Gil Bailie > Quotes

“The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.”
― Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads

“Humans, in short, desire something both unknown to them and inaccessible to the strategies of acquisition that desire sets in motion. We are creatures in whom has been implanted and to whom has been entrusted a world-consuming desire, and if misdirected, it will sooner or later lay waste the world.”
― Gil Bailie, God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love

“The very word, religio—to bind (ligio) back (re)—suggests exactly this. Thus these ancient cultures remained profoundly backward oriented. This ritualized return to a primordial past, the very essence of mythological forms of recollection, is what de Lubac perceptively characterized as a “deliberate (though admittedly still instinctive) refusal of history.”
― Gil Bailie, God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love

“In sharp contrast to their pagan contemporaries, Israel’s remembrance of the past was marked by two tendencies: a faith in Yahweh’s fidelity to the Abrahamic covenant, on which Jewish confidence in the future was based, and the contrition that accompanied the remembrance of Israel’s own violations of that covenant.”
― Gil Bailie, God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love

“It is when we ask about the nature of this catharsis that we discover that culture itself represents something like the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
― Gil Bailie, God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love

“As we shall see below, without that tinge of moral remorse, however, there would have been no catharsis, and therefore no surviving culture.”
― Gil Bailie, God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love