Sublime

That meant ignoring the barriers and divisions established by the world’s religious and political power systems. It identified Jesus not just as someone who waited for God to overturn the system, but as someone who worked to undermine it here and now.

That singly hold, yet give the lie To him who seeks to yoke them both

The urgent task is to find a story that will help us face down our own compulsive destructiveness and save ourselves and the world.

Taylor, who affirms the genius of Durkheim but turns him against himself, shows with this triad how the social function of religion adds to the opaqueness of divine action.

the mythic premises of a religion are systematized, beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events;

a discomfort with uncertainty that impels a compulsion to explain or account for every mystery under the sun.

Of course, the author did not know then what we know now. But nor could he have known even then what did not happen. What did not happen cannot be known, though it may be believed.

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was converted from an enduringly useful fiction into a dangerous assertion of historical fact. In their account, it wasn’t the fact that it went on happening now that mattered.

an increasing number of people live their lives without answering the religious question in either its theist or atheist forms, because they do not ask the question in the first place.