Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
Interpretation
This quote contrasts the hate often associated with certain interpretations of Christianity with the love that is central to Christ's teachings.
H. L. Mencken critiques the dichotomy between Evangelical Christianity, which he claims is rooted in hate, and the original teachings of Christ, which emphasize love. This highlights a significant gap between the foundational values of a religious movement and how it may be practiced or perceived in contemporary society, suggesting that some adherents have strayed from the core message of compassion and kindness.
In practice
This quote can be included in a discussion on the interpretations of religious texts in modern society.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
So she was considering in her own mind...whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up & picking the daisies.
That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.
Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.
We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.
The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
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