This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Al-Anṭākī , full name Yaḥya ibn Saʿīd al-Anṭākī NULL
Question: What is the most harmful sin? Answer: The sin thou dost not know to be a sin.
Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister
Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.
Abuse | Children | Commitment | Conscience | God | Individual | Law | Morality | Obedience | Sin | Soul |
Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield
In the kind of world that I see in history there is one sin that locks people up in all their other sins… the sin of self-righteousness.
History | People | Righteousness | Self | Self-righteousness | Sin | World |
Both sin and sickness are error, and Truth is their remedy.
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 |
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 |
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.