lion's roar. ~ Rajneesh

126:Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own and follow them strictly. ~ Ursula K Le Guin

127:Objectivity” means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of entrenched Washington. Opinions are problematic only when they deviate from the acceptable range of Washington orthodoxy. ~ Glenn Greenwald

128:Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief. ~ Jesse Ventura

129:I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay. ~ Sheri S Tepper

130:And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common sense. ~ G K Chesterton

131:It is telling commentary on economic orthodoxy that a whole subdiscipline--behavioral economics--and a raft of lab experiments are needed to show that humans often fail to behave with the rationality expected of them. ~ Kaushik Basu

132:Though environmental orthodoxy holds that Third World deforestation is caused by rapacious clear-cutters and ruthless cattle barons, penniless peasants seeking fuel wood may be the greatest threat to our forests. ~ Gregg Easterbrook

133:[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy. ~ Barbara W Tuchman

134:The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult. ~ Rowan Atkinson

135:True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy, should be recognized for what it is: a way of being religious. ~ Stephen R Prothero

136:Accusations are made directly to Rome about theologians from persons who are not theologians. Some of these accusations are anonymous. The local bishop should be the one to relate to theologians to determine orthodoxy. ~ Godfried Danneels

137:Morons often like to claim that their truth has been suppressed: that they are like Galileo, a noble outsider fighting the rigid and political domain of the scientific literature, which resists every challenge to orthodoxy. ~ Ben Goldacre

138:If once in America the question of religious toleration was raised in defense of nonbelievers who dissented from religious orthodoxy, today it is raised by believers who feel excluded from a predominantly secular public world. ~ Alan Wolfe

139:This accounts for many of the changes in the translations of the biblical books. It also explains why orthodoxy actually means conformity with a specialized interpretation of the holy writings. ~ Manly P Hall, The Bible, the Story of a Book

140:His metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ has been cited ad nauseam to support the current orthodoxy that markets, left to themselves, may lead to a socially optimal outcome–indeed, more beneficial than if the state intervenes ~ Mariana Mazzucato

141:I believe that Orthodoxy has been thinking lately, and despite other impressions, that we can't have full sacramental communion if we don't first have a fundamental agreement on the question of the primacy, that still isn't there. ~ Karl Lehmann

142:She is reading Zen, Krishnamurti, and Jung, asking herself questions she has never had the courage to explore. Suddenly, the shackles which have bound her are beginning to snap, as personal revelation replaces orthodoxy. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

143:When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? ...Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes. ~ Owen Gleiberman

144:Descartes' immortal conclusion cogito ergo sum was recently subjected to destruction testing by a group of graduate researchers at Princeton led by Professors Montjuic and Lauterbrunnen, and now reads, in the Shorter Harvard Orthodoxy: ~ Tom Holt

145:How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real. ~ Jack Vance

146:People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. ~ G K Chesterton

147:Another article in the Washington Post said, ‘While the West used the last two centuries to advance the cause of human freedom, the Islamic world, by contrast, was content to remain in its torpor, locked in rigid orthodoxy, fearful of freedom. ~ Dan Eaton

148:People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton

149:Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog. ~ Ben Lerner

150:The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech". ~ James Fenton

151:I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. ~ Flannery O Connor

152:In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy. ~ Howard Fast

153:This is the beauty of Donald Trump, that he goes against the Republican orthodoxy, much of which has been rejected a lot of Republican voters, who, well, would be Republican voters, at least in my state, who I think would otherwise like to vote Republican. ~ Rick Santorum

154:However, because the Ulama have tended to regard Islamic practice as informing Islamic theology, orthopraxy and orthodoxy are intimately bound together in Islam, meaning questions of theology, or kalam, are impossible to separate from questions of law, or fiqh. ~ Reza Aslan

155:I came to the conclusion that in order to end racial barriers, I needed to run for the office of the president and put forth an agenda of social justice and world peace. In addition, I concluded that someone needed to run and challenge the liberal orthodoxy. ~ Jesse Jackson

156:There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely. ~ G K Chesterton

157:The advent of postmodernism, the enshrinement of Darwinian orthodoxy in the educational systems of Western society, and the rise of blatant humanism as the religion-by-default of large subcultures have brought no end of new challenges to biblical sufficiency. ~ James R White

158:beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to accept certain credal propositions. It stresses orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. ~ Karen Armstrong

159:Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper ~ A W Tozer

160:It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'. ~ Thomas Huxley

161:Addie and Louis sat down in front. She had arranged the funeral and told the minister about Ruth. He hadn't known her at all. She had stopped going to any church because of her feeling about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God. ~ Kent Haruf

162:The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it – and companies cannot grow without innovation. Great leaders almost always exude self-confidence. ~ David Ogilvy

163:The official keepers of the Holocaust wage an international campaign to silence the disturbing questions. Most people never even hear the revisionist position because Jewish forces dominate the media and block mainstream access to material that questions Holocaust orthodoxy. ~ David Duke

164:It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'... ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

165:These friends represent an oversimplified “orthodoxy,” based on a misreading of the wisdom tradition to the effect that all troubles are punishments for wrongdoing. Their “comfort” consists largely of applying this message to Job, urging him to identify his sin and repent of it. ~ Anonymous

166:I won't pretend that I've arrived at humble orthodoxy. When I gain a bit of theological knowledge, I all too frequently get puffed up with pride. But I'll tell you what deflates my arrogance and self-righteousness faster than anything else: trying to live whatever truth I have. ~ Joshua Harris

167:He was a rather quirky worker, and he didn’t really fit into the day-to-day business of GCHQ. But in terms of coming up with new ideas he was quite exceptional. You had to sort through some rubbish sometimes, but he was very innovative and always willing to challenge the orthodoxy. ~ Simon Singh

168:The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties. ~ Norman Tebbit

169:The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

170:One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else. ~ Huston Smith

171:Although the Ante-Nicene Fathers were aware of the inner mysteries of the Christian faith, a rising orthodoxy was content to disseminate the most literal possible explanations of the Christian mysteries. This is largely responsible for modern sectarianism. ~ Manly P Hall, The Bible, the Story of a Book

172:RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. ~ Reza Aslan

173:There are some who seek to magnify the Spirit but neglect the Word. This will not do at all. Fanaticism, baseless enthusiasm, wildfire are the result. Others seek to magnify the Word, but largely ignore the Spirit. Neither will this do. It leads to dead orthodoxy, truth without life and power. ~ R A Torrey

174:Timid orthodoxy, its irrational repressions and its accumulation of dead centuries, dwarfs man through its idolatry of the past. Seated rigid in the centre of stagnation, it firmly ties the human spirit to the revolving wheels of habit till faintness overwhelms her. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man

175:He is summoned and asked to swear upon the only book the judge will allow in "his court." PaPa LaBas won't dare touch the accursed thing. He demands the right to his own idols and books. It reminds PaPa LaBas of the familiar epigram: "Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy. ~ Ishmael Reed

176:I have assumed my clear commitment to a Trinitarian orthodoxy was sufficient evidence that I have not intentionally ignored the role of the Holy Spirit. It may be true, however, that my work has been so Christ-centred, I may have given the impression that the Holy Spirit is an afterthought. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

177:Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. ~ Flannery O Connor

178:Think of lab rats racing through a maze, when you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel 'dialogue' conducted on the teli. Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a 'maze-bright' rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth. ~ Ilana Mercer

179:Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this. ~ A W Tozer

180:I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views - towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues - has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform...not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view. ~ William O Douglas

181:Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this. ~ John Wesley

182:is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state—where the private realm is effectively eliminated—is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level. ~ Glenn Greenwald

183:The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty. ~ William O Douglas

184:The psalmist [of Psalm 119] was interested in truth and orthodoxy, in biblical teaching and theology, not as ends in themselves, but as means to the further ends of life and godliness. His ultimate concern was with the knowledge and service of the great God whose truth he sought to understand (pp. 22-23). ~ J I Packer

185:The emperor [Constantine], realizing that the council was hopelessly entangled in its controversial issues, recommended the formulation of the basic creed to which all the various bishops would subscribe and thus have a common and mutually acceptable statement of orthodoxy. ~ Manly P Hall, The Bible, the Story of a Book

186:When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless ‘freedom of worship’ for ‘freedom of religion’. ~ Eric Metaxas

187:College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance. ~ William Deresiewicz

188:the discovery in Upper Egypt of a stash of manuscripts in 1945. In the village of Nag Hammadi, not far from Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, thirteen ancient codices were unearthed, containing over fifty crumbling texts once thought to have been destroyed during the early Church’s struggle to define orthodoxy. ~ Dan Eaton

189:Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. ~ Thomas Huxley

190:One is reminded of the origins of Christianity and the process whereby Pauline thought, originally a schism or heretical deviation from Jesus' own teachings, supplanted those teachings and became the new orthodoxy — while Nazarean thought, the original repository of the teachings, was labelled a form of heresy. ~ Michael Baigent

191:It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some,” I hear my master say (I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart), “but it is my conviction that the more religiously and intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for himself, his master, and the commonweal. ~ William Styron

192:Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

193:With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the 'sixties', as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance , had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone - beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty. ~ John Galsworthy

194:The truths of Christianity are constant, unchanging, and meant for all people, times, and places. But the methods by which truth is articulated and practiced must be culturally appropriated, and therefore constantly translated. If doctrine is constant and practice is constantly changing, the result is living orthodoxy. ~ Mark Driscoll

195:God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior partner. ~ Samuel P Huntington

196:He used the term jihad in both spiritual and physical contexts, but the physical jihad is the one Muhammad strongly emphasizes.33 The peaceful practice of Islam hinges on later, often Western, interpretations of Muhammad’s teachings, whereas the more violent variations of Islam are deeply rooted in orthodoxy and history.34 ~ Nabeel Qureshi

197:Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle. ~ Pat Buchanan

198:The war between the artist and writer and government or orthodoxy is one of the tragedies of humankind. One chief enemy is stupidity and failure to understand anything about the creative mind. For a bureaucratic politician to presume to tell any artist or writer how to get his mind functioning is the ultimate in asininity. ~ Helen Foster Snow

199:The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. ~ G K Chesterton

200:The word “heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For ~ G K Chesterton

201:The gospel of perpetual economic growth carries in its train the salvation promise of a life bigger and better for everyone. But this greater good is often mythical. The actual experience of believers rarely bear out the claims of their faith. Even so, many adherents cleave stubbornly, fearfully to orthodoxy. I guess it's what they know. ~ Tim Winton

202:Ironically, the same church gathering that had denounced Paul of Samosata back in 268 had explicitly condemned the term homoousios, which that earlier council had regarded as one of Paul’s heretical innovations. In 268, the church dismissed the word as heretical nonsense; sixty years later, it was the watchword for unifying orthodoxy. ~ Philip Jenkins

203:The individuation of dharma practice occurs whenever priority is given to the resolution of a personal existential dilemma over the need to conform to the doctrines of a Buddhist orthodoxy. Individuation is a process of recovering personal authority through freeing ourselves from the constraints of collectively held belief systems. ~ Stephen Batchelor

204:What the issue here is, you get rid of all the conservative orthodoxy about capital gains, marginal tax rate, supply side economics, you just throw all that out the window, limited government and you just embrace the sheer and raw politics of resentment that have been bubbling the whole time and that`s what you get. You get Donald Trump. ~ Chris Hayes

205:Nowadays, as before, the public declaration and confession of Orthodoxy is usually encountered among dull-witted, cruel and immoral people who tend to consider themselves very important. Whereas intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good-naturedness and morality are qualities usually found among people who claim to be non-believers. ~ Leo Tolstoy

206:Populists have always been out to challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate order and to empower workaday Americans so they can control their own economic and political destinies. This approach distinguishes the movement from classic liberalism, which seeks to live in harmony with concentrated corporate power by trying to regulate excesses. ~ Jim Hightower

207:Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example? ~ Sue Monk Kidd

208:In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. ~ George Orwell

209:To ask for overt renunciation of a cherished doctrine is to expect too much of human nature. Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogmas to which they have sworn their loyalty. Instead they rationalize, revise, and re-interpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is the purest orthodoxy. ~ J William Fulbright

210:We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of D—— on the score of orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs from our own. ~ Victor Hugo

211:Rome is burning, Jesus says. Drop your fiddle, change your life and come to Me. Let go of the good days that never were - a regimented church you never attended, traditional virtues you never practiced, legalistic obedience you never honored, and a sterile orthodoxy you never accepted. The old era is done. The decisive inbreak of God has happened. ~ Brennan Manning

212:Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin. ~ Robert G Ingersoll

213:I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. ~ Thomas Huxley

214:Having total freedom to direct my own movies is more difficult than those I was hired for, where the framework has been already furnished. Unlike with my own work, I don't have to deny or feel embarrassed at the straightforwardness or orthodoxy of the directorial style, because I can say in excuse, "This is how I was asked to direct by those people." ~ Takeshi Kitano

215:Confessional orthodoxy coupled with a view of a heavenly Father whose love is conditioned on his Son’s suffering, and further conditioned by our repentance, leads inevitably to a restriction in the preaching of the gospel. Why? Because it leads to a restriction in the heart of the preacher that matches the restriction he sees in the heart of God! ~ Sinclair B Ferguson

216:Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Ghost. Everywhere among conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something which they can grasp with the mind. ~ A W Tozer

217:Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, “hell to pay.” That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history. ~ Dallas Willard

218:I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face. ~ Barack Obama

219:The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton

220:The truth of Wesley's words is established before our eyes: "Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this. ~ A W Tozer

221:Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers: (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment, and Righteousness in the Earth. ~ Various

222:An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too. ~ Bill Moyers

223:Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy. ~ Alan Bennett

224:The new, hyper-partisan think tanks had impact far beyond Washington. They introduced doubt into areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship, undermined genuinely unbiased experts, and gave politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose. The benefit was a far more pluralistic intellectual climate, beyond liberal orthodoxy. ~ Jane Mayer

225:Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth. ~ William Penn

226:Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it. ~ Peter Rollins

227:"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself." ~ Aldous Huxley

228:As for Africa, its per capita income grew relatively slowly even in the 1960s and t he 1970s (1-2% a year). But since the 1980s, the region has seen a fall in living standards. This record is a damning indictment of the neoliberal orthodoxy, because most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century. ~ Ha Joon Chang

229:Welcome to the era of Minority Wars. If you’re gay, they’ll ask what your skin color is. If you’re black, they’ll ask if you’re a woman. If you’re a woman, they’ll ask you to stop worrying about Muslim rapists, you racist. If you happen to fit into every conceivable minority group, heaven help you if your opinions do not precisely follow political orthodoxy. Donald ~ Milo Yiannopoulos

230:There is a kind of orthodoxy in which the several loci of systematic theology, or stages of redemptive history, are all in place, but that lacks the life of the whole, just as arms, legs, torso, head, feet, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth may all be present—while the body as a whole lacks energy and perhaps life itself. The form of godliness is not the same as its power. ~ Sinclair B Ferguson

231:We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp. ~ Brian D McLaren

232:After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession... and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love. ~ John Gresham Machen

233:This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist. ~ David Graeber

234:Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

235:If, for you, orthodox means finally “getting it right” or “getting it straight,” mine is a pretty disappointing, curvy orthodoxy. But if, for you, orthodoxy isn’t a list of correct doctrines, but rather the doxa in orthodoxy, which means “thinking” or “opinion,” then the lifelong pursuit of expanding thinking and deepening, broadening opinions about God sounds like a delight, a joy. ~ Brian D McLaren

236:I do not think anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and [Anthony] Collins without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful Power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered orthodoxy. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

237:But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong. ~ Umberto Eco

238:Isn't atheism just another religion?' No, it isn't. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed 'holy' leaders. Atheists don't believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism. ~ Dan Barker

239:Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time. ~ Jo Nesb

240:No matter what the political environment, blasphemy laws lend the power of the state to particular religious authorities and effectively reinforce extreme views, since the most conservative or hard-line elements in a religious community are generally the quickest to take offence and the first to claim the mantle of orthodoxy. Virtually any act has the potential to draw an accusation and prosecution ~ Nick Cohen

