Quotes About Traditions

Western civilization has preferred love of death to love of life to the very extent that its religious traditions have preferred redemption to creation, sin to ecstasy, and individual introspection to cosmic awareness and appreciation.

The notion that one's culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one's ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority—but as "ethnic" pride if claimed by a minority.

Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home." I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

the great works of imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?

And there was no ultimate reality—any culture that would judge the perceptions of another, particularly one outside its own traditions, should proceed cautiously.

This oldest Christology of all may be found in the preliterary traditions in Paul and the book of Acts, but it is not the view presented in any of the Gospels. Instead, as we will see at greater length, the oldest Gospel, Mark, seems to assume that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Son of God; the next Gospels, Matthew and Luke, indicate that Jesus became the Son of God when he was born; and the last Gospel, John, presents Jesus as the Son of God from before creation.

ancient religions were almost never interested in "true beliefs.

Religion was all about the proper practices:

During the first century after Jesus' death, his followers interpreted his cosmic role—his posthumous descent into the Underworld, his ascent to heaven, and his invisible reign as universal king—in terms that echoed some ancient traditions about Greco-Roman gods and heroes.

Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war.

discriminate between the principles that improve the quality of prose and the superstitions, fetishes, shibboleths, and initiation ordeals that have been passed down in the traditions of usage. The

Charles Napier, the British army's commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee, replied, "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."14

I'm not gonna lie, I love the holidays. But Christmas was a lot more fun when you weren't paying for it.

Churches all over the country have decided they love their traditions more than their children.

That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

Goji Berries Really Cure Cancer? The problem with these exotic berries and the juices made from them (Goji, noni, acai) isn't that they're not incredibly healthy foods—they are. Foods that have been used in medical and healing traditions

Order is the stability of your marriage. It's buttressed by the traditions of the past and by your expectations-grounded, often invisibly, in those traditions. Chaos is that stability crumbling under your feet when you discover your partner's infidelity. Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse.

Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.

Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse.