[Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton]@TWC D-Link bookOrthodoxy CHAPTER IX 7/60
Let us take cases. Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom.
Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge.
The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue.
If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is.
It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation.
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