Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the tendency of people to accept comforting beliefs over harsh realities.
Edward Gibbon highlights the human inclination to cling to comforting ideologies, even when faced with uncomfortable truths. By suggesting that many would rather see a wafer as a representation of God than confront the notion of a cruel deity, he reflects on the complexities of faith and the lengths to which individuals go to preserve their beliefs against distressing concepts.
In practice
In a discussion about faith and belief, this quote can illustrate the struggle between comfort and truth.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
As a cultural product of both 'East' and 'West', I do not believe there is a fundamental basis for a clash of civilisations, or that the West is the cause of all problems.
The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
There's a way of life, there's a way of death. Which way are you on?
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
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