241:Faith is either something that informs one at all times or it isn’t anything at all, really. When the Chinese government tells its citizens that they can worship in a certain building on a certain day, but once they leave that building they must bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state, you have a cynical lie at work. They’ve substituted a toothless “freedom of worship” for “freedom of religion”. ~ Eric Metaxas

242:when theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called “liberation theologians,” but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled “domination theologians” or “colonization theologians.” Similarly, we have “black theology” and “feminist theology,” but Greco-Roman orthodoxy is never called “white theology” or “male theology. ~ Brian D McLaren

243:The Bible is, after all, God’s gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy—is what it requires to direct us into life in God’s kingdom. ~ Dallas Willard

244:But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong. ~ Umberto Eco

245:And if we now cast our eyes over the nations of the earth, we shall find that, instead of possessing the pure religion of the Gospel, they may be divided either into infidels, who deny the truth; or politicians who make religion a stalking horse for their ambition; or professors, who walk in the trammels of orthodoxy, and are more attentive to traditions and ordinances of men than to the oracles of truth. ~ Samuel Adams

246:Well, we are Americans. I've always believed that you work with where you are - I am a Mormon woman who was raised on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in the American West in the United States of America. But, by the same token, much of my life has been spent resisting traditional forms of democracy, resisting traditional forms of orthodoxy, be it the United States government or the Mormon Church. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

247:Spinoza's Philosophia Scripturæ Interpres, Exercitatio Paradoxa, printed anonymously ...is properly paradox, though also heterodox. It supposes, contrary to all opinion, orthodox and heterodox, that philosophy can... explain the Athanasian doctrine so as to be at least compatible with orthodoxy. The author would stand almost alone, if not quite; and this is what he meant. ~ Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes (1872)

248:let anyone using those weasel words “freedom of worship” know, they have “freedom of worship” in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. “Freedom of worship” says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing “freedom of religion. ~ Eric Metaxas

249:And so the catastrophe of 1929–33 did to the certainties of laissez-faire economics what science did to nineteenth-century religion and what the slaughter of World War I did to old-fashioned patriotism: it knocked out the props. “Everything nailed down is coming loose,” people used to say back then: The Depression made business leaders into laughingstocks and transformed economic orthodoxy into so many fairy tales. ~ Thomas Frank

250:The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. ~ G K Chesterton

251:It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, “faith” has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into “belief,” which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust. ~ Walter Brueggemann

252:Truth indeed is sacred; but, as Pilate said, "What is truth?" Show us the undoubted infallible criterion of absolute truth, and we will hold it as a sacred inviolable thing. But in the absence of that infallible criterion, we have all an equal right to grope about in our search of it, and no body and no school nor clique must be allowed to set up a standard of orthodoxy which shall bar the freedom of scientific inquiry. ~ William Stanley Jevons

253:Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher’s sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. ~ D A Carson

254:The friends of evangelical doctrine, and the advocates of orthodoxy, have the following objects to keep ever in view in this age; they must take care of their Bibles, that they be not mutilated or curtailed by lawless criticism; they must take care of their theology, that it be not perverted by false philosophy; and they must take care of their pulpits, that they be not occupied by heretical, unspiritual, or incompetent ministers. ~ John Angell James

255:Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, all these guys talk about how the United States became a national security state after World War II. I agree with that thesis. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd or stupid they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy. ~ Michael Hastings

256:A generous orthodoxy is like that. It acknowledges that we’re all a mess. It sees in our worst failures the possibility of our deepest repentance and God’s opening for our most profound healing. It remembers Jesus’ parable that wherever God sows good seed, “an enemy” will sow weed seeds. It realizes that you can’t pull up the bad without uprooting the good too, and so it refrains from judging. It just rejoices wherever good seed grows. ~ Brian D McLaren

257:Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy. ~ Fulton J Sheen

258:As a member of the *magisterial Reformation, Calvin used his legal and theological training to shape the reform of Geneva around biblical principles. Toward that end, he wrote the *Geneva Catechism and a new *liturgy, and he kept revising the Institutes until its fourth and definitive edition in 1559, which together with his biblical commentaries shaped the identity of Reformed *orthodoxy beyond the influence of Ulrich *Zwingli. Following ~ Kelly M Kapic

259:When Christianity proscribed the public exercise of the ancient worships, the partisans of the latter were compelled to meet in secret for the celebration of their mysteries. Initiates presided over these assemblies and soon established a kind of orthodoxy among the varieties of persecuted worships, this being facilitated by the aid of magical truth and by the fact that proscription unites wills and forges bonds of brotherhood between men. ~ liphas L vi

260:The central fact for me is, I think, that the [role of the] intellectual... cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. ~ Edward Said

261:The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy. ~ George Carlin

262:Too often, Muslims, especially females, who challenge certain widely accepted views are met with warnings to desist; that way, it is said, lies heresy, blasphemy, apostasy. Those who have appointed themselves the guardians of communal orthodoxy are particularly vigilant on matters concerned with women and gender – in part, because it is in these realms that the construction of Muslim identity in self-conscious opposition to a decadent West takes place. ~ Kecia Ali

263:The definitions had the stately reassurance of orthodoxy, reminding her of the prewar years, when she had relied on the reference book to complete her weekly assignments ... when she still believed the meaning of a thing was limited to a few tersely worded clauses, but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own. ~ Anthony Marra

264:The effects of this change were momentous. Truth was no longer to be ascertained by consulting authority, but by inward meditation. There was a tendency, quickly developed, towards anarchism in politics, and, in religion, towards mysticism, which had always fitted with difficulty into the framework of Catholic orthodoxy. There came to be not one Protestantism, but a multitude of sects; not one philosophy opposed to scholasticism, but as many as there ~ Bertrand Russell

265:Spiritual but not religious” is an expression of a very human yearning for an opening of mind and heart—a sense of soul and spirit that enhances day-to-day experience instead of tamping it down and channeling it into the narrow confines of stick-and-carrot orthodoxy. It’s a rejection of traditional tenets and pieties, of doctrine and dogma and judgment. It resists the usual attempts to pigeonhole, saying, “Spare me your labels.” It is, at heart, agnostic. — ~ Lesley Hazleton

266:The Kochs’ extensive research had shown that what the American “customer” wanted from politics, alas, was quite different from their business-dominated free-market orthodoxy. It wasn’t just that Americans were interested in opportunity for the many, rather than just for themselves. It also turned out, Fink acknowledged, that they wanted a clean environment and health and high standards of living, as well as political and religious freedom and peace and security. ~ Jane Mayer

267:Now, if it was only Korea that became rich through such 'heretical' policies, the free-market gurus might be able to dismiss it as merely the exception that proves the rule. However, Korea is no exception. As I shall show later, practically all of today's developed countries, including Britain and the US, the supposed homes of the free market and free trade, have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against the orthodoxy of neo-liberal economics. ~ Ha Joon Chang

268:we find the university dominated by theology of another kind – a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, sceptics and debunkers. People are no longer burned at the stake for their views: they simply fail to get tenure, or, if they are students, they flunk the course. But the effect is similar, namely to reinforce an orthodoxy in which nobody really believes. ~ Roger Scruton

269:Everything is made to center upon the initial act of "accepting" Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. ~ Anonymous

270:The reality is that while heliocentrism was discussed and often accepted within Catholic circles - it was effectively the only place where it could be - the more traditional view of the solar system still prevailed even among leading scientists. So it's hardly surprising that Galileo's Catholic judges had difficult accepting his views, especially when they saw themselves as defending scientific orthodoxy and were supported in this by the scientific establishment. ~ Michael Coren

271:At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals. ~ George Orwell

272:Failure, then, is hardwired into both the logic and spirit of scientific progress. Mankind’s most successful discipline has grown by challenging orthodoxy and by subjecting ideas to testing. Individual scientists may sometimes be dogmatic but, as a community, scientists recognize that theories, particularly those at the frontiers of our knowledge, are often fallible or incomplete. It is by testing our ideas, subjecting them to failure, that we set the stage for growth. ~ Matthew Syed

273:And suddenly there came a second, when somehow for the first time I saw (as if a door had opened from a dark room into the sunny street), and in the next second I already knew for sure that God exists and that God is the Jesus Christ of Orthodoxy, and not some other God. I call this moment the greatest miracle because this precise knowledge came to me not through reason (I know this for sure) but by some other way, and I am unable to explain this moment rationally .... ~ Seraphim Rose

274:Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher’s sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity. ~ D A Carson

275:Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity. ~ D A Carson

276:[Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestionably accepted. ~ Richard Rhodes

277:Plus, there were the children to consider. They were, for me, the biggest concern of all...But what if I challenged the institution? Not setting the "proper and accepted" religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting the circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example? ~ Sue Monk Kidd

278:her choice to be, not only a poet but a woman who explored her own mind, without any of the guidelines of orthodoxy. To say "yes" to her powers was not simply a major act of nonconformity in the nineteenth century; even in our own time it has been assumed that Emily Dickinson, not patriarchal society, was "the problem." The ore we come to recognise the unwritten and written laws and taboos underpining patriarchy, the less problematical, surely, will seem the methods she chose. ~ Adrienne Rich

279:The ONLY holy sites in Islam (according to Orthodoxy) that are allowed to be visited by Muslims are: (1) Al Aqsa Mosque (falsely known as, Temple Mount Area) which resembles The Celestial Link. (2) Medina Mosque; which is the Political Residence of the Prophet. (3) Kaaba Mosque; which is the center of religion and resembles The Terrestrial Link. And these three sites are linked together with the natural logarithm parameter in regard to their metric distances from one another. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

280:In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing - the flimsy, filmy elusiveness - is supremely characteristic of America's expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent. ~ Edwin Gaustad

281:Self can live unrebuked at the very altar. It can watch the bleeding Victim die and not be in the least affected by what it sees. It can fight for the faith of the Reformers and preach eloquently the creed of salvation by grace, and gain strength by its efforts. To tell all the truth, it seems actually to feed upon orthodoxy and is more at home in a Bible Conference than in a tavern. Our very state of longing after God may afford it an excellent condition under which to thrive and grow. ~ A W Tozer

282:The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, would become a mark of their urban culture. ~ Karen Armstrong

283:That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. ~ Learned Hand

284:Because we approach the gospel with preconceived notions of what it should say rather than what it does say, the Word no longer falls like rain on the parched ground of our souls. It no longer sweeps like a wild storm into the corners of our comfortable piety. It no longer vibrates like sharp lightning in the dark recesses of our nonhistoric orthodoxy. The gospel becomes, in the words of Gertrude Stein, … a pattering of pious platitudes spoken by a Jewish carpenter in the distant past. ~ Brennan Manning

285:...and William said, "O Lord God, we have tried to hear Your voice above the din of other voices. Above the heresy--and even above the orthodoxy. Above the abbots and the masters. Above the knights and even the kings. And though this world is confusing and strange, we believe we have heard Your voice and followed it--followed it here, to this place. Now please, God, hear us. Help us, watch over us, and protect us as we face the flames of hate. Please, God, please. And they all said, "Amen. ~ Adam Gidwitz

286:Let's start with some of the reasons that the press holds its tongue and some of the things that you don't know because of this. We'll begin with squeamishness, prudishness, timidity and an overdeveloped fear of offending someone... So much for squeamishness and prudishness. There are many other reasons that we editors fail you in this pact you and we have. Let me name a few more: Orthodoxy, conventional thinking, a misplaced pleasure at being on the inside, incompetence and laziness. ~ Geneva Overholser

287:Then, chillingly, they made an argument that has become increasingly common among the illiberal left: liberal political orthodoxy trumps academic freedom. “While academic freedom has immense value within the walls of the classroom,” they wrote, “[we] invite you into a dialogue with UVA students who are negatively impacted by your work. It is vitally important to balance the collective work of our academic community with the collective impact of that work in communities across the country. ~ Kirsten Powers

288:Whereas Roman Catholicism granted the authority of special revelation to human ecclesiastical traditions; theological liberalism sought special revelation within, effectively subordinating the Bible to man’s thoughts; religious pluralism dissipated revelation among the contradictory claims of various religions; and neoorthodoxy redefined revelation to a personal encounter, another stream of thought sought to find revelation in God’s historical actions while still excluding verbal revelation. ~ Joel R Beeke

289:The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money. ~ Thomas Sowell

290:It is one thing to argue that a free society should accept gay marriage or allow people to define their gender in terms utterly unrecognizable to science. It is another thing to demand that individuals rejoice—or pretend to rejoice—in the lifestyles or decisions of others. But that is precisely what the jihad against “hate speech” demands. Dissent from the orthodoxy is now the equivalent of violence or complicity in it. The war on tolerance has become an effort to make room for a new intolerance. ~ Jonah Goldberg

291:Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic. ~ Emil M Cioran

292:Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt. ~ John D Caputo

293:If someone like Batsheva wanted to be Orthodox, there was surely something to it. Not that she doubted it (or at least she didn't ever really and truly doubt it), but it was nice to have outside validation. Whenever Mrs. Levy heard about people who left Orthodoxy, she felt a pang of insecurity. Did they know something she didn't? Were they smarter than she was? Did they now look at Orthodox Jews as silly, backward, superstitious? But with Batsheva choosing it on her own, she could breathe a little easier. ~ Tova Mirvis

294:Early orthodoxy set itself the task to confuse the epistles of Paul. Paul could not be ignored nor entirely destroyed; his sphere of influence had been too wide. The easiest solution was to corrupt his writings, thus destroying his subtler meanings. The result of this questionable strategy is obvious to the impartial reader. Paul is made to contradict himself; statements obviously inconsistent with his vision stand side by side with the most lofty and transcendental thoughts. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible

295:Orthodoxy often requires us to be hard precisely where the world is soft, and soft where the world is hard. It means condemning the homosexual lifestyle and being labeled bigots. It means caring for AIDS patients though many think us fools. It means respecting the rule of law though our culture is increasingly lawless. It means visiting the prisoners who offend that law though our culture would prefer to forget them. In every way that matters, Christianity is an affront to the world; it is countercultural.43 ~ D A Carson

296:Regarding faith, my adherence to Islam had not diminished over the years since my conversion, but I had modified it from the intense orthodoxy I had followed at first to a more streamlined version that I felt was more progressive and inclusive. I practiced quietly on my own without the need to proselytize. I had been able to separate my faith in the theology from using it to make a cultural statement about black Americans. My only interest in Islam was spiritual and ethical guidance, not politics. In ~ Kareem Abdul Jabbar

297:The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

298:Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

299:I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill. ~ Matt Walsh

300:Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy. ~ Charlie Munger

301:Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity." (A Call To Spiritual Reformation,121) ~ D A Carson

302:remember when a former bishop of Colorado Springs told me: “Many of the best Catholics in my diocese left the church for a while — and then came back for adult and right reasons.” One does not hear that kind of wisdom much anymore. Today it is all about being a consummate insider, which now is called “orthodoxy.” Jesus clearly was much more concerned with journey, integrity, and what we would call “orthopraxy” (our 8th principle of practice over theory) more than mere correct ideas or belonging to the correct group. ~ Richard Rohr

303:But the old 1840s split between the religious, patriotic, Slavophile establishment and the progressive, humane, revolutionary Westernizers was giving way to the exacerbated conflict between the alienated positivist radicals of the 1860s who adopted the name Turgenev had given them, Nihilists, and those who thanked Russian Nationalism, Orthodoxy and Autocracy for the bloodless liberation of the serfs, introduction of trial by jury, reduction of the draft from twenty-five to five years, partial decentralization of ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

304:Bartley wasn’t interested in seeing a lot of contrary viewpoints beyond that. His reasoning was that other newspapers such as the New York Times provided plenty of space for the liberal orthodoxy; he wanted the Journal’s editorial pages to be a forum for the right. I barely managed to avoid losing my job over the Krugman debacle; Bartley apparently thought about removing me but decided to give the tyro another chance. This was an early indication to me that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the left. ~ Max Boot

305:the thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, reject orthodoxy of any kind: I hold to no religion or creed, am neither Eastern nor Western, Muslim or infidel, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile. I come from neither land nor sea, am not related to those above or below, was not born nearby or far away, do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth, claim descent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above. I transcend body and soul. My home is beyond place and name. It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space. ~ Stephen Kinzer

