«CHURCH IS A FUN PLACE TO GO»

«I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea.
Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hardcore gay
activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to
educate the young. Flicking the radio dial in America, one hears
bursts of beautiful, spellbinding poetry. But it is neither academics
nor contemporary writers who are filling the air with dazzling imagery
and profound spiritual truths. Alas for progressive politics, these
are the voices of white and black Christian ministers, reading form
the Bible. Why have intellectuals abandoned the people? This is the
shame of modernism. High Romanticism at least gave poetry as the prize
of rebellion and, turning from God, put nature in his place.

Everyone in the world should know all the great religions of the
world: Hinduism; Buddhism; Greco-Roman and Near Eastern paganism;
Judeo-Christianity; Islam, African, North American, and Oceanic tribal
cults, pre-Columbia imperial myth. Art, history, and philosophy are
intertwined with the evolution of religion. This is the true
multiculturalism. The secularism of the Enlightenment was meant to
free the mind, not kill the soul. In the spirit of the
eighteenth-century encyclopedists and revolutionaries, we must keep
church and state separate, even while we preserve the eternal insights
and metaphors of religion. Authority belongs to the classroom, not the
pulpit.»

-Camille Paglia