James Alison

"The function of the Church’s doctrine of original sin ... is to keep alive the beam in my eye ... God keeps alive the beam in my eye by making that beam a living Cross, a beam on which there hangs a murdered victim."

"It’s precisely because you are relaxed about someone who is bigger than you holding you that you are relaxed enough to undergo crises of self. If there isn’t anyone bigger than you holding you in being, then you have to hold tight to yourself, and not allow yourself the luxury of being re-worked from within."

"The problem is that this being identified with the victim can come to be used as an arm with which to club others. The victims become the group of the righteous just in order to exclude the poor Pharisees, who are never in short supply as the butts of easy mockery."