306:Initially those at the western end in the Panjab and the Doab tended to look down on those on the eastern frontier in Bihar and Bengal; the latter were mleccha, uncouth in their arya speech and negligent in their sacrificial observance. By mid-first millennium BC it would be the other way round. As the eastern settlements grew into a network of thriving proto-states, many laid claim to exalted pedigrees and, assuming the mantle of Aryanised orthodoxy, would be happy to disparage their Panjabi cousins as vratya or ‘degenerate’. ~ John Keay

307:The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses. ~ Ed Crane

308:"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them). ~ Kenny Smith

309:The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed." It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table. The truth of Wesley's words is established before our eyes: "Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this. ~ A W Tozer

310:In the Bible, the word antichrist is only used as a description of people who don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He is not described as one satanic entity—as the beast of Revelation which many people believe—but as a person, any person, who deviates from the Christian orthodoxy. But through years of myth-making and fear-sowing, Christianity metamorphosed antichrists into a single Antichrist, an apocalyptic villain and Christian bogeyman used to scare people much as Santa Claus is used to regulate children’s behavior. ~ Marilyn Manson

311:Christianity is now understood by those who profess the church doctrines as a supernatural, miraculous revelation concerning everything which is given in the symbol of faith, and by those who do not believe, as an obsolete manifestation of humanity's need of believing in something supernatural, as a historical phenomenon, which is completely expressed in Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and which has no longer any vital meaning for us. For the believers the meaning of the teaching is concealed by the church, for unbelievers by science. ~ Leo Tolstoy

312:The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come. ~ Edmund S Morgan

313:The Purana carry on propaganda in favour of a particular deity or a place sacred to that deity, and are sectarian. … The Vayu, Brahmanda, Matsya, and the Vishnu Puranas give ancient royal genealogies. The original Puranas existed long before the Christian era, were revised and modified in later times and chapters on Hindu rites and customs were added to them. They attempted to being Vaishnavism and Saivism within the orthodoxy and combined new doctrines with Vedic rituals, ... ~ R. K. Dwivedi, et all, in A history of the Guptas, political & cultural {1985), p. 122

314:What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things. ~ Ben Okri

315:Believing in the divinity of Jesus is the heart of Christian orthodoxy. But believing in the viability of Jesus’s ideas makes Christianity truly radical. Divorcing Jesus from his ideas—especially divorcing Jesus from his political ideas—has been a huge problem that’s plagued the church from the fourth century onward. The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas—thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement. ~ Brian Zahnd

316:The new Islamic science has been fathered by the global resurgence of orthodoxy in Muslim countries; it is not peculiar to Pakistan by any means. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia are also particularly active centres. However, it is not confined by national boundaries and is particularly to be found amongst immigrants settled in the West. It evidently provides a form of psychological defence against the continuous battering by modern science in its many manifestations. For this reason, one must not expect the phenomenon to disappear in the decades to come. ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy

317:It was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. ~ Charles Dickens

318:In England Giordano Bruno had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors - that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith. ~ John William Draper

319:Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, talk about how the U.S. became a national security state after World War II. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy. To me it was the most depressing thing, these full-scale military interventions firsthand for a number of years, seeing how quickly we can get involved in another war with very little debate. ~ Michael Hastings

320:Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are both important and are both things that Jesus spoke to, but I no longer believe that either of these things belongs in the center of our circles. I think that spot should be reserved for the exact representation of love: Jesus. By erasing my central pursuit of orthodoxy and orthopraxy and replacing it with Jesus, the essence of love, I realized that perhaps Jesus was inviting us to pursue something even better than right thinking or right doing: he was inviting us to pursue a heart that is constantly increasing in is capacity to love. ~ Benjamin L Corey

321:There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it...All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit. ~ Larry Kramer

322:In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math. ~ Lionel Shriver

323:The letters between Pliny and Trajan amount to one of the most loquacious non-Christian discussions of the new religion to survive. The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners. They construct a triumphalist history of Christianity as victorious both against its pagan rivals, despite cruel persecution by the Roman state, and against all the internal variants (‘heresies’, as later Christians defined them), which challenged what came to be Christian orthodoxy. ~ Mary Beard

324:The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place ti is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. ~ Edward W Said

325:I had long ago determined that I would devote my life to literary scholarship. Not, let me emphasise, the dry-as-dust scholarship of academe, the crushing orthodoxy to be found in universities, but rather the recondite scholarship that is a journey into the unknown. I refer, chiefly, to those dead authors whose works savour of the uncanny and the marvellous, authors whose unique perspectives are beyond the self-stultifying purview of the modern critical mania for so-called realism. For my part I chose the mysteries, and the hierophant of mystery was an obscure author called Arthur Machen. ~ Mark Samuels

326:The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or “willingness to yield to authority,” was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as “assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention.” Other ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

327:Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

328:Certainly truths are to be found in all the philosophers, and above all half-truths, but these truths are flanked with errors and inconsistencies, and there is moreover no need for them; hence it is pointless to dwell on them. Partial truths are only to be accepted in the domain of traditional orthodoxy, because they are only acceptable in the context of the total Truth, which alone guarantees their exactitude and their efficacy. To think while denying the total Truth, which is both objective and subjective, is completely inconsistent; it is not really thinking. [Letter on Existentialism to Huston Smith] ~ Frithjof Schuon

329:how we appeared to those on the outside—the sense that no one could really understand what it meant to live in this way—but I had believed that there was room for portrayals that showed the varieties of experience within Orthodoxy. I had wanted to reckon with the ways people lived not only within the sanctioned positions of the law but inside all the human possibilities between. I had wanted to write about the small transgressions and religious compromises people make and yet remain inside—that wily inner sphere that surely existed here as it did everywhere. But apparently, here there was no doubting, no desiring ~ Tova Mirvis

330:One of the most common criticisms of my theology is that I have placed compassion ahead of orthodoxy. Aside from the fact that this is a very false assumption, as my stances are based on deeply studied convictions, there seems to be another assumption that compassion and orthodoxy are inherently at odds, with the latter being more more authoritative. God is "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth". That is no mere sentiment. If your orthodoxy doesn't fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all. ~ Jamie Arpin Ricci

331:If, as Ricardo had argued, all economic value was derived from human labor, then the capitalist prospered by paying workers less than the value that they had added and pocketing the difference. To secure the maximum profit, the capitalist paid the worker only enough for his subsistence. Surplus value, then, is the value produced by the worker beyond what he is compensated. Thus the capitalist's profit came from the exploiting the worker. Although unequivocal in his dogmas of history and of economics, Marx's lively mind occasionally rebelled at hints of orthodoxy. And he more than once declared, "I am not a Marxist. ~ Daniel J Boorstin

332:sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can’t keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I’d rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make more sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I ~ Julian Barnes

333:To the extent that anyone gives up the mentality of antithesis, he has moved over to the other side, even if he still tries to defend orthodoxy or evangelicalism. If Christians are to take advantage of the death of romanticism, we must consciously build back the mentality and practice of antithesis among Christians in doctrine and life. We must do it in our teaching and example toward compromise, both ecclesiastically and in evangelism. To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at these points where there is a cost in doing so, is to push the next generation into the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us. ~ Francis A Schaeffer

334:Most notably, FDR defied the orthodoxy of his time by abandoning the gold standard in a series of steps in 1933. With the money supply no longer constrained by the amount of gold held by the government, deflation stopped almost immediately. Roosevelt also quelled the raging financial crisis by temporarily shutting down the nation’s banks (a bank holiday), permitting only those judged sound to reopen, and by pushing legislation establishing federal deposit insurance. These measures brought intense criticism from orthodox economists and conservative business leaders. And they were indeed experiments. But, collectively, they worked. ~ Ben S Bernanke

335:But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

336:There is only one speaker throughout: Allah himself (although there are a few exceptions that bedevil Koranic commentators to this day). Because it is without doubt, and because it is entirely Allah’s word, without any human element whatsoever, and because he guarantees its preservation, it cannot be questioned. Historically this has made the words of the Koran—on wife-beating, the treatment of non-Muslims, and much more—a virtually insurmountable obstacle to reform within Islam. Reformers are immediately branded as heretics or apostates, and are frequently subject to persecution from authorities anxious to safeguard Islamic orthodoxy. To ~ Robert Spencer

337:The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone ~ Ian Morgan Cron

338:How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of "accepting" Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshipping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside. ~ A W Tozer

339:The Holy Father is doing the wisest thing possible, considering the circumstances. He has gently but firmly deflected Vettore’s attention elsewhere. He has given him a noble project that will consume his energies, yet demand of him a proof of orthodoxy It is a test the cardinal cannot escape without abandoning his public image. He is to begin a series of fact-finding journeys to the Far East, assessing the condition of the Church in mainland China and Vietnam. He is to put all of his effort into this research for the coming two years. And the Pope has generously excused him from the ordinary duties of his office, replacing him, temporarily of course, with a man we know to be loyal. ~ Michael D O Brien

340:I have a feeling that if Darwin turns out to be right, the Christian faith won’t fall apart after all. Faith is more resilient than that. Like a living organism, it has a remarkable ability to adapt to change. At our best, Christians embrace this quality, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then. At our worst, we kick and scream our way through each and every change, burning books and bridges and even people along the way. But if we can adjust to Galileo’s universe, we can adjust to Darwin’s biology — even the part about the monkeys. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that faith can survive just about anything, so long as it’s able to evolve. ~ Rachel Held Evans

341:Something of the same difficulty attaches to a number of other books. For example, while one deeply appreciates the tact, humility, and good spirit Fackre displays in one of his recent works,35 pretty soon one recalls the fundamental point Machen made more than half a century ago: At some point one must face the fact that the kind of disavowals and denials one finds in many branches of classic liberalism, and repeated by the major proponents of religious pluralism, are much deeper even than the chasms between, say, Russian Orthodoxy and American Pentecostalism, or between Roman Catholicism and classic evangelicalism; we are dealing with “different religions,” in the strongest sense of that expression.36 ~ D A Carson

342:Zeena believes that the breaking of taboos creates access to blocked energy that is let loose in a forceful way. The left-hand path is about consciously breaking with a ‘sleepwalker orthodoxy’ to be able to act as a fully awaken and conscious individual. In her book, George Orwell (1984) is quoted: “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” At the same time she notes that the left-hand path is the ‘way of action’. It is not about intellectual contemplation, or worse, just reading about action.' About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger from: Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity, University of Stockholm, 2004 ~ Zeena Schreck

343:The story of Carol's transformation evoked complicated feelings in Rose. It appalled her, of course. The idea of an educated, metropolitan woman voluntarily casting off every vestige of modernity in order to make herself over as a medieval ghetto-dweller was unconscionable - but it also inspired a sneaking envy. By submitting to the restraints of Orthodoxy, Carol had not only performed an impressive act of self-denial - an act guaranteed to appeal to Rosa's ascetic sensibility - but also freed herself from the burden of trying to improvise her own moral code. These days, she always knew what the right thing to do was - or if she didn't, she knew a rabbi who did. Every aspect of her daily life was consonant with her convictions. ~ Zo Heller

344:In these pages, it is my intention to make many people—not only Muslims but also Western apologists for Islam—uncomfortable. I am not going to do this by drawing cartoons. Rather, I intend to challenge centuries of religious orthodoxy with ideas and arguments that I am certain will be denounced as heretical. My argument is for nothing less than a Muslim Reformation. Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam’s core concepts, I believe, we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion. I intend to speak freely, in the hope that others will debate equally freely with me on what needs to change in Islamic doctrine, rather than seeking to stifle discussion. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

345:Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women. ~ Kirsten Powers

346:We forgot that there are some things that we cannot get hold of with our minds. The mind is good -- God put it there. He gave us our heads, and it was not His intention that our heads would function just as a place to hang a hat. He gave us our heads, and He put brains in our heads, and that faculty we call the intellect has its own work to do. But that work is not the apprehending of divine things -- that is of the Holy Spirit. Let me remind you now that modern orthodoxy has make a great blunder in the erroneous assumption that spiritual truth can be intellectually perceived. There have been far-reaching conditions resulting from this concept -- and they are showing in our preaching, our praying, our singing, our activity and our thinking. ~ A W Tozer

347:My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture. I have great respect for orthodoxy, but my reverence for inspiration is far greater. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God. I never thought it to be any very great crime to seem to be inconsistent with myself; for who am I that I should everlastingly be consistent? But I do think it a great crime to be so inconsistent with the word of God that I should want to lop away a bough or even a twig from so much as a single tree of the forest of Scripture. God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

348:Free speech is a unitary issue in which there are no possible divisions. The moral standing of the speaker has no relevance, other than in our correlated free right to judge him in turn for his actions, and it should not matter whether the person speaking is the finest man who has ever lived or the worst, nor whether or not a majority concurs with his sentiment. It must not matter whether a writer is brilliant or moronic, or a cartoonist witty or bigoted, because it is not up to power, authority, plurality or orthodoxy to make that distinction. Parliament can not be the architect of its own opposition, nor the offended the authors of their own offense. Put bluntly, the law must not distinguish between the writings of Hitler and those of Shakespeare. ~ Charles C W Cooke

349:I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it. ~ G K Chesterton

350:The new territory opened up by the impetuous advance of a few geniuses, acting as a spearhead, is subsequently occupied by the solid phalanxes of mediocrity; and soon the revolution turns into a new orthodoxy, with its unavoidable symptoms of one-sidedness, over-specialization, loss of contact with other provinces of knowledge, and ultimately, estrangement from reality. We see this happening-unavoidably, it seems-at various times in the history of various sciences. The emergent orthodoxy hardens into a 'closed system' of thought, unwilling or unable to assimilate new empirical data or to adjust itself to significant changes in other fields of knowledge; sooner or later the matrix is blocked, a new crisis arises, leading to a new synthesis, and the cycle starts again. ~ Arthur Koestler

351:Today's rich countries used protection and subsidies, while discriminating against foreign investors-all anathema to today's economic orthodoxy and now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations (notably the IMF and the World Bank). There are a few countries that did not use much protection, such as the Netherlands and (until the First World War) Switzerland. But they deviated from the orthodoxy in other ways, such as their refusal to protect patents. The records of today's rich countries on policies regarding foreign investment, state-owned enterprises, macroeconomic management and political institutions also show significant deviations from today's orthodoxy regarding these matters. ~ Ha Joon Chang

352:To be specific, the self-sins are self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins – egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion – are strangely tolerated Christian leaders, even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice. ~ A W Tozer

353:It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy, which seeks to reanimate the account of knowledge offered by Augustine and Aquinas. On this ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model, we rightly give up pretensions to absolute knowledge or certainty, but we do not thereby give up on knowledge altogether. Rather, we can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular, special) revelation, is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit's regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge). We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity. ~ James K A Smith

354:To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice. ~ Anonymous

355:Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." ~ G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy,

356:When historians look back at that era, they sometimes describe those views as Orthodox, but that term is slanted. Literally, it means “right teaching,” and, of course, everyone believes that his or her particular views are correct. The main reason we call these opinions orthodox is that they were held by the Roman Church and the papacy, and over time, that church survived the political disasters that overwhelmed other once-great centers like Antioch and Alexandria. In the great debates over Christ’s nature, anti-Chalcedonians also called themselves Orthodox, and if matters had worked out differently, perhaps that faction would have won out. At least in their own minds, everyone is always “orthodox.” English bishop William Warburton explained the difference frankly: orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’s doxy. ~ Philip Jenkins

357:RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an “orthodoxic” religion; it is principally one’s beliefs—expressed through creed—that make one a faithful Christian. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Judaism, a quintessentially “orthopraxic” religion, where it is principally one’s actions—expressed through the Law—that make one an observant Jew. It is not that beliefs are irrelevant in Judaism, or actions unimportant in Christianity. Rather, it is that of the two religions, Judaism places far greater emphasis on orthopraxic behavior than does Christianity. ~ Reza Aslan

358:Philosophy is one of those subjects, like astrophysics and neurosurgery, that are not for the fainthearted. To delve into the absolutes of the human experience, to seek to advance the progress of enlightenment first expounded by the likes of the revered Aristotle and Plato, to search for the answers to the profound questions of the universe, often at the risk of deadly reprisal from entrenched powers, requires not only brilliance and tenacity but a deep sense of purpose. But even among this select fraternity, [René] Descartes stands out. From him did we get practical discoveries like coordinates in geometry and the law of refraction of light. But what he really did was to shake loose the human mind from the shackles of centuries of stultifying religious orthodoxy by creating an entirely original approach to reasoning: the Cartesian method. ~ Nancy Goldstone

