“All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, at nations; It was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ’s victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and have endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life of vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace. So molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [being a very modern man, he avoids drawing the obvious conclusion]

“The problem is what is normal in man or, to put it more simply, what is human in him. Now, there are some who maintain, like Mr Blatchford, that the religious experience of the ages was abnormal, a youthful morbidity, a nightmare from which he is gradually waking. There are others like myself who think that on the contrary it is the modern rationalist civilization which is abnormal, a loss of ancient human powers of perception of ecstasy in the feverish cynicism of cities and empire. We maintain that man is not only part of God, but that God is part of man; a thing essential, like sex. We say that (in the light of actual history) if you cut off the supernatural what remains is the unnatural. We say that it is in believing ages that you get men living in the open and dancing and telling tales by the fire. We say that it is in ages of unbelief, that you get emperors dressing up as women, and gladiators, or minor poets wearing green carnations and praising unnameable things. We say that, taking ages as a whole, the wildest fantasies of superstition are nothing to the fantasies of rationalism…”

G.K. Chesterton in the Daily News quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“G.K. Chesterton – there was a bright guy – said, ‘I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my work seriously’”.

Chuck Jones, the animation legend from Warner Bros. who cocreated Bugs Bunny etc., at age 80, quoted in Maclean’s June 14, 1993

“Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.”

Jeremiah 10:11 [KJV].

“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“For, ex hypothesi, he is as insensible to all rational argument as a horny-hided Siegfried, dipped in the flood of incapacity, and unable to think or judge.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Art of Controversy,” in Jack E. Conner & Marcelline Krafchick Speaking of Rhetoric [condescendingly, the reference is to an ordinary man as an opponent in argument but I treasure the phrase “dipped in the flood of incapacity”]

“The devil wouldn’t be attacking you so hard if there wasn’t something valuable inside of you. Thieves don’t break into empty houses.”

Emailed by a friend without further attribution

In my latest appearance on Rebel News I discuss Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to embrace evil in the Middle East with Ezra Levant.