Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.
Interpretation
Religious unity brings joy and celebration, while religious liberty can be serious and somber.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton contrasts the vibrancy and joy of religious unity with the solemnity and seriousness that can accompany the notion of religious liberty. It suggests that while unity among different religions can lead to a festive and celebratory atmosphere, the idea of liberty might evoke a more grave consideration of the complexities and struggles involved in ensuring that freedom for all is respected and upheld.
In practice
In discussions about interfaith dialogues, this quote encapsulates the challenges and joys of bringing people together.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.
Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.
I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.
Kids can't see us bombing, and then listen to us _x000D_ _x000D_ talking about getting guns out of the schools. _x000D_ _x000D_ How can we tell them to solve problems without violence, _x000D_ _x000D_ if, in fact, we can't show an ability to solve problems _x000D_ _x000D_ without violence?
God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.
Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.
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