359:The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy ("right opinion"). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before. ~ Wendell Berry

360:MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university. He studied at Princeton, taught in New York. He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States. He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded. That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare. He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read. He died in New York in 1859. His ~ Eduardo Galeano

361:Struggles among Roman patricians, plebeians, and slaves produced a version of the chordal triad universalized around a notion of libertas. Different notes of the chord were dominant from the Republic to the Empire. The slave’s point of view was made prominent in the figure of Epictetus, one of the few major Roman theorists born a slave. By the Middle Ages, freedom had attained a spiritual dimension but was still linked to the political. With medieval Christendom came the triumph of the sovereignal conception of freedom. That triumph coincided with theocratic societal decadence, the doctrine of heresy, the transformation of mass slavery into the political language of serfdom, and the introduction of the root word Slav to refer to serfs across Europe. Heretics privileged their personal freedom over sovereign orthodoxy. Being burned at the stake was a consequence. ~ Neil Roberts

362:Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on the truth of those claims. Loyalty becomes belief in the historical truthfulness of all the statements in the gospels. Discipleship is then easily confused with dogmatism or doctrinal orthodoxy. The absence of an image - the most common fruit of biblical scholarship in this century - leaves us with no clear notion of what it means to take Jesus seriously, no notion of what loyalty might entail, no direction for the life of discipleship. But the vision of Jesus as a person of Spirit, deeply involved in the historical crisis of his own time, can shape the church’s discipleship today. For us, as for the world in which he lived, he can be the light in our darkness. ~ Marcus J Borg

363:The moral point of The Eternal Champion is pretty simple but I think it is worth mentioning. Recently, in a radio interview, I was asked if my use of the forces of Law and Chaos was not, after all, merely another version of Tolkien's or Howard's Good and Evil. I replied emphatically--I use the ideas of Law and Chaos precisely because I am suspicious of simplistic notions of good and evil. In my multiverse, Law and Chaos are both legitimate ways of interpreting and defining experience. Ideally, the Cosmic Balance keeps both sides in equilibrium. By playing "the Game of Time" (or the Blood-Red Game as Asquiol calls it) the various participants maintain that equilibrium. When the scales tip too far towards Law we move toward rigid orthodoxy and social sterility, a form of decadence. When Chaos is uppermost we move too far towards undisciplined and destructive creativity. ~ Michael Moorcock

364:Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church? ~ James MacDonald

365:The upshot was that by the end of the 1970s conservative nonprofits had achieved power that was almost unthinkable when the League to Save Carthage first formed. Enormously wealthy right-wing donors had transformed themselves from the ridiculed, self-serving “economic royalists” of FDR’s day into the respected “other side” of a two-sided debate. The new, hyper-partisan think tanks had impact far beyond Washington. They introduced doubt into areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship, undermined genuinely unbiased experts, and gave politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose. The benefit was a far more pluralistic intellectual climate, beyond liberal orthodoxy. The hazard, however, was that partisan shills would create “balance” based on fraudulent research and deceive the public about pressing issues in which their sponsors had financial interests. ~ Jane Mayer

366:Has anyone provided proof of God’s inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on. ~ David Berlinski

367:Though Women's Studies was supposed to give a voice to "silenced" women, all too many women who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors—and students, too. Indeed, while some (generally tenured) older professors like Willingham do dare to challenge Women's Studies dogma, younger initiates, whether students or greenhorn instructors, often act as fierce enforcers of dogma, reiterating it (as did Tholen and Alder at the Beijing +15 session) with all the zeal of fresh converts to a fundamentalist faith and bristling at any violation of Holy Writ. Patai and Koertge quote professors who complain about students being "zombified" by Women's Studies, turned into "ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives" who "utter…stock phrases" and are plainly "terrified of a thought because if they ever had a serious thought, they might start reflecting on this stuff they're taught to repeat. ~ Bruce Bawer

368:Hume’s purported fideism had serious impact on some religious thinkers. One of these, the German philosopher J. G. Hamann, decided that Hume, intentionally or not, was the greatest voice of religious orthodoxy—for insisting that there was no rational basis for religious belief, and that there was no rational evidence for Christianity. When the Dialogues appeared, Hamann became quite excited; he translated the first and last dialogues into German so that Immanuel Kant might read them and become a serious Christian. Hamann’s use of Hume as the voice of orthodoxy led the great Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard to become the most important advocate of fideistic Christianity in the nineteenth century. So, although most of Hume’s influence has been in creating doubts and leading thinkers to question accepted religious views, he also played an important role in the development of fideistic orthodoxy, culminating in Kierkegaard’s views. ~ David Hume

369:If there’s anything we know from the history of innovation—and particularly from the history of the time travelers—it is that being true to yourself is not enough. Certainly, you don’t want to be trapped by orthodoxy and conventional wisdom. Certainly, the innovators profiled in this book had the tenacity to stick with their hunches for long periods of time. But there is comparable risk in being true to your own sense of identity, your own roots. Better to challenge those intuitions, explore uncharted terrain, both literal and figurative. Better to make new connections than remain comfortably situated in the same routine. If you want to improve the world slightly, you need focus and determination; you need to stay within the confines of a field and open the new doors in the adjacent possible one at a time. But if you want to be like Ada, if you want to have an “intuitive perception of hidden things”—well, in that case, you need to get a little lost. ~ Steven Johnson

370:in Solitude; also James Martin’s introduction to Merton and others, Becoming Who You Are), Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love), Gregory Mayers (Listen to the Desert), Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trust), J. Keith Miller (Compelled to Control) and David Benner (Spirituality and the Awakening Self). Let me also include here Frederica Matthews-Green (The Jesus Prayer and At the Corner of East and Now) for gentle and compelling introductions to Eastern Orthodoxy, a direction to which I never once nodded throughout my entire seminary career, and James Fowler’s classic Stages of Faith. Others I want to mention are M. Holmes Hartshorne (The Faith to Doubt) and Daniel Taylor (The Myth of Certainty and The Skeptical Believer). I could go on, but each of these were one ah-ha moment after another, encouraging in me a different perspective on what the life of faith can look like, which I found both unsettling and also healing and freeing. These books have become old friends. ~ Peter Enns

371:When it is once admitted that a body of facts lies at the basis of the Christian religion, the efforts which past generations have made toward the classification of the facts will have to be treated with respect. In no branch of science would there be any real advance if every generation started fresh with no dependence upon what past generations have achieved. Yet in theology, vituperation of the past seems to be thought essential to progress. And upon what base slanders the vituperation is based! After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives rather a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession, for example, or to that tenderest and most theological of books, the "Pilgrim's Progress" of John Bunyan, and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love. ~ J Gresham Machen

372:The third revolutionary upheaval, that of the Protestant Reformation, was initiated when Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517, insisting on the individual’s direct relationship with God; hence individual conscience—not established orthodoxy—was put forward as the key to salvation. A number of feudal rulers seized the opportunity to enhance their authority by embracing Protestantism, imposing it on their populations, and enriching themselves by seizing Church lands. Each side regarded the other as heretical, and disagreements turned into life-or-death struggles as political and sectarian disputes commingled. The barrier separating domestic and foreign disputes collapsed as sovereigns backed rival factions in their neighbors’ domestic, often bloody, religious struggles. The Protestant Reformation destroyed the concept of a world order sustained by the “two swords” of papacy and empire. Christianity was split and at war with itself. ~ Anonymous

373:is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power. To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice. ~ A W Tozer

374:The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true. ~ Don DeLillo

375:But if God and immortality be repudiated, what is left? That is the question usually thrown at the atheist's head. The orthodox believer likes to think that nothing is left. That, however, is because he has only been accustomed to think in terms of his orthodoxy. In point of fact, a great deal is left. That is immediately obvious from the fact that many men and women have led active, or self-sacrificing, or noble, or devoted lives without any belief in God or immortality. Buddhism in its uncorrupted form has no such belief; nor did the great nineteenth-century agnostics; nor do the orthodox Russian Communists; nor did the Stoics. Of course, the unbelievers have often been guilty of selfish or wicked actions; but so have the believers. And in any case that is not the fundamental point. The point: is that without these beliefs men and women may yet possess the mainspring of full and purposive living, and just as strong a sense that existence can be worth while as is possible to the most devout believers. ~ Julian Huxley

376:At a deeper level what this whole exchange revealed to me was something disturbing about the way science works. I hadn't quite grasped the role of fear before. But I could see it in action everywhere here: fear of being 'noticed and monitored by colleagues,' fear of unwanted negative celebrity, fear of indignity, fear of loss of reputation, fear of loss of career--and not for committing some terrible crime but simply for exploring unorthodox possibilities and undertaking 'somewhat controversial research' into what everyone agrees were extraordinary events 12,800 years ago. Worse still, this pervasive state of fear has somehow ingrained itself so deeply into the fabric of science that those who have embraced unorthodox possibilities themselves are often among the least willing to consider unorthodox possibilities embraced by others--lest by doing so they 'contaminate' their own preferred unorthodoxy. How will it ever be possible to discover the truth about the past when so much fear gets in the way? ~ Graham Hancock

377:Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now in his third five-year term as head of the modern equivalent of the Holy Inquisition, served in the military in Germany during the war, though he saw no combat. By his own admission he was aware of the Holocaust. No German could have been totally ignorant. "The abyss of Hitlerism could not be overlooked," Ratzinger now confesses.22 Yet he overlooked it when it would have cost him something to speak out against it. Surely now, as the watchdog of orthodoxy and the longestserving and most powerful official in the Vatican next to the pope, Ratzinger could make amends both for his own silence and that of his Church all during the Holocaust. Why not offer genuine repentance and sorrowful apology to the Jews? But Ratzinger and John Paul II continue Pius XII's stony silence. And how could they apologize without admitting that their popes and Church have sinned grievously against Christ's natural brethren, and thus that the very claim to infallibility and being the one true Church is a fraud? No Escape from Guilt ~ Dave Hunt

378:I have just initiated a new public field of research which I call: Abrahamology. It is the same discipline that I have been working on, however, this is the first time I am announcing the existence of this platform for the large amount of information and body of knowledge that I was able to generate so far. My motivation is driven by it and for eventually making this theoretical construct stand alongside other disciplines of research, however, using an Islamic (i.e., Strict & Uncompromising Abrahamic Orthodoxy) lens of interpretation. To establish it as a genuine field of study is therefore the path which will mark my future endeavors while presenting, advancing, scrutinizing and validating my assertions. There are no tools of Gematria, Philosophy, Kabbalah, Shamanism, Esotery, Gnosticism, Proselytization, or Synchronicity used, but rather the methods of inquiry which are found in Observation, Useful Knowledge, Debates, Discussions, Mathematics, Alternative (alongside Academia), Science and Reason are those which are utilized. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

379:Any Christianity that rests upon a dichotomy - some sort of platonic concept - simply does not have an answer to nature, and we must say with tears that much orthodoxy, much evangelical Christianity, is rooted in a platonic concept, wherein the only interest is in the "upper story", in the heavenly things - only in "saving the soul" and getting it to heaven. In this platonic concept, even though orthodox and evangelical terminology is used, there is little or no interest in the proper pleasures of the body or the proper uses of the intellect. In such a Christianity there is a strong tendency to see nothing in nature beyond its use as one of the classic proofs of God's existence. "Look at nature," we are told; "Look at the Alps. God must have made them." And that is the end. Nature has become merely an academic proof of the existence of the Creator, with little value in itself. Christians of this outlook do not show an interest in nature itself. They use it simply as an apologetic weapon, rather than thinking or talking about the real value of nature. ~ Francis A Schaeffer

380:...when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little--or at best a distorted--sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life. Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.... My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable....I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of the audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause. ~ Flannery O Connor

381:...'unless you convert to Orthodoxy, you too will follow your Pope down that valley, through the scorching fire. We will watch you from this balcony,' he added, 'but of course it will then be too late to save you.' I smiled, but Fr. Theophanes was in full swing and clearly in no mood for joking. 'No one can truly know what that day will be like.' He shook his head gravely. 'But some of our Orthodox fathers have had visions. Fire-fire that will never end, terrible, terrible fire - will come from the throne of Christ, just like it does on the icons. The saints-those who are to be saved, in router words the Orthodox Church-will fly in the air to meet Christ. But sinners and all non-Orthodox will be separated from the Elect. The damned will be pushed and prodded by devils down through the fire, down from the Valley of Joseph, past here-in fact exactly the route those Israeli hikers took today-down, down to the Mouth of Hell.' 'Is that nearby?' 'Certainly,' said Theophanes, stroking his beard. 'The Mouth of Hell will open up near the Dead Sea.' 'That is in the Bible?' 'Of course,' said Theophanes. 'Everything I am telling you is true. ~ William Dalrymple

382:The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness. ~ Peter L Berger

383:In fact it might be said that the main reason why modern science never arose in China or Islam is precisely because of the presence of metaphysical doctrine and a traditional religious structure which refused to make a profane thing of nature. Neither the ‘Oriental bureaucratism' of Needham nor any other social and economic explanation suffices to explain why the scientific revolution as seen in the West did not develop elsewhere. The most basic reason is that neither in Islam, nor India nor the Far East was the substance and stuff of nature so depleted of a sacramental and spiritual character, nor was the intellectual dimension of these traditions so enfeebled as to enable a purely secular science of nature and a secular philosophy to develop outside the matrix of the traditional intellectual orthodoxy. Islam, which resembles Christianity in so many ways, is a perfect example of this truth, and the tact that modern science did not develop in its bosom is not the sign of decadence as some have claimed but of the refusal of Islam to consider any form of knowledge as purely secular and divorced from what it considers as the ultimate goal of human existence. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

384:There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” As he described them, they were people who were “dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, food, to housing, you name it.” These were “people who pay no income tax,” he said, and so “our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.” He seemed to be implying that nearly half the country consisted of parasites. This was no slip of the tongue. Romney was expressing what The Wall Street Journal described as the “new orthodoxy” within the Republican Party. In a new twist on the old conservative argument against government aid for the poor, it denigrated nearly half the country as what the Journal called “Lucky Duckies” freeloading off the rich. This startling theory held that because many members of the middle class and working poor received targeted tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, which reduced their income taxes to zero, they were “a nation of moochers,” as the title of a book written by a fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute put it. ~ Jane Mayer

385:William Palmer, a distinguished member of the Anglican Church and of the University of Oxford, wished to join the Orthodox Church. He went to Russia and Turkey to study the contemporary situation in the Christian East and to find out on what conditions he would be admitted to the communion of the Eastern Orthodox. At St. Petersburg and at Moscow he was told that he had only to abjure the errors of Protestantism before a priest, who would thereupon administer to him the sacrament of Holy Chrism or Confirmation. But at Constantinople he found that he must be baptized afresh. As he knew himself to be a Christian and saw no reason to suspect the validity of his baptism (which incidentally was admitted without question by the Orthodox Russian Church), he considered that a second baptism would be a sacrilege. On the other hand, he could not bring himself to accept Orthodoxy according to the local rules of the Russian Church, since he would then become Orthodox only in Russia while remaining a heathen in the eyes of the Greeks; and he had no wish to join a national Church but to join the universal Orthodox Church. No one could solve his dilemma, and so he became a Roman Catholic. ~ Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

386:Catherine had to treat the church hierarchy carefully. She had always exercised a rational flexibility in matters of religious dogma and policy. Brought up in an atmosphere of strict Lutheranism, she had as a child expressed enough skepticism about religion to worry her deeply conventional father. As a fourteen-year-old in Russia, she had been required to change her religion to Orthodoxy. In public, she scrupulously observed all forms of this faith, attending church services, observing religious holidays, and making pilgrimages. Throughout her reign, she never underestimated the importance of religion. She knew that the name of the autocrat and the power of the throne were embodied in the daily prayers of the faithful, and that the views of the clergy and the piety of the masses were a power to be reckoned with. She understood that the sovereign, whatever his or her private views of religion, must find a way to make this work. When Voltaire was asked how he, who denied God, could take Holy Communion, he replied that he “breakfasted according to the custom of the country.” Having observed the disastrous effect of her husband’s contemptuous public rejection of the Orthodox Church, Catherine chose to emulate Voltaire. ~ Robert K Massie

