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. Menckenβs 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.
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' β¦ That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Away with the cant of 'Measures not men!'-the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along.
A wider of more altruistic attitude is very relevant in today's world. If we look at the situation from various angles, such as the complexity and inter-connectedness of the nature of modern existence, then we will gradually notice a change in our outlook, so that when we say 'others' and when we think of others, we will no longer dismiss them as something that is irrelevant to us. We will no longer feel indifferent.
Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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