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“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
-- H. L. Mencken
We certainly should not bow down to another's religion to the extent that we allow him to dictate how to dress our wives or what we can write without being blasphemous, nor should we conform our science to their ancient texts, nor limit our reproductive rights by their lights, and on and on.
Got this quote from the Andrew Sullivan blog.
xXx
“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
-- H. L. Mencken
We certainly should not bow down to another's religion to the extent that we allow him to dictate how to dress our wives or what we can write without being blasphemous, nor should we conform our science to their ancient texts, nor limit our reproductive rights by their lights, and on and on.
Got this quote from the Andrew Sullivan blog.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 02:06 pm (UTC)From:In fact, the only one of the recent biographers really to press the notion that Mencken is a figure whose time has come (or, more accurately, returned) is Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic (2002), which asserted that Mencken was politically conservative and that conservatives are in the ascendancy today. The particular species of conservatism that now holds the nation in its grasp, however, owes few debts to Mencken. The man was no fan of what we now call the "red states." On the contrary: He savagely derided the same backwoods civilization that so many conservative writers now embrace in order to establish their regular-guy bona fides. Mencken revered science and lambasted religion; his favorite put-downs, usually applied to the inhabitants of deepest Arkansas or Tennessee, were words like "moron," "idiot" and "yokel." His conservatism was that of Nietzsche, not George Wallace, and one can only speculate wistfully about the kind of destruction he would have visited on such excreta as the Left Behind novels or "The O'Reilly Factor."
Heh.