387:Economists who simply advised leaving the economy alone, governments whose first instincts, apart from protecting the gold standard by deflationary policies, was to stick to financial orthodoxy, balance budgets and cut costs, were visibly not making the situation better. Indeed, as the depression continued, it was argued with considerable force not least by J.M. Keynes who consequently became the most influential economist of the next forty years - that they were making the depression worse. Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which, once again, they were equally unable to understand or to deal with. Still, this strange phenomenon should remind us of the major characteristic of history which it exemplifies: the incredible shortness of memory of both the theorists and practitioners of economics. It also provides a vivid illustration of society's need for historians, who are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

388:The premise of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was used as a perfect tool, especially by the British, to divide the Hindu society and the state of India. The North Indian “Aryans” were then pit against the South Indian “Dravidians,” along with high-caste against low-caste, mainstream Hindus against tribals, Vedic orthodoxy against the indigenous orthodox sects, and later to neutralize Hindu criticism of the forced Islamic occupation of India, since “Hindus themselves entered India in the same way as Muslims did.” Even today, the theory has still been used as the basis for the growth of secularist and even Marxist forces. The problem with all of this is that people of Indian descent, especially the youth, when they hear all of this Aryan Invasion theory nonsense, they begin to lose faith in their own country, culture and history, and especially in the Vedic tradition and epics. They think it is all just stories, fiction, or even a lie. But that is not the case at all, which is why it is important to show where this theory came from, what its purpose was, and why we should throw it away and take a second and much deeper look at what the Vedic tradition has to offer, and how it was actually the source of much of the world’s advancement in so many areas. ~ Stephen Knapp

389:Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution of Ideas' equally apply to the evolution of art. In both fields the truly original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of talented practitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new territories, which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both fields there are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a break-through to new frontiers-followed by decades, or centuries of consolidation, orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence-until a new crisis arises, a holy discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other parallels could be drawn: 'multiple discoveries' -the simultaneous emergence of a new style, for which the time is ripe, independently in several places; 'collective discoveries' originating in a closely knit group, clique, school, or team; 'rediscoveries'- the periodic revivals of past and forgotten forms of art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between seemingly distant provinces of science and art. To quote a single example: the rediscovery of the treatise on conic sections by Apollonius of Perga, dating from the fourth century B.C., gave the ellipse to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy-and to Guarini, who introduced new vistas into architecture. ~ Arthur Koestler

390:Reluctantly, he knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fit so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment buildings, for their overdeveloped sense of responsibility and lack of flamboyance. Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utencils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings. In short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated, professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbors’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, but the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. ~ J G Ballard

391:We sing the order of the night, a tune which reminds me of being a little girl in a new dress that, because of the season, came with an Easter bonnet, which I wore as well. It reminds me of being so studious that I took to heart my teachers' promise that for each word of the seder we recited, we would receive divine credit for a separate good deed. Now, for me, there is no counting up good deeds, no worrying about ingesting every crumb of required matzo. It's not the same seder I used to attend but an alternate one being written in the margins. There is room for the pleasure of being here with my family, telling the story we have been imparting for generations. I am still part of this story, and the story remains part of me as well - its language, its rhythms, its customs all have shaped who I am. To the rabbi who once issued the warning about partaking but not enjoying, and to the wayward yeshiva student who tried to go, I want to offer my own ending: When participation no longer feels like it might be mistaken for capitulation, when there is acceptance of who have chosen to become - then it's possible to return and enjoy parts of what you've left. Not ever leave-taking had to be absolute and entire. Orthodoxy can remain my childhood home, a place I visit but where I no longer live. ~ Tova Mirvis

392:What we are doing at this moment is incredibly unnecessary and archaic. And we do it because it’s how we’ve always done it: gather together and talk. But, you know, Tim Leary had a wonderful saying back in the sixties; he said, “Find the others.” Find the others. Well, if you go onto the net, no matter what your concern is—you know, the restoration of south German harpsichords, or whatever it is—there are hundreds of people waiting to share their secrets with you, to passionately communicate with you, to draw you into a community. The net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity. You know, if you’re a 245-pound white male and you want to present yourself as a seven-year-old black girl who’s made a great victory over polio—hey, nobody can stop you from doing that on the net. On the net you are who you say you are. And all interest groups, no matter how peculiar and formerly insulated, can contact each other instantly. So the idea, the very notion, of orthodoxy is melting away. Freakery is the wave of the future. The bohemians knew it, the ’pataphysicians knew it, the dadaists knew it, the surrealists knew it, the hippies, even the zippies. Eccentricity and the empowerment of individuality is a paradoxical part of living in an electronic collectivity. ~ Terence McKenna, Spirituality and Technology

393:The concept of internal selection, of a hierarchy of controls which eliminate the consequences of harmful gene-mutations and co-ordinates the effects of useful mutations, is the missing link in orthodoxy theory between the 'atoms' of heredity and the living stream of evolution. Without that link, neither of them makes sense. There can be no doubt that random mutations do occur: they can be observed in the laboratory. There can be no doubt that Darwinian selection is a powerful force. But in between these two events, between the chemical changes in a gene and the appearance of the finished product as a newcomer on the evolutionary stage, there is a whole hierarchy of internal processes at work which impose strict limitations on the range of possible mutations and thus considerably reduce the importance of the chance factor. We might say that the monkey works at a typewriter which the manufacturers have programmed to print only syllables which exist in our language, but not nonsense syllables. If a nonsense syllable occurs, the machine will automatically erase it. To pursue the metaphor, we would have to populate the higher levels of the hierarchy with proof-readers and then editors, whose task is no longer elimination, but correction, self-repair and co-ordination-as in the example of the mutated eye. ~ Arthur Koestler

394:As my daughter nursed, I ran my hands over her tiny legs and silken cheeks, marveling at the mystery of such a small creature, the fact that inside her head, a world was awakening. Looking at her blue-green eyes and fuzz-dusting of blond hair was like waiting for a picture to come more fully into focus. So far, little had been imprinted on her but each moment, even right now, was shaping who she would become. It felt too late for me, but was I going to offer her words that would stick in my mouth as I tried to say them? Orthodoxy, or at least our small corner of it, had continued to evolve, changes forged by women I admired. Maybe my daughter wouldn't have to feel the inequalities and the constraints as viscerally as I did. But even then, would I have to teach her the tactics I used to remain inside? Don't say what you really think. Don't name what you really feel. It's not what it sounds like. It's not what it really means. I didn't want her to feel that she had to tuck away any dissenting part of herself. I didn't want her to feel that the only choice was to live with an endless sense of obligation and contradiction. Try not to be bothered by things that make you seethe. Try not to feel exhausted from walking against an ever-present tide, the current pulling your body, the sand slipping away beneath your feet. ~ Tova Mirvis

395:From this state of bewildered scepticism the student may take a leap of faith. And the leap is never backwards into the old curriculum, the old canon, the old belief in objective standards and settled ways of life. It is always a leap forward, into the world of free choice and free opinion, in which nothing has authority and nothing is objectively right or wrong. In this postmodern world there is no such things as adverse judgement – unless it be judgement of the adverse judge. It is a playground world, in which all are equally entitled tot their culture, their lifestyle and their opinions. And that is why, paradoxically, the postmodern curriculum is so censorious – in just the way that liberalism is censorious. When everything is permitted, it is vital to forbid the forbidder. All serious cultures are founded on the distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, good and bad taste, knowledge and ignorance. It was to the perpetuation of those distinctions that the humanities, in the past were devoted. Hence the assault on the curriculum, and the attempt to impose a standard of 'political correctness' – which means, in effect, a standard of non-exclusion and non-judgement – is also designed to authorise a vehement kind of judgement, against all those authorities that question the orthodoxy of the left. ~ Roger Scruton

396:Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act. This ~ Kirsten Powers

397:In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the greatest naturalist of the age with their ecclesiastical opponents. Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

398:ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy ~ Robert D Kaplan

399:The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or “willingness to yield to authority,” was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as “assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention.” Other studies on identical twins continued to deepen the effect of genes on human personality and behavior. Novelty seeking and impulsiveness were found to have striking degrees of correlation. Experiences that one might have imagined as intensely personal were, in fact, shared between twins. “Empathy, altruism, sense of equity, love, trust, music, economic behavior, and even politics are partially hardwired.” As one startled observer wrote, “A surprisingly high genetic component was found in the ability to be enthralled by an esthetic experience such as listening to a symphonic concert.” Separated by geographic and economic continents, when two brothers, estranged at birth, were brought to tears by the same Chopin nocturne at night, they seemed to be responding to some subtle, common chord struck by their genomes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

400:And not merely slogan-shouting, but debate. The Chronicle of the courtier Theophanes faithfully records a debate—perhaps disputation is the better word—between Justinian (through his herald, or mandatus) and the chosen representative of the Green faction. The dialogue is startling on a number of grounds. First, the Green “debater” addresses the emperor, the viceroy of Christ on earth, practically as an equal. He addresses Justinian respectfully—as “Justinianus Augustus”—but registers his complaint precisely as if he were doing so before a small claims court, informing the most powerful man in the world that “my oppressor can be found in the shoemaker’s quarter.” For his part, Justinian, though clearly aware that he holds what might be called a preemptive advantage (“Verily, if you refuse to keep silent, I shall have you beheaded”), still debates both the truth of the Green claims and the theological position that he suggests informs those claims. Justinian tells his interlocutor, “I would have you baptized in the name of one God” only to receive the response, “I am baptized in One God,” evidently an attempt to contrast his Monophysite sympathies with the emperor’s orthodoxy. The Green spokesman accuses the emperor of suppressing the truth, of countenancing murder, and when he has had enough, he ends with “Goodbye Justice! You are no longer in fashion. I shall turn and become Jew; better to be a pagan than a Blue, God knows…”14 The most telling part of the entire dialogue, however, is that it was ~ William Rosen

401:Almost every book in the NT has something to say about false beliefs and those who advocate them. We are warned, e.g., about false prophets (Matt. 7:15–16; 24:11), false christs (Matt. 24:5, 24; Mark 13:22), a different Jesus and a different spirit (2 Cor. 11:4), false apostles (2 Cor. 11:13–15), and “another gospel” (Gal. 1:8). With so many warnings, it is clear God knew that many false teachers would come, and that he did not want his people to be deceived (cf. Eph. 4:14; 2 John 7). In what follows, notable deceptions of prominent cults will be summarized, along with a brief biblical response. From the viewpoint of those who hold to historic, evangelical Christianity, a “cult” is any religious movement that claims to be derived from the Bible and/or the Christian faith, and that advocates beliefs that differ so significantly with major Christian doctrines that two consequences follow: (1) The movement cannot legitimately be considered a valid “Christian” denomination because of its serious deviation from historic Christian orthodoxy. (2) Believing the doctrines of the movement is incompatible with trusting in the Jesus Christ of the Bible for the salvation that comes by God’s grace alone (Eph. 2:8–9). By this traditional understanding of the word “cult,” the following groups described are “cults,” though this does not imply that they share the extremely oppressive, authoritarian, life-controlling, and often immoral practices that are found in what the secular world calls “cults,” using the term in a more extreme sense. ~ Anonymous

402:In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation of because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noted that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn't even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents' attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don't adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn't the same as knowing - and having others know - that the one who went the other way was my own brother. pp. 175-176 ~ Leonardo Padura

403:CONCLUSION TO THE SEVEN CHURCHES The church at Ephesus represents the danger of losing our first love (2:4), that fresh devotion to Christ that characterized the early church. The church at Smyrna represents the danger of fear of suffering and was exhorted, “Do not fear what you are about to suffer” (2:10). With persecution against believers worldwide so strong today, the church can take heart that Christ is aware of her suffering. The church at Pergamum illustrates the constant danger of doctrinal compromise (2:14–15), often the first step toward complete defection. The modern church that has forsaken so many fundamentals of biblical faith needs to heed this warning! The church at Thyatira is a monument to the danger of moral compromise (2:20). The church today may well take heed to the departure from moral standards that has invaded the church itself. The church at Sardis is a warning against the danger of spiritual deadness (3:1–2), of orthodoxy without life, of mere outward appearance. The church at Philadelphia commended by our Lord is nevertheless warned against the danger of not holding fast (3:11), and exhorted to keep “my word about patient endurance,” to maintain the “little power” that they did have and to wait for their coming Lord. The final message to the church at Laodicea is a telling indictment, a warning against the danger of lukewarmness (3:15–16), of self-sufficiency, of being unconscious of desperate spiritual need. Each of these messages is amazingly relevant and pointed in its analysis of what our Lord sees as He stands in the midst of His church. The ~ Mark Hitchcock

404:It is for his great mental faculties that I dread him," said he. "It is incalculable what evil such a person as he may do, if so disposed. There is a sublimity in his ideas, with which there is to me a mixture of terror; and, when he talks of religion, he does it as one that rather dreads its truths than reverences them. He, indeed, pretends great strictness of orthodoxy regarding some of the points of doctrine embraced by the reformed church; but you do not seem to perceive that both you and he are carrying these points to a dangerous extremity. Religion is a sublime and glorious thing, the bonds of society on earth, and the connector of humanity with the Divine nature; but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds: this is of all others the readiest way to destruction. Neither is there anything so easily done. There is not an error into which a man can fall which he may not press Scripture into his service as proof of the probity of, and though your boasted theologian shunned the full discussion of the subject before me, while you pressed it, I can easily see that both you and he are carrying your ideas of absolute predestination, and its concomitant appendages, to an extent that overthrows all religion and revelation together; or, at least, jumbles them into a chaos, out of which human capacity can never select what is good. Believe me, Mr. Robert, the less you associate with that illustrious stranger the better, for it appears to me that your creed and his carries damnation on the very front of it. ~ James Hogg

405:To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. ~ Walter Pater

406:For the Orthodox tradition, then, Adam's original sin affects the human race in its entirety, and it has consequences both on the physical and the moral level: it, results not only in sickness and physical death, but in moral weakness and paralysis. But does it also imply an inherited guilt? Here Orthodoxy is more guarded. Original sin is not to be interpreted in juridical or quasi-biological terms, as if it were some physical 'taint' of guilt, transmitted through sexual intercourse. This picture, which normally passes for the Augustinian view, is unacceptable to Orthodoxy. The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men's suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider. It is here, in the solidarity of the human race, that we find an explanation for the apparent unjustness of the doctrine of original sin. Why, we ask, should the entire human race suffer because of Adam's fall? Why should all be punished because of one man's sin? The answer is that human beings, made in the image of the Trinitarian God, are interdependent and coinherent. No man is an island. We are 'members one of another'(Eph. 4:25), and so any action, performed by any member of the human race, inevitably affects all the other members. Even though we are not, in the strict sense, guilty of the sins of others, yet we are somehow always involved. ~ Kallistos Ware

407:Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life. And the greatest of these, of course, was sex. I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy. Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths. ~ Andrew Klavan

408:Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such eccentricities of behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. ‘He always needs people who can translate his ideologies into reality so that they can be implemented,’ Pfeffer is reported as stating. Hitler’s way was, in fact, not to hand out streams of orders to shape important political decisions. Where possible, he avoided decisions. Rather, he laid out – often in his diffuse and opinionated fashion – his ideas at length and repeatedly. These provided the general guidelines and direction for policy-making. Others had to interpret from his comments how they thought he wanted them to act and ‘work towards’ his distant objectives. ‘If they could all work in this way,’ Hitler was reported as stating from time to time, ‘if they could all strive with firm, conscious tenacity towards a common, distant goal, then the ultimate goal must one day be achieved. That mistakes will be made is human. It is a pity. But that will be overcome if a common goal is constantly adopted as a guideline.’ This instinctive way of operating, embedded in Hitler’s social-Darwinist approach, not only unleashed ferocious competition among those in the party – later in the state – trying to reach the ‘correct’ interpretation of Hitler’s intentions. It also meant that Hitler, the unchallenged fount of ideological orthodoxy by this time, could always side with those who had come out on top in the relentless struggle going on below him, with those who had best proven that they were following the ‘right guidelines’. And since only Hitler could determine this, his power position was massively enhanced. ~ Ian Kershaw

409:The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true. The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy. ~ Anonymous

410:One wonders why no one in church history has ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved. Yet if love is to be placed above all other considerations (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8), if nothing has any value apart from love (1 Cor. 13:1–3), and if the only thing that matters is faith working in love (Gal. 5:6), how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetrated such things were not only not deemed heretics but often were (and yet are) held up as “heroes of the faith”? If there is an answer to this question, I believe it lies in the deceptive power of the sword. While God uses the sword of governments to preserve law, order, and justice, as we have seen, there is a corrupting principality and power always at work. Much like the magical ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the sword has a demonic power to deceive us. When we pick it up, we come under its power. It convinces us that our use of violence is a justified means to a noble end. It intoxicates us with the unquenchable dream of redemptive violence and blinds us to our own iniquities, thereby making us feel righteous in overpowering the unrighteousness of others. Most of the slaughtering done throughout history has been done by people who sincerely believed they were promoting “the good.” Everyone thinks their wars are just, if not holy. Marxists, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Islamic terrorists, and Christian crusaders have this in common. ~ Gregory A Boyd

411:Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of them were emotionally committed to either Villanova or Temple-two local teams that had just been involved in enervating battles with Providence and Connecticut, respectively, scrambling for a chance at the rest of the country. A group of Princeton players shooting basketballs miscellaneously in preparation for still another game hardly promised to be a high point of the evening, but Bradley, whose routine in the warmup time is a gradual crescendo of activity, is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play. In Philadelphia that night, what he did was, for him, anything but unusual. As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from 20 feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots-the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball-and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera. ~ John McPhee

412:D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under-gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.2 But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.3 Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”4 Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them. ~ Timothy J Keller

413:Sciences can only be validly constituted as ‘sacred sciences’ by those who, before all else, are in full possession of principia! Knowledge and are thereby qualified to carry out, in conformity with the strictest traditional orthodoxy, all the adaptations required by circumstances of time and place. However, when these sciences have been so established, their teaching may follow an inverse order: they then serve as it were as 'illustrations’ of pure doctrine, which they render more easily accessible to certain minds, and the fact that they are concerned with the world of multiplicity gives them an almost indefinite variety of points of view, adapted to the no less great variety of the individual aptitudes of those whose minds are still limited to that same world of multiplicity. The ways leading to knowledge may be extremely different at the lowest degree, but they draw closer and closer together as higher levels are reached. This is not to say that any of these preparatory degrees are absolutely necessary, since they are mere contingent methods having nothing in common with the end to be attained; it is even possible for some persons, in whom the tendency to contemplation is predominant, to attain directly to true intellectual intuition without the aid of such means; but this is a more or less exceptional case, and in general it is accepted as being necessary to proceed upward gradually. The whole question may also be illustrated by means of the traditional image of the 'cosmic wheel’: the circumference in reality exists only in virtue of the center, but the beings that stand upon the circumference must necessarily start from there or, more precisely, from the point thereon at which they actually find themselves, and follow the radius that leads to the center. Moreover, because of the correspondence that exists between all the orders of reality, the truths of a lower order can be taken as symbols of those of higher orders, and can therefore serve as 'supports’ by which one may arrive at an understanding of these; and this fact makes it possible for any science to become a sacred science, giving it a higher or 'anagogical’ meaning deeper than that which it possesses in itself. ~ Ren Gu non

414:That brings us to the nub of the issue. The second reason for drawing lines even when drawing lines is not “cool” (as my daughter and son would say) is that the New Testament documents model the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, even if these terms are not deployed exactly in their English sense. Despite the faddish popularity of religious pluralism, despite the erroneous historical reconstructions of Walter Bauer and others, despite the common practice of treating other religions with more deference than a Christianity that tries to conform to the Bible, the fact remains that there is something disturbingly unfaithful about forms of expression that attempt to be more “broadminded” than the New Testament documents themselves. True, most who read these pages will want to avoid the kind of obscurantist “fundamentalism” that is less concerned with fundamentals than with fences. But most who read these pages will not be tempted down that path, and so they scarcely need to be warned against it. It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others. We are more likely to squirm when we read words like these: Do you agree with those who say that a spirit of love is incompatible with the negative and critical denunciation of blatant error, and that we must always be positive? The simple answer to such an attitude is that the Lord Jesus Christ denounced evil and denounced false teachers. I repeat that He denounced them as “ravening wolves” and “whited sepulchres,” and as “blind guides.” The Apostle Paul said of some of them, “whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame”. That is the language of the Scriptures. There can be little doubt but that the Church is as she is today because we do not follow New Testament teaching and its exhortations, and confine ourselves to the positive and the so-called “simple Gospel”, and fail to stress the negatives and the criticism. The result is that people do not reconize error when they meet it. It is not pleasant to be negative; it is not enjoyable to have to denounce and to expose error. But any pastor who feels in a little measure, and with humility, the responsibility which the Apostle Paul knew in an infinitely greater degree for the souls and the well-being spiritually of his people is compelled to utter these warnings. It is not liked and appreciated in this modern flabby generation.29 ~ D A Carson

415:Subterranean Phantasies I died. As meekly in the earth I lay, With shriveled fingers reverently folded, The worm-uncivil engineer!-my clay Tunneled industriously, and the mole did. My body could not dodge them, but my soul did; For that had flown from this terrestrial ball And I was rid of it for good and all. So there I lay, debating what to do What measures might most usefully be taken To circumvent the subterranean crew Of anthropophagi and save my bacon. My fortitude was all this while unshaken, But any gentleman, of course, protests Against receiving uninvited guests. However proud he might be of his meats, Not even Apicius, nor, I think, Lucullus, Wasted on tramps his culinary sweets; '_Aut Caesar_,' say judicious hosts, '_aut nullus_.' And though when Marcius came unbidden Tullus Aufidius feasted him because he starved, Marcius by Tullus afterward was carved. We feed the hungry, as the book commands (For men might question else our orthodoxy) But do not care to see the outstretched hands, And so we minister to them by proxy. When Want, in his improper person, knocks he Finds we're engaged. The graveworm's very fresh To think we like his presence in the flesh. So, as I said, I lay in doubt; in all That underworld no judges could determine My rights. When Death approaches them they fall, And falling, naturally soil their ermine. And still below ground, as above, the vermin That work by dark and silent methods win The case-the burial case that one is in. 431 Cases at law so slowly get ahead, Even when the right is visibly unclouded, That if all men are classed as quick and dead, The judges all are dead, though some unshrouded. Pray Jove that when they're actually crowded On Styx's brink, and Charon rows in sight, His bark prove worse than Cerberus's bite. Ah! Cerberus, if you had but begot A race of three-mouthed dogs for man to nourish And woman to caress, the muse had not Lamented the decay of virtues currish, And triple-hydrophobia now would flourish, For barking, biting, kissing to employ Canine repeaters were indeed a joy. Lord! how we cling to this vile world! Here I, Whose dust was laid ere I began this carping, By moles and worms and such familiar fry Run through and through, am singing still and harping Of mundane matters-flatting, too, and sharping. I hate the Angel of the Sleeping Cup: So I'm for getting-and for shutting-up. ~ Ambrose Bierce

416:GOSPEL REDISCOVERY Along with extraordinary, persistent prayer, the most necessary element of gospel renewal is a recovery of the gospel itself, with a particular emphasis on the new birth and on salvation through grace alone. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel emphasis on grace could be lost in several ways. A church might simply become heterodox — losing its grip on the orthodox tenets of theology that under-gird the gospel, such as the triune nature of God, the deity of Christ, the wrath of God, and so on. It may turn its back on the very belief in justification by faith alone and the need for conversion and so move toward a view that being a Christian is simply a matter of church membership or of living a life based on Christ’s example. This cuts the nerve of gospel renewal and revival.2 But it is possible to subscribe to every orthodox doctrine and nevertheless fail to communicate the gospel to people’s hearts in a way that brings about repentance, joy, and spiritual growth. One way this happens is through dead orthodoxy, in which such pride grows in our doctrinal correctness that sound teaching and right church practice become a kind of works-righteousness. Carefulness in doctrine and life is, of course, critical, but when it is accompanied in a church by self-righteousness, mockery, disdain of everyone else, and a contentious, combative attitude, it shows that, while the doctrine of justification may be believed, a strong spirit of legalism reigns nonetheless. The doctrine has failed to touch hearts.3 Lloyd-Jones also speaks of “defective orthodoxy” and “spiritual inertia.”4 Some churches hold to orthodox doctrines but with imbalances and a lack of proper emphasis. Many ministries spend more time defending the faith than propagating it. Or they may give an inordinate amount of energy and attention to matters such as prophecy or spiritual gifts or creation and evolution. A church may become enamored with the mechanics of ministry and church organization. There are innumerable reasons that critical doctrines of grace and justification and conversion, though strongly held, are kept “on the shelf.” They are not preached and communicated in such a way that connects to people’s lives. People see the doctrines — yet they do not see them. It is possible to get an “A” grade on a doctrinal test and describe accurately the doctrines of our salvation, yet be blind to their true implications and power. In this sense, there are plenty of orthodox churches in which the gospel must be rediscovered and then brought home and applied to people’s hearts. When this happens, nominal Christians get converted, lethargic and weak Christians become empowered, and nonbelievers are attracted to the newly beautified Christian congregation. ~ Timothy J Keller

417:It serves the American socialists as a leading argument in their endeavor to depict American capitalism as a curse of mankind. Reluctantly forced to admit that capitalism pours a horn of plenty upon people and that the Marxian prediction of the masses' progressive impoverishment has been spectacularly disproved by the facts, they try to salvage their detraction of capitalism by describing contemporary civilization as merely materialistic and sham. Bitter attacks upon modem civilization are launched by writers who think that they are pleading the cause of religion. They reprimand our age for its secularism. They bemoan the passing of a way of life in which, they would have us believe, people were not preoccupied with the pursuit of earthly ambitions but were first of ali concerned about the strict observance of their religious duties. They ascribe ali evils to the spread of skepticism and agnosticism and passionately advocate a return to the orthodoxy of ages gone by. It is hard to find a doctrine which distorts history more radically than this antisecularism. There have always been devout men, pure in heart and dedicated to a pious life. But the religiousness of these sincere believers had nothing in common with the established system of devotion. It is a myth that the political and social institutions of the ages preceding modem individualistic philosophy and modem capitalism were imbued with a genuine Christian spirit. The teachings of the Gospels did not determine the official attitude of the governments toward religion. It was, on the contrary, thisworldly concems of the secular rulers—absolute kings and aristocratic oligarchies, but occasionally also revolting peasants and urban mobs—that transformed religion into an instrument of profane political ambitions. Nothing could be less compatible with true religion than the ruthless persecution of dissenters and the horrors of religious crusades and wars. No historian ever denied that very little of the spirit of Christ was to be found in the churches of the sixteenth century which were criticized by the theologians of the Reformation and in those of the eighteenth century which the philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked. The ideology of individualism and utilitarianism which inaugurated modern capitalism brought freedom also to the religious longings of man. It shattered the pretension of those in power to impose their own creed upon their subjects. Religion is no longer the observance of articles enforced by constables and executioners. It is what a man, guided by his conscience, spontaneously espouses as his own faith. Modern Western civilization is thisworldly. But it was precisely its secularism, its religious indifference, that gave rein to the renascence of genuine religious feeling. Those who worship today in a free country are not driven by the secular arm but by their conscience. In complying with the precepts of their persuasion, they are not intent upon avoiding punishment on the part of the earthly authorities but upon salvation and peace of mind. ~ Ludwig von Mises

418:What distinguishes us above all from Muslim-born or converted individuals—“psychologically”, one could say—is that our mind is a priori centered on universal metaphysics (Advaita Vedānta, Shahādah, Risālat al-Ahadiyah) and the universal path of the divine Name (japa-yoga, nembutsu, dhikr, prayer of the heart); it is because of these two factors that we are in a traditional form, which in fact—though not in principle—is Islam. The universal orthodoxy emanating from these two sources of authority determines our interpretation of the sharī'ah and Islam in general, somewhat as the moon influences the oceans without being located on the terrestrial globe; in the absence of the moon, the motions of the sea would be inconceivable and “illegitimate”, so to speak. What universal metaphysics says has decisive authority for us, as does the “onomatological” science connected to it, a fact that once earned us the reproach of “de-Islamicizing Islam”; it is not so much a matter of the conscious application of principles formulated outside of Islamism by metaphysical traditions from Asia as of inspirations in conformity with these principles; in a situation such as ours, the spiritual authority—or the soul that is its vehicle—becomes like a point of intersection for all the rays of truth, whatever their origin. One must always take account of the following: in principle the universal authority of the metaphysical and initiatic traditions of Asia, whose point of view reflects the nature of things more or less directly, takes precedence—when such an alternative exists—over the generally more “theological” authority of the monotheistic religions; I say “when such an alternative exists”, for obviously it sometimes happens, in esoterism as in essential symbolism, that there is no such alternative; no one can deny, however, that in Semitic doctrines the formulations and rules are usually determined by considerations of dogmatic, moral, and social opportuneness. But this cannot apply to pure Islam, that is, to the authority of its essential doctrine and fundamental symbolism; the Shahādah cannot but mean that “the world is false and Brahma is true” and that “you are That” (tat tvam asi), or that “I am Brahma” (aham Brahmāsmi); it is a pure expression of both the unreality of the world and the supreme identity; in the same way, the other “pillars of Islam” (arqān al-Dīn), as well as such fundamental rules as dietary and artistic prohibitions, obviously constitute supports of intellection and realization, which universal metaphysics—or the “Unanimous Tradition”—can illuminate but not abolish, as far as we are concerned. When universal wisdom states that the invocation contains and replaces all other rites, this is of decisive authority against those who would make the sharī'ah or sunnah into a kind of exclusive karma-yoga, and it even allows us to draw conclusions by analogy (qiyās, ijtihād) that most Shariites would find illicit; or again, should a given Muslim master require us to introduce every dhikr with an ablution and two raka'āt, the universal—and “antiformalist”—authority of japa-yoga would take precedence over the authority of this master, at least in our case. On the other hand, should a Hindu or Buddhist master give the order to practice japa before an image, it goes without saying that it is the authority of Islamic symbolism that would take precedence for us quite apart from any question of universality, because forms are forms, and some of them are essential and thereby rejoin the universality of the spirit. (28 January 1956) ~ Frithjof Schuon

