Not only does "orthodox" no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.