Rabelais (Gargantua & Pantagruel): Quare? Quia! [Translation: Why? Because.]

Rabelais (Gargantua & Pantagruel): I believe that the Goths spoke like that … and if God wished us to speak through our backsides we should speak like that too.

Rabelais (Gargantua & Pantagruel): If you say to me: ‘It does not seem very wise of you to have written down all this gay and empty balderdash for us,’ I will reply that you do not show yourselves much wiser by taking pleasure in the reading of it.

John Milton (Areopagitica): …who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

John Milton (Areopagitica): I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where the immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

John Milton (Areopagitica): … a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool will do of sacred scripture.

John Milton (Areopagitica): Though you take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has one jewel left: ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not hither so …

John Milton (Areopagitica):… if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would not gladlier post off to another, than the charge and care of their religion.

John Milton (Areopagitica): And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injurously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

Jonathon Swift (A Tale Of A Tub): We have just Religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

Jonathon Swift (A Tale Of A Tub): The latter Part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the Follies, Prejudices, and false Opinions he had contracted in the former.

Jonathon Swift (A Tale Of A Tub): If a Man would register all his Opinions upon Love, Politicks, Religion, Learning, and the like; beginning from his Youth, and go on to old Age: What a Bundle of Inconsistencies and Contradictions would appear at last?

William Blake (The Everlasting Gospel): The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my Vision’s Greatest Enemy: … Thine loves the same world that mine hates Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates…. Both read the Bible day & night, But thou read’st black where I read white.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): …the gospel songs delivered with soulful or beatific expressions, the permanent atmosphere of forced heartiness and cheerfulness … After a while I began to see the well-attended youth group as an index not of a church’s strength, but of its oppressive conservatism …. they prevent other, more healthier minded young people from ever taking the question of God seriously.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic):I did, however, in the course of my interview trot out my favourite quotation from Cardinal Newman: ‘To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. When the interview was eventually printed in Australian Presbyterian Living, the quotation appeared in the following form: ‘To live is to change, but to be perfect is to have changed not’. A Freudian slip if ever there was one …. because the misquotation encapsulates the Fundamentalist position.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): Augustine said: ‘The clouds roll with thunder, that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth: and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak, “We are the only Christians”‘.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic):…the Fundamentalist approach to the Bible is not, in spite of the claims of its adherents, identical with that of every orthodox Christian since the days of the early church: it is a relatively new phenomenon, formulated in response to, or in reaction to, the reults of ‘liberal’ scholarship.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): For the Fundamentalist the messenger is unimportant: all that matters is is that he wears the official uniform and delivers the message. This explains why Fundamentalist ministers are all the same, and why they are so uninspiring. Theological education is simply a matter of producing clones who can be relied upon to repeat the message verbatim. Christianity is reduced to a series of shibboleths or passwords, and it becomes quite unclear why Christ died, or even why he lived in the first place. The incarnational aspect of the religion …evaporates: God might as well have sent a telegram.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): My impression is that the dominating motivating force behind Fundamentalism is a hunger for power and authority. It is in education that the fundamentalist sees his greatest opportunity … operates by indoctrination … brainwashing others … The most glaring example is creation ‘science’. … Fundamentalism has in fact been described as a patriarchal protest movement.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): …the greater the theological spectrum the healthier the church. So I am resigned to the continued presence of the Fundamentalists, and I have no intention at all of trying to drive them out of the church. But I do insist on my right and duty to say publically what I think of them, and to challenge their attempts to ‘cleanse’ the church by driving away or excluding anyone like myself who disagrees with them.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): I’ve met more nastiness and intolerance in the church than in any other walk of life. But it needn’t necessarily be like that.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): …the sort of God the fundamentalist puts across, the authoritarian God who tells people what to do, and is pleased with them when they obey and punishes them when they don’t – that to my mind is the sort of God that, if he exists, I don’t want. As Dostoevsky said, I would be happier to return my entrance ticket to heaven.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic):.. Fundamentalism is wrong and can be shown to be wrong: and by ‘wrong’ I mean illogical, unhistorical, a perversion of Christianity – in a word, a lie.

Dr Peter Cameron, Australia’s living heretic (Heretic): Christianity is indefinable, and perhaps essentially incommunicable. To try to answer the question ‘What is a Christian?’ is, as Kierkegaard would say, to try to paint to god Mars in the armour which made him invisible. To the extent that we define Christianity we betray it. The most that can be said is that Christianity is openess to God and other people, and so far as we elaborate on that we diminish this openess.

Steve Taylor (I Want To Be A Clone): Be a clone and kiss conviction goodnight Cloneliness is next to Godliness, right?

Steve Taylor (I Want To Be A Clone): I’m grateful that they show the way ’cause I could never know the way to serve him on my own I want to be a clone

Steve Taylor (I Want To Be A Clone): So now I see the whole design my church is an assmebly line I want to be a clone

Rev Dr Mark Believer in Exile Oz