419:A TRAGEDY IN TWO ACTS Translated from the Original Doric 'Choose Reform or Civil War, When through thy streets, instead of hare with dogs, A Consort-Queen shall hunt a King with hogs, Riding on the IONIAN MINOTAUR.' DRAMATIS PERSONAE Tyrant Swellfoot, King of Thebes. Iona Taurina, his Queen. Mammon, Arch-Priest of Famine. Purganax Wizard, Minister of Swellfoot. Dakry Wizard, Minister of Swellfoot. Laoctonos Wizard, Minister of Swellfoot. The Gadfly. The Leech. The Rat. Moses, the Sow-gelder. Solomon, the Porkman. Zephaniah, Pig-butcher. The Minotaur. Chorus of the Swinish Multitude. Guards, Attendants, Priests, etc., etc. SCENE.--THEBES ACT I. Scene I.-- A magnificent Temple, built of thigh-bones and death's-heads, and tiled with scalps. Over the Altar the statue of Famine, veiled; a number of Boars, Sows, and Sucking-Pigs, crowned with thistle, shamrock, and oak, sitting on the steps, and clinging round the Altar of the Temple. Enter Swellfoot, in his Royal robes, without perceiving the Pigs. Swellfoot. Thou supreme Goddess! by whose power divine These graceful limbs are clothed in proud array [He contemplates himself with satisfaction. Of gold and purple, and this kingly paunch Swells like a sail before a favouring breeze, And these most sacred nether promontories Lie satisfied with layers of fat; and these Boeotian cheeks, like Egypt's pyramid, (Nor with less toil were their foundations laid)[1], Sustain the cone of my untroubled brain, That point, the emblem of a pointless nothing! Thou to whom Kings and laurelled Emperors, Radical-butchers, Paper-money-millers, Bishops and Deacons, and the entire army Of those fat martyrs to the persecution Of stifling turtle-soup, and brandy-devils, Offer their secret vows! Thou plenteous Ceres Of their Eleusis, hail! The Swine.             Eigh! eigh! eigh! eigh!             Swellfoot.                          Ha! what are ye, Who, crowned with leaves devoted to the Furies, Cling round this sacred shrine? Swine.                  Aigh! aigh! aigh!                  Swellfoot.                           What! ye that are The very beasts that, offered at her altar With blood and groans, salt-cake, and fat, and inwards, Ever propitiate her reluctant will When taxes are withheld? Swine.              Ugh! ugh! ugh!              Swellfoot.                      What! ye who grub With filthy snouts my red potatoes up In Allan's rushy bog? Who eat the oats Up, from my cavalry in the Hebrides? Who swill the hog-wash soup my cooks digest From bones, and rags, and scraps of shoe-leather, Which should be given to cleaner Pigs than you? The Swine.Semichorus I. The same, alas! the same; Though only now the name Of Pig remains to me. Semichorus II. If 'twere your kingly will Us wretched Swine to kill, What should we yield to thee? Swellfoot. Why, skin and bones, and some few hairs for mortar. Chorus of Swine. I have heard your Laureate sing, That pity was a royal thing; Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs Were bless'd as nightingales on myrtle sprigs, Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew, And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too; But now our sties are fallen in, we catch The murrain and the mange, the scab and itch; Sometimes your royal dogs tear down our thatch, And then we seek the shelter of a ditch; Hog-wash or grains, or ruta-baga, none Has yet been ours since your reign begun. First Sow. My Pigs, 'tis in vain to tug. Second Sow. I could almost eat my litter. First Pig. I suck, but no milk will come from the dug. Second Pig. Our skin and our bones would be bitter. The Boars. We fight for this rag of greasy rug, Though a trough of wash would be fitter. Semichorus.   Happier Swine were they than we,   Drowned in the Gadarean sea I wish that pity would drive out the devils, Which in your royal bosom hold their revels, And sink us in the waves of thy compassion! Alas! the Pigs are an unhappy nation! Now if your Majesty would have our bristles To bind your mortar with, or fill our colons With rich blood, or make brawn out of our gristles, In policyask else your royal Solons You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw, And sties well thatched; besides it is the law! Swellfoot. This is sedition, and rank blasphemy! Ho! there, my guards! Enter a Guard. Guard.            Your sacred Majesty.            Swellfoot. Call in the Jews, Solomon the court porkman, Moses the sow-gelder, and Zephaniah The hog-butcher. Guard.          They are in waiting, Sire.          Enter Solomon, Moses, and Zephaniah. Swellfoot. Out with your knife, old Moses, and spay those Sows [The Pigs run about in consternation. That load the earth with Pigs; cut close and deep. Moral restraint I see has no effect, Nor prostitution, nor our own example, Starvation, typhus-fever, war, nor prison This was the art which the arch-priest of Famine Hinted at in his charge to the Theban clergy Cut close and deep, good Moses. Moses.                  Let your Majesty Keep the Boars quiet, else Swellfoot.                Zephaniah, cut That fat Hog's throat, the brute seems overfed; Seditious hunks! to whine for want of grains. Zephaniah. Your sacred Majesty, he has the dropsy; We shall find pints of hydatids in's liver, He has not half an inch of wholesome fat Upon his carious ribs Swellfoot.             'Tis all the same, He'll serve instead of riot money, when Our murmuring troops bivouac in Thebes' streets; And January winds, after a day Of butchering, will make them relish carrion. Now, Solomon, I'll sell you in a lump The whole kit of them. Solomon.             Why, your Majesty, I could not give Swellfoot.           Kill them out of the way, That shall be price enough, and let me hear Their everlasting grunts and whines no more! [Exeunt, driving in the Swine. Enter Mammon, the Arch-Priest; and Purganax, Chief of the Council of Wizards. Purganax. The future looks as black as death, a cloud, Dark as the frown of Hell, hangs over it The troops grow mutinousthe revenue fails There's something rotten in usfor the level Of the State slopes, its very bases topple, The boldest turn their backs upon themselves! Mammon. Why what's the matter, my dear fellow, now? Do the troops mutiny?decimate some regiments; Does money fail?come to my mintcoin paper, Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed To show his bilious face, go purge himself, In emulation of her vestal whiteness. Purganax. Oh, would that this were all! The oracle!! Mammon. Why it was I who spoke that oracle, And whether I was dead drunk or inspired, I cannot well remember; nor, in truth, The oracle itself! Purganax.           The words went thus: 'Boeotia, choose reform or civil war! When through the streets, instead of hare with dogs, A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with Hogs, Riding on the Ionian Minotaur.' Mammon. Now if the oracle had ne'er foretold This sad alternative, it must arrive, Or not, and so it must now that it has; And whether I was urged by grace divine Or Lesbian liquor to declare these words, Which must, as all words must, be false or true, It matters not: for the same Power made all, Oracle, wine, and me and youor none 'Tis the same thing. If you knew as much Of oracles as I do Purganax.            You arch-priests Believe in nothing; if you were to dream Of a particular number in the Lottery, You would not buy the ticket? Mammon.                 Yet our tickets Are seldom blanks. But what steps have you taken? For prophecies, when once they get abroad, Like liars who tell the truth to serve their ends, Or hypocrites who, from assuming virtue, Do the same actions that the virtuous do, Contrive their own fulfilment. This Iona Wellyou know what the chaste Pasiphae did, Wife to that most religious King of Crete, And still how popular the tale is here; And these dull Swine of Thebes boast their descent From the free Minotaur. You know they still Call themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate, And everything relating to a Bull Is popular and respectable in Thebes. Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules; They think their strength consists in eating beef, Now there were danger in the precedent If Queen Iona Purganax.         I have taken good care That shall not be. I struck the crust o' the earth With this enchanted rod, and Hell lay bare! And from a cavern full of ugly shapes I chose a Leech, a Gadfly, and a Rat. The Gadfly was the same which Juno sent To agitate Io[2], and which Ezekiel[3] mentions That the Lord whistled for out of the mountains Of utmost Aethiopia, to torment Mesopotamian Babylon. The beast Has a loud trumpet like the scarabee, His crookd tail is barbed with many stings, Each able to make a thousand wounds, and each Immedicable; from his convex eyes He sees fair things in many hideous shapes, And trumpets all his falsehood to the world. Like other beetles he is fed on dung He has eleven feet with which he crawls, Trailing a blistering slime, and this foul beast Has tracked Iona from the Theban limits, From isle to isle, from city unto city, Urging her flight from the far Chersonese To fabulous Solyma, and the Aetnean Isle, Ortygia, Melite, and Calypso's Rock, And the swart tribes of Garamant and Fez, Aeolia and Elysium, and thy shores, Parthenope, which now, alas! are free! And through the fortunate Saturnian land, Into the darkness of the West. Mammon.                 But if This Gadfly should drive Iona hither? Purganax. Gods! what an if! but there is my gray Rat: So thin with want, he can crawl in and out Of any narrow chink and filthy hole, And he shall creep into her dressing-room, And Mammon.    My dear friend, where are your wits? as if She does not always toast a piece of cheese And bait the trap? and rats, when lean enough To crawl through such chinks Purganax.                 But my Leecha leech Fit to suck blood, with lubricous round rings, Capaciously expatiative, which make His little body like a red balloon, As full of blood as that of hydrogen, Sucked from men's hearts; insatiably he sucks And clings and pullsa horse-leech, whose deep maw The plethoric King Swellfoot could not fill, And who, till full, will cling for ever. Mammon.                       This For Queen Iona would suffice, and less; But 'tis the Swinish multitude I fear, And in that fear I have Purganax.               Done what?               Mammon.                    Disinherited My eldest son Chrysaor, because he Attended public meetings, and would always Stand prating there of commerce, public faith, Economy, and unadulterate coin, And other topics, ultra-radical; And have entailed my estate, called the Fool's Paradise, And funds in fairy-money, bonds, and bills, Upon my accomplished daughter Banknotina, And married her to the gallows[4]. Purganax.                   A good match!                   Mammon. A high connexion, Purganax. The bridegroom Is of a very ancient family, Of Hounslow Heath, Tyburn, and the New Drop, And has great influence in both Houses;oh! He makes the fondest husband; nay, too fond, New-married people should not kiss in public; But the poor souls love one another so! And then my little grandchildren, the gibbets, Promising children as you ever saw, The young playing at hanging, the elder learning How to hold radicals. They are well taught too, For every gibbet says its catechism And reads a select chapter in the Bible Before it goes to play. [A most tremendous humming is heard. Purganax.             Ha! what do I hear?             Enter the Gadfly. Mammon. Your Gadfly, as it seems, is tired of gadding. Gadfly.   Hum! hum! hum! From the lakes of the Alps, and the cold gray scalps Of the mountains, I come!   Hum! hum! hum! From Morocco and Fez, and the high palaces Of golden Byzantium; From the temples divine of old Palestine, From Athens and Rome, With a ha! and a hum! I come! I come!   All inn-doors and windows   Were open to me: I saw all that sin does,   Which lamps hardly see That burn in the night by the curtained bed, The impudent lamps! for they blushed not red, Dinging and singing, From slumber I rung her, Loud as the clank of an ironmonger;    Hum! hum! hum!     Far, far, far! With the trump of my lips, and the sting at my hips, I drove herafar! Far, far, far! From city to city, abandoned of pity, A ship without needle or star; Homeless she passed, like a cloud on the blast, Seeking peace, finding war; She is here in her car, From afar, and afar;   Hum! hum!    I have stung her and wrung her,   The venom is working; And if you had hung her   With canting and quirking, She could not be deader than she will be soon; I have driven her close to you, under the moon, Night and day, hum! hum! ha! I have hummed her and drummed her From place to place, till at last I have dumbed her,    Hum! hum! hum!    Enter the Leech and the Rat. Leech. I will suck Blood or muck! The disease of the state is a plethory, Who so fit to reduce it as I? Rat. I'll slily seize and Let blood from her weasand, Creeping through crevice, and chink, and cranny, With my snaky tail, and my sides so scranny. Purganax. Aroint ye! thou unprofitable worm! [To the Leech. And thou, dull beetle, get thee back to hell! [To the Gadfly. To sting the ghosts of Babylonian kings, And the ox-headed Io Swine (within).             Ugh, ugh, ugh! Hail! Iona the divine, We will be no longer Swine, But Bulls with horns and dewlaps. Rat.                   For, You know, my lord, the Minotaur Purganax (fiercely). Be silent! get to hell! or I will call The cat out of the kitchen. Well, Lord Mammon, This is a pretty business. [Exit the Rat. Mammon.               I will go And spell some scheme to make it ugly then. [Exit. Enter Swellfoot. Swellfoot. She is returned! Taurina is in Thebes, When Swellfoot wishes that she were in hell! Oh, Hymen, clothed in yellow jealousy, And waving o'er the couch of wedded kings The torch of Discord with its fiery hair; This is thy work, thou patron saint of queens! Swellfoot is wived! though parted by the sea, The very name of wife had conjugal rights; Her cursd image ate, drank, slept with me, And in the arms of Adiposa oft Her memory has received a husband's [A loud tumult, and cries of 'Iona for ever!No Swellfoot!'!                     Hark! How the Swine cry Iona Taurina; I suffer the real presence; Purganax, Off with her head! Purganax.           But I must first impanel A jury of the Pigs. Swellfoot.           Pack them then.           Purganax. Or fattening some few in two separate sties, And giving them clean straw, tying some bits Of ribbon round their legsgiving their Sows Some tawdry lace, and bits of lustre glass, And their young Boars white and red rags, and tails Of cows, and jay feathers, and sticking cauliflowers Between the ears of the old ones; and when They are persuaded, that by the inherent virtue Of these things, they are all imperial Pigs, Good Lord! they'd rip each other's bellies up, Not to say, help us in destroying her. Swellfoot. This plan might be tried too;where's General Laoctonos? Enter Laoctonos and Dakry.      It is my royal pleasure That you, Lord General, bring the head and body, If separate it would please me better, hither Of Queen Iona. Laoctonos.        That pleasure I well knew, And made a charge with those battalions bold, Called, from their dress and grin, the royal apes, Upon the Swine, who in a hollow square Enclosed her, and received the first attack Like so many rhinoceroses, and then Retreating in good order, with bare tusks And wrinkled snouts presented to the foe, Bore her in triumph to the public sty. What is still worse, some Sows upon the ground Have given the ape-guards apples, nuts, and gin, And they all whisk their tails aloft, and cry, 'Long live Iona! down with Swellfoot!' Purganax.                      Hark!                      The Swine (without). Long live Iona! down with Swellfoot! Dakry.                     I Went to the garret of the swineherd's tower, Which overlooks the sty, and made a long Harangue (all words) to the assembled Swine, Of delicacy, mercy, judgement, law, Morals, and precedents, and purity, Adultery, destitution, and divorce, Piety, faith, and state necessity, And how I loved the Queen!and then I wept With the pathos of my own eloquence, And every tear turned to a mill-stone, which Brained many a gaping Pig, and there was made A slough of blood and brains upon the place, Greased with the pounded bacon; round and round The mill-stones rolled, ploughing the pavement up, And hurling Sucking-Pigs into the air, With dust and stones. Enter Mammon. Mammon.             I wonder that gray wizards Like you should be so beardless in their schemes; It had been but a point of policy To keep Iona and the Swine apart. Divide and rule! but ye have made a junction Between two parties who will govern you But for my art.Behold this BAG! it is The poison BAG of that Green Spider huge, On which our spies skulked in ovation through The streets of Thebes, when they were paved with dead: A bane so much the deadlier fills it now As calumny is worse than death,for here The Gadfly's venom, fifty times distilled, Is mingled with the vomit of the Leech, In due proportion, and black ratsbane, which That very Rat, who, like the Pontic tyrant, Nurtures himself on poison, dare not touch; All is sealed up with the broad seal of Fraud, Who is the Devil's Lord High Chancellor, And over it the Primate of all Hell Murmured this pious baptism:'Be thou called The GREEN BAG; and this power and grace be thine: That thy contents, on whomsoever poured, Turn innocence to guilt, and gentlest looks To savage, foul, and fierce deformity. Let all baptized by thy infernal dew Be called adulterer, drunkard, liar, wretch! No name left out which orthodoxy loves, Court Journal or legitimate Review! Be they called tyrant, beast, fool, glutton, lover Of other wives and husbands than their own The heaviest sin on this side of the Alps! Wither they to a ghastly caricature Of what was human!let not man or beast Behold their face with unaverted eyes! Or hear their names with ears that tingle not With blood of indignation, rage, and shame!' This is a perilous liquor;good my Lords. [Swellfoot approaches to touch the GREEN BAG. Beware! for God's sake, beware!if you should break The seal, and touch the fatal liquor Purganax.                      