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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

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Olivia Laing

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“The most important moment in religious history was when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus Christ, “What is truth?” This was the ideal opportunity for “God” to finally explain reality and truth to humanity. What, then, was Christ’s answer? Er, nothing. That dreadful silence reveals everything about mainstream religion and its inability to explain anything.”

TruthReligionChristSilencePontius Pilate
Book:All the Rest is Propaganda
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“I decided that to get at the historical Jesus, one should perhaps start by looking at his background: his parents, his family, the places of his birth and life. The Gospels, of course, contained a lot of that stuff, though they didn’t always agree. But one couldn’t prove the validity of the Gospel story by appealing to the Gospel story. But here was the problem I encountered. Using the Muratorian Project Index and my own search of the non-canonical material I had entered, I could find no references to the names of Mary and Joseph, nor to Bethlehem, Nazareth or Galilee, anywhere in the non-Gospel documents of the first century. I decided to look up the name of the man who one might say was the most crucial in Jesus’ life, namely, the man who had tried and executed him: the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. In the epistles, he appeared only in a single passing reference in 1 Timothy 6:13, at my date of 115. Elsewhere, in all the discussions about Christ’s death and crucifixion, he was nowhere to be found. I could not even locate a reference in Paul or any other epistle writer to the fact that Jesus had undergone a trial! Little did Pilate realize when he washed his hands, that he was washing himself out of the wider Christian record for about 80 years!”

ChristianChristianityChurch HistoryGospelsPontius PilateChristian History
Book:The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus
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“The malice of a true Christian attempting to destroy an opponent is something unique in the world. No other religion ever considered it necessary to destroy others because they did not share the same beliefs. At worst, another man's belief might inspire amusement or contempt—the Egyptians and their animal gods, for instance. Yet those who worshipped the Bull did not try to murder those who worshipped the Snake, or to convert them by force from Snake to Bull. No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did.”

ChristianityWorshipHypocrisyHeresyHoly War1962Evils Of HatredPriscus
Book:JULIAN
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“The emergent Church is the latest act in the wave of antimodernist revolt by liturgical renewal and charismatic revival, a rebellion whose central insight is that rationalistic fundamentalism, as much as liberalism, is a mass of worldly accretions. The historical record and human feeling, not the illusion of inerrancy, are supposed to command authority in the post-Christian age. Yet American evangelicals' craving for clear authority is second only to their refusal to let any authority boss them around. Skeptics note that the Emergent Church is a movement of quintessentially evangelical individualists. 'By constantly appealing to the "capital T" Tradition, and then in effect picking and choosing from its offerings, they do not succeed in living out any of the traditions that flow from the Tradition, but create their own eclectic, ad hod churchmanship,' wrote D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 'It is controlled by what these emerging thinkers judge to be appropriate in the postmodern world - and this results, rather ironically, in one of the most self-serving appeals to tradition I have ever seen.”

Emergent ChurchPostmodern ChristianityChurch TraditionEcclesiastical Authority
Book:Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism
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“Van Hermans wordt al 1½ of 2 jaar een roman aangekondigd, maar ik zie nergens iets ervan, ook geen voorpublikaatsies. Louis Paul Boon schrijft niet meer, maar schildert nu. Richard Minne is dood, Jan van Nijlen is dood, Pierre Kemp is dood. Het holle vat Mulisch is van eigen verbeelding gebarsten, Wolkers absoluut ongenietbaar geworden. Het zo geestdriftig begroete talent Hamelink is verzand. De gehele markt, de gehele Nederlandse levende literatuur is voor mij — een gek idee, net alsof je een heel groot strandbad of koncertzaal voor jezelf alleen hebt. Het is niet echt leuk, & je wordt er nerveus van. Autorijden terwijl er nergens ook maar iemand op de weg is, dagen, jaren lang. Toch moet je rechts blijven houden, richting aangeven etc. etc. Vreemd, heel vreemd. Kwam Willem Frederik Hermans maar eindelijk weer eens met iets groots.”

DutchDutch LiteratureBriefBrieven
Book:Verscheur deze brief! Ik vertel veel te veel
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