This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We are at ease with a moral judgment made against someone’s private sin - lust or greed. We are much less comfortable judging someone’s public ethic - those decisions that can lead to such outcomes as aggression, the abuse of the environment, the neglect of the needy.
Abuse | Aggression | Greed | Judgment | Lust | Neglect | Public | Sin |
In visions of wisdom, in devotion to the good, in submission to beauty, and when overwhelmed by the holy, we awake to behold existence in this relationship. In reverence, suffering, and humility we discover our existence and find the bridge that leads from existence to God. And this is religion.
Beauty | Devotion | Existence | God | Good | Humility | Relationship | Religion | Reverence | Submission | Suffering | Wisdom |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
The doctrine of original sin is a theological perversion of natural fact. It is a fact that all human beings begin life with an equipment of instincts, impulses, and desires, at war with one another and often out of harmony with the realities of eth physical, social, and spiritual world. Sin and the sense of sin will always be with us, to torture and weigh down; but… the religion of the future will try to prevent men’s being afflicted with the sense of sin, rather than encourage it, and then attempt to cure it.
Doctrine | Future | Harmony | Life | Life | Men | Religion | Sense | Sin | Torture | War | Will | World |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
Authority | Conduct | Government | Harmony | Law | Life | Life | Obedience | Society | Submission | Society | Government |
The worst type of sin, in fact the only “mortal sin” which has enslaved man for the greater part of history, is the institutionalized sin. Under the institution, vice appears to be, or is actually turned into, virtue. Apathy toward evil is thus engendered; recognition of sin becomes totally effaced; sinful institutions become absolutized, almost idolized, and sin becomes absolutely moral.
Apathy | Evil | History | Man | Mortal | Sin | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
If the opposing sides are Christian, they share the sin of caricaturing their Faith; if the one side is Christian, and the other is not, Christians sin gravely if they are the aggressors.
To put the temporal in the place of God, when done with full deliberation, is the sin of pride in all its gravity.
Deliberation | God | Pride | Sin |
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
It is not God that is worshipped but the group or the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity.
Muriel Spark, fully Dame Muriel Sarah Camberg Spark
It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.
The pleasure of sin is of short duration… It operates on a law of diminishing returns. The more often it is repeated, the more familiar with its face, the less pleasure sin gives.
Sin is disappointing. Whoever got out of sin half as much pleasure as he expected?
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
No amount of libido, or passion, no external force, and no inner prompting to sin can make the human action of man anything but free. We are never tempted beyond our strength. Every moral failure is ours alone, because our choices are our own.
Action | Failure | Force | Man | Passion | Sin | Strength | Failure |