There, Give it to me. I have been used to handle All sorts of poisons. His dread Majesty Only desires to see the colour of it. Mammon. Now, with a little common sense, my Lords, Only undoing all that has been done (Yet so as it may seem we but confirm it), Our victory is assured. We must entice Her Majesty from the sty, and make the Pigs Believe that the contents of the GREEN BAG Are the true test of guilt or innocence. And that, if she be guilty, 'twill transform her To manifest deformity like guilt. If innocent, she will become transfigured Into an angel, such as they say she is; And they will see her flying through the air, So bright that she will dim the noonday sun; Showering down blessings in the shape of comfits. This, trust a priest, is just the sort of thing Swine will believe. I'll wager you will see them Climbing upon the thatch of their low sties, With pieces of smoked glass, to watch her sail Among the clouds, and some will hold the flaps Of one another's ears between their teeth, To catch the coming hail of comfits in. You, Purganax, who have the gift o' the gab, Make them a solemn speech to this effect: I go to put in readiness the feast Kept to the honour of our goddess Famine, Where, for more glory, let the ceremony Take place of the uglification of the Queen. Dakry (to Swellfoot). I, as the keeper of your sacred conscience, Humbly remind your Majesty that the care Of your high office, as Man-milliner To red Bellona, should not be deferred. Purganax. All part, in happier plight to meet again. [Exeunt. END OF THE FIRST ACT. ACT II Scene I. The Public Sty. The Boars in full Assembly. Enter Purganax. Purganax. Grant me your patience, Gentlemen and Boars, Ye, by whose patience under public burthens The glorious constitution of these sties Subsists, and shall subsist. The Lean-Pig rates Grow with the growing populace of Swine, The taxes, that true source of Piggishness (How can I find a more appropriate term To include religion, morals, peace, and plenty, And all that fit Boeotia as a nation To teach the other nations how to live?), Increase with Piggishness itself; and still Does the revenue, that great spring of all The patronage, and pensions, and by-payments, Which free-born Pigs regard with jealous eyes, Diminish, till at length, by glorious steps, All the land's produce will be merged in taxes, And the revenue will amount tonothing! The failure of a foreign market for Sausages, bristles, and blood-puddings, And such home manufactures, is but partial; And, that the population of the Pigs, Instead of hog-wash, has been fed on straw And water, is a fact which isyou know That isit is a state-necessity Temporary, of course. Those impious Pigs, Who, by frequent squeaks, have dared impugn The settled Swellfoot system, or to make Irreverent mockery of the genuflexions Inculcated by the arch-priest, have been whipped Into a loyal and an orthodox whine. Things being in this happy state, the Queen Iona [A loud cry from the Pigs.    She is innocent! most innocent!    Purganax. That is the very thing that I was saying, Gentlemen Swine; the Queen Iona being Most innocent, no doubt, returns to Thebes, And the lean Sows and Boars collect about her, Wishing to make her think that we believe (I mean those more substantial Pigs, who swill Rich hog-wash, while the others mouth damp straw) That she is guilty; thus, the Lean-Pig faction Seeks to obtain that hog-wash, which has been Your immemorial right, and which I will Maintain you in to the last drop of A Boar (interrupting him).                     What Does any one accuse her of? Purganax.                Why, no one Makes any positive accusation;but There were hints dropped, and so the privy wizards Conceived that it became them to advise His Majesty to investigate their truth; Not for his own sake; he could be content To let his wife play any pranks she pleased, If, by that sufferance, he could please the Pigs; But then he fears the morals of the Swine, The Sows especially, and what effect It might produce upon the purity and Religion of the rising generation Of Sucking-Pigs, if it could be suspected That Queen Iona [A pause. First Boar.          Well, go on; we long To hear what she can possibly have done. Purganax. Why, it is hinted, that a certain Bull Thus much is known:the milk-white Bulls that feed Beside Clitumnus and the crystal lakes Of the Cisalpine mountains, in fresh dews Of lotus-grass and blossoming asphodel Sleeking their silken hair, and with sweet breath Loading the morning winds until they faint With living fragrance, are so beautiful! Well, I say nothing;but Europa rode On such a one from Asia into Crete, And the enamoured sea grew calm beneath His gliding beauty. And Pasiphae, Iona's grandmother,but she is innocent! And that both you and I, and all assert. First Boar. Most innocent! Purganax.        Behold this BAG; a bag        Second Boar. Oh! no GREEN BAGS!! Jealousy's eyes are green, Scorpions are green, and water-snakes, and efts, And verdigris, and Purganax.            Honourable Swine, In Piggish souls can prepossessions reign? Allow me to remind you, grass is green All flesh is grass;no bacon but is flesh Ye are but bacon. This divining BAG (Which is not green, but only bacon colour) Is filled with liquor, which if sprinkled o'er A woman guilty ofwe all know what Makes her so hideous, till she finds one blind She never can commit the like again. If innocent, she will turn into an angel, And rain down blessings in the shape of comfits As she flies up to heaven. Now, my proposal Is to convert her sacred Majesty Into an angel (as I am sure we shall do), By pouring on her head this mystic water.[Showing the Bag. I know that she is innocent; I wish Only to prove her so to all the world. First Boar. Excellent, just, and noble Purganax. Second Boar. How glorious it will be to see her Majesty Flying above our heads, her petticoats Streaming likelikelike Third Boar.                Anything.                Purganax.                     Oh no! But like a standard of an admiral's ship, Or like the banner of a conquering host, Or like a cloud dyed in the dying day, Unravelled on the blast from a white mountain; Or like a meteor, or a war-steed's mane, Or waterfall from a dizzy precipice Scattered upon the wind. First Boar.              Or a cow's tail.              Second Boar. Or anything, as the learned Boar observed. Purganax. Gentlemen Boars, I move a resolution, That her most sacred Majesty should be Invited to attend the feast of Famine, And to receive upon her chaste white body Dews of Apotheosis from this BAG. [A great confusion is heard of the Pigs out of Doors, which communicates itself to those within. During the first Strophe, the doors of the Sty are staved in, and a number of exceedingly leanPigs and Sows and Boars rush in. Semichorus I. No! Yes! Semichorus II. Yes! No! Semichorus I. A law! Semichorus II. A flaw! Semichorus I. Porkers, we shall lose our wash, Or must share it with the Lean-Pigs! First Boar. Order! order! be not rash! Was there ever such a scene, Pigs! An old Sow (rushing in). I never saw so fine a dash Since I first began to wean Pigs. Second Boar (solemnly). The Queen will be an angel time enough. I vote, in form of an amendment, that Purganax rub a little of that stuff Upon his face. Purganax (his heart is seen to beat through his waistcoat).          Gods! What would ye be at?          Semichorus I. Purganax has plainly shown a Cloven foot and jackdaw feather. Semichorus II. I vote Swellfoot and Iona Try the magic test together; Whenever royal spouses bicker, Both should try the magic liquor. An old Boar (aside). A miserable state is that of Pigs, For if their drivers would tear caps and wigs, The Swine must bite each other's ear therefore. An old Sow (aside). A wretched lot Jove has assigned to Swine, Squabbling makes Pig-herds hungry, and they dine On bacon, and whip Sucking-Pigs the more. Chorus.   Hog-wash has been ta'en away:    If the Bull-Queen is divested,   We shall be in every way    Hunted, stripped, exposed, molested;   Let us do whate'er we may,    That she shall not be arrested. Queen, we entrench you with walls of brawn, And palisades of tusks, sharp as a bayonet: Place your most sacred person here. We pawn Our lives that none a finger dare to lay on it.   Those who wrong you, wrong us;   Those who hate you, hate us;   Those who sting you, sting us;   Those who bait you, bait us; The oracle is now about to be Fulfilled by circumvolving destiny; Which says: 'Thebes, choose reform or civil war, When through your streets, instead of hare with dogs, A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with Hogs, Riding upon the IONIAN MINOTAUR.' Enter Iona Taurina. Iona Taurina (coming forward). Gentlemen Swine, and gentle Lady-Pigs, The tender heart of every Boar acquits Their Queen, of any act incongruous With native Piggishness, and she, reposing With confidence upon the grunting nation, Has thrown herself, her cause, her life, her all, Her innocence, into their Hoggish arms; Nor has the expectation been deceived Of finding shelter there. Yet know, great Boars, (For such whoever lives among you finds you, And so do I), the innocent are proud! I have accepted your protection only In compliment of your kind love and care, Not for necessity. The innocent Are safest there where trials and dangers wait; Innocent Queens o'er white-hot ploughshares tread Unsinged, and ladies, Erin's laureate sings it[5], Decked with rare gems, and beauty rarer still, Walked from Killarney to the Giant's Causeway, Through rebels, smugglers, troops of yeomanry, White-boys and Orange-boys, and constables, Tithe-proctors, and excise people, uninjured! Thus I! Lord Purganax, I do commit myself Into your custody, and am prepared To stand the test, whatever it may be! Purganax. This magnanimity in your sacred Majesty Must please the Pigs. You cannot fail of being A heavenly angel. Smoke your bits of glass, Ye loyal Swine, or her transfiguration Will blind your wondering eyes. An old Boar (aside).                  Take care, my Lord, They do not smoke you first. Purganax.                At the approaching feast Of Famine, let the expiation be. Swine. Content! content! Iona Taurina (aside).          I, most content of all, Know that my foes even thus prepare their fall! [Exeunt omnes. Scene II. The interior of the Temple of Famine. The statue of the Goddess, a skeleton clothed in parti-coloured rags, seated upon a heap of skulls and loaves intermingled. A number of exceedingly fat Priests in black garments arrayed on each side, with marrow-bones and cleavers in their hands. [Solomon, the Court Porkman.] A flourish of trumpets. Enter Mammon as arch-priest, Swellfoot, Dakry, Purganax, Laoctonos, followed by Iona Taurina guarded. On the other side enter the Swine. Chorus of Priests, accompanied by the Court Porkman on marrow-bones and cleavers.   Goddess bare, and gaunt, and pale,   Empress of the world, all hail!   What though Cretans old called thee   City-crested Cybele?    We call thee Famine! Goddess of fasts and feasts, starving and cramming! Through thee, for emperors, kings, and priests and lords, Who rule by viziers, sceptres, bank-notes, words, The earth pours forth its plenteous fruits, Corn, wool, linen, flesh, and roots Those who consume these fruits through thee grow fat, Those who produce these fruits through thee grow lean, Whatever change takes place, oh, stick to that! And let things be as they have ever been;   At least while we remain thy priests,   And proclaim thy fasts and feasts. Through thee the sacred Swellfoot dynasty Is based upon a rock amid that sea Whose waves are Swineso let it ever be! [Swellfoot, etc., seat themselves at a table magnificently covered at the upper end of the Temple. Attendants pass over the stage with hog-wash in pails. A number of Pigs, exceedingly lean, follow them licking up the wash. Mammon. I fear your sacred Majesty has lost The appetite which you were used to have. Allow me now to recommend this dish A simple kickshaw by your Persian cook, Such as is served at the great King's second table. The price and pains which its ingredients cost Might have maintained some dozen families A winter or twonot moreso plain a dish Could scarcely disagree. Swellfoot.               After the trial, And these fastidious Pigs are gone, perhaps I may recover my lost appetite, I feel the gout flying about my stomach Give me a glass of Maraschino punch. Purganax (filling his glass, and standing up). The glorious Constitution of the Pigs! All. A toast! a toast! stand up, and three times three! Dakry. No heel-tapsdarken daylights! Laoctonos.                   Claret, somehow, Puts me in mind of blood, and blood of claret! Swellfoot. Laoctonos is fishing for a compliment, But 'tis his due. Yes, you have drunk more wine, And shed more blood, than any man in Thebes. [To Purganax. For God's sake stop the grunting of those Pigs! Purganax. We dare not, Sire, 'tis Famine's privilege. Chorus of Swine. Hail to thee, hail to thee, Famine! Thy throne is on blood, and thy robe is of rags; Thou devil which livest on damning; Saint of new churches, and cant, and GREEN BAGS, Till in pity and terror thou risest, Confounding the schemes of the wisest; When thou liftest thy skeleton form, When the loaves and the skulls roll about, We will greet theethe voice of a storm Would be lost in our terrible shout! Then hail to thee, hail to thee, Famine! Hail to thee, Empress of Earth! When thou risest, dividing possessions; When thou risest, uprooting oppressions, In the pride of thy ghastly mirth; Over palaces, temples, and graves, We will rush as thy minister-slaves, Trampling behind in thy train, Till all be made level again! Mammon. I hear a crackling of the giant bones Of the dread image, and in the black pits Which once were eyes, I see two livid flames. These prodigies are oracular, and show The presence of the unseen Deity. Mighty events are hastening to their doom! Swellfoot. I only hear the lean and mutinous Swine Grunting about the temple. Dakry.               In a crisis Of such exceeding delicacy, I think We ought to put her Majesty, the Queen, Upon her trial without delay. Mammon.                 THE BAG Is here. Purganax.     I have rehearsed the entire scene With an ox-bladder and some ditchwater, On Lady P-; it cannot fail. (Taking up the Bag.) Your Majesty [To Swellfoot. In such a filthy business had better Stand on one side, lest it should sprinkle you. A spot or two on me would do no harm, Nay, it might hide the blood, which the sad Genius Of the Green Isle has fixed, as by a spell, Upon my browwhich would stain all its seas, But which those seas could never wash away! Iona Taurina. My Lord, I am readynay, I am impatient To undergo the test. [A graceful figure in a semi-transparent veil passes unnoticed through the Temple; the word LIBERTY is seen through the veil, as if it were written in fire upon its forehead. Its words are almost drowned in the furious grunting of the Pigs, and the business of the trial. She kneels on the steps of the Altar, and speaks in tones at first faint and low, but which ever become louder and louder.   Mighty Empress! Death's white wife!   Ghastly mother-in-law of Life!   By the God who made thee such,   By the magic of thy touch,   By the starving and the cramming Of fasts and feasts! by thy dread self, O Famine! I charge thee! when thou wake the multitude, Thou lead them not upon the paths of blood. The earth did never mean her foison For those who crown life's cup with poison Of fanatic rage and meaningless revenge But for those radiant spirits, who are still The standard-bearers in the van of Change. Be they th'appointed stewards, to fill The lap of Pain, and Toil, and Age! Remit, O Queen! thy accustomed rage! Be what thou art not! In voice faint and low Freedom calls Famine,her eternal foe, To brief alliance, hollow truce.Rise now! [Whilst the Veiled Figure has been chanting this strophe, Mammon, Dakry, Laoctonos, and Swellfoot, have surrounded Iona Taurina, who, with her hands folded on her breast, and her eyes lifted to Heaven, stands, as with saint-like resignation, to wait the issue of the business, in perfect confidence of her innocence. [Purganax, after unsealing the Green Bag, is gravely about to pour the liquor upon her head, when suddenly the whole expression of her figure and countenance changes; she snatches it from his hand with a loud laugh of triumph, and empties it over Swellfoot and his whole Court, who are instantly changed into a number of filthy and ugly animals, and rush out of the Temple. The image of Famine then arises with a tremendous sound, the Pigs begin scrambling for the loaves, and are tripped up by the skulls; all those who eat the loaves are turned into Bulls, and arrange themselves quietly behind the altar. The image of Famine sinks through a chasm in the earth, and a Minotaur rises. Minotaur. I am the Ionian Minotaur, the mightiest Of all Europa's taurine progeny I am the old traditional Man-Bull; And from my ancestors having been Ionian, I am called Ion, which, by interpretation, Is John; in plain Theban, that is to say, My name's John Bull; I am a famous hunter, And can leap any gate in all Boeotia, Even the palings of the royal park, Or double ditch about the new enclosures; And if your Majesty will deign to mount me, At least till you have hunted down your game, I will not throw you. Iona Taurina. (During this speech she has been putting on boots and spurs, and a hunting-cap, buckishly cocked on one side, and tucking up her hair, she leaps nimbly on his back.)            Hoa! hoa! tallyho! tallyho! ho! ho! Come, let us hunt these ugly badgers down, These stinking foxes, these devouring otters, These hares, these wolves, these anything but men. Hey, for a whipper-in! my loyal Pigs, Now let your noses be as keen as beagles', Your steps as swift as greyhounds', and your cries More dulcet and symphonious than the bells Of village-towers, on sunshine holiday; Wake all the dewy woods with jangling music. Give them no law (are they not beasts of blood?) But such as they gave you. Tallyho! ho! Through forest, furze, and bog, and den, and desert, Pursue the ugly beasts! tallyho! ho! Full Chorus of Iona and the Swine. Tallyho! tallyho! Through rain, hail, and snow, Through brake, gorse, and briar, Through fen, flood, and mire, We go! we go!   Tallyho! tallyho! Through pond, ditch, and slough, Wind them, and find them, Like the Devil behind them, Tallyho! tallyho! [Exeunt, in full cry; Iona driving on the Swine, with the empty Green Bag. THE END 'Begun at the Baths of San Giuliano, near Pisa, August 24, 1819; published anonymously by J. Johnston, Cheapside (imprint C. F. Seyfang,) 1820. On a threat of prosecution the publisher surrendered the whole impression, seven copies -- the total number sold -- excepted. Oedipus does not appear in the first edition of the Poetical Works, 1839, but it was included by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of that year.' ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot The Tyrant

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   2 Psychology
   2 Philosophy
   1 Poetry
   1 Integral Yoga
   1 Fiction
   1 Christianity


   2 Aldous Huxley


   2 The Secret Doctrine
   2 The Perennial Philosophy