"Organized religion provides a model of the way all organizations, from the state down to the village garden club, end a price in terms of a member's freedom of thought and action."

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More quotes from: Robert Shea

• "A few fringe philosophers are attracted to a vision of what might be tenDed the ..."
• "A permanent division of labor inevitably creates occupational and class inequality and conflict. "
• "An organized religion tends to require that its members live in certain specified ways and ..."
• "And, of course, the more self-sufficient we are, the less we will be dependent upon ..."
• "Anyone who seeks power wants absolute power. "
• "As such people achieve influence within the organization, whenever there is a conflict between their ..."
• "As the political aspect becomes more and more influential, the organization ceases to be useful ..."
• "Because the better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people ..."
• "But instead I usually say that, though it may surprise them, I too believe in ..."
• "But the more an organization succeeds and prospers, the more it is likely to be ..."
• "Even while we busily attend meetings, contribute money and perform our assigned tasks, we suspect ..."
• "Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a ..."
• "Every Roman emperor, every Medieval and Renaissance monarch who succeeded in getting an armlock on ..."
• "For this reason, the most admirable time in the history of any institution is its ..."
• "I think there may be ways to tame the organizational beast, though I have hardly ..."
• "Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn't learned how to care for ..."
• "Indeed, one of the most successful and influential religious organizations in history, the Society of ..."
• "Individuals, too, who cultivate a variety of skills seem brighter, more energetic and more adaptable ..."
• "It doesn't seem possible for an organization to be egalitarian, democratic and allow its participants ..."
• "It is instructive, for instance, to trace the computer industry's decline in vision, idealism, creativity, ..."
• "It often happens that when a person possesses a particular ability to an extraordinary degree, ..."

• "Just as predatory animals follow a similar general design and behave in similar ways, so ..."
• "Military organization, like religious organization, can be seen as a paradigm of organization in general. "
• "Not all of us can be polymaths, like Leonardo, Thomas Jefferson or Steve Allen, but ..."
• