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.
I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.
Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
People live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and do not know they are asleep.
One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other.
To course across more kindly waters now my talent's little vessel lifts her sails, leaving behind herself a sea so cruel; and what I sing will be that second kingdom, in which the human soul is cleansed of sin, becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.
Philosophy can't build bridges, but can encourage people to cross them.
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