Cole Bailey

“Yet from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story? There are only speculative answers, but it seems plausible that Christianity and the Western world would have had a somewhat different religious and cultural inheritance. Perhaps women would have found more egalitarianism. Perhaps the relationship between sexuality and sacredness would have been less fractured. Celibacy among the priesthood might not exist. I wondered what, if any, effect imagining the possibility of a married Jesus could have on these traditions. How does imagining new possibilities affect realities in the present?”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“To sum up, that despot, the cannon, can’t do all it would like to; strength is a great weakness. A cannonball does only six hundred leagues an hour; light does seventy thousand leagues a second. That is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoléon.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“What causes all the hatred? At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“We have a duty: to work on the human soul, to defend mystery as opposed to miracle, to worship the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to accept of the inexplicable only what is necessary, to clean up faith, to remove superstition from on top of religion; to rid God of worms.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables