Category Archives: History

Gore Vidal 1925-2012

Posted on by

On monotheism:

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.”  (1988)

“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose.”  (1992)

On himself:

“I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”  (1956)

“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”  (1992)

Sex and Christianity

Posted on by

I’ve often wondered when and how the men in charge of Christianity decided that sex, especially outside of marriage, is shameful.

In an article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Brown (a respected professor of history at Princeton) implies that Ambrose of Milan (aka St. Ambrose) and John Chrysostom of Antioch and Constantinople were largely responsible (or irresponsible, depending on your point of view). Both men were bishops in the 4th century. According to Brown:

In their hands, long-established codes of living in this world (propounded by philosophers since classical times) were transformed … (into) divinely sanctioned precepts with which to achieve entrance to the other world….

It was not enough that precepts of courage, continence and self-denial should help to steer men and women through the dangers and temptations of this life alone. These virtues, if practiced with heroic abandon, were held to lead directly to heaven.

The ascetic or philosophical life, in which the mind or soul was elevated above the body, had often been recommended as the best or most satisfying way of life by ancient philosophers. Eventually, this way of life became not just the most prudent one, but the most religiously acceptable one. Sex became officially dirty.

No doubt the story is complex. One of the books that tells the story and which is discussed in Professor Brown’s article is Ambrose and John Chrysostom: Clerics between Desert and Empire by J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz. Only $100.96 on Amazon (or $88 if you lean toward the electronic).