Mary Douglas

“If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization.”

“Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.”

“Mormons... are so strong, they can handle wealth, they are confident. I think it is because they are not bogged down by rules for equality, but have a firmly defined system of relative status and responsible command.”

“Inequality can have a bad downside, but equality, for its part, sure does get in the way of coordination.”

“If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny.”

“Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?”

“Since 1970, relationships can be more volatile, jobs more ephemeral, geographical mobility more intensified, stability of marriage weaker.”

“I have increasingly, over the years, felt that religion today does our civilization more harm than good.”

“It is very reasonable to worry about the harm done by organized religion, and to prefer looser and more private arrangements.”

“Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.”

“It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on.”

“It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.”

“I am sure it must be true that people opt out of the mainstream society because they feel that there are going to be no rewards for them, if they stay.”