It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
Interpretation
The quote questions the notion that celibacy is a sin by highlighting the example of Christ's single status.
H. L. Mencken’s quote challenges conventional beliefs about celibacy and marriage within religious contexts. By pointing out that God allowed His son Jesus to remain unmarried, Mencken suggests that celibacy should not be viewed as sinful or undesirable. Instead, he argues that this divine allowance reflects a complex understanding of human relationships and personal choice, prompting deeper contemplation of societal norms concerning love and partnership.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about the role of celibacy in religion.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.
Every sensation shares the same characteristic: it arises and passes away, arises and passes away. It is this arising and passing that we have to experience through practice, not just accept as truth because Buddha said so, not just accept because intellectually it seems logical enough to us. We must experience sensation’s nature, understand its flux, and learn not to react to it.
Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.
Mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong.
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how then with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books should be forbid.
This thing comes to me, not by the hearing of the ear, but by my own personal experience: I know of a surety that Jesus manifests Himself unto His people as He doth not unto the world.
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