User:K61824/quote

Belief marks the line at which our thinking stops, or perhaps better, the place where we confine our thinking to a carefully delineated region. The content of belief is shaped in conflict with others; were it not for this conflict we would not know what we believe. Because belief depends on hostile others, it is necessary for us as believers not to think what the others are thinking, else it could pull us across the defined boundary into another system of belief. The fact that we stop our thinking at specified limits is hidden in the assumption that we are in agreement with an established authority, not seeing that it is we who have established that authority. Indeed, the more passionately we hold to our beliefs, the more we are tempted to abandon them. However, if as a work of literature the New Testament is confused, as a religious literature it's a glorious confusiuon. It's abiding power lies precisely in the fact that every attempt to improve it is doomed. The irony in the war is the irony in the evil itself. No one is evil by choice, willingly and consciously, but only by the desire to eliminate it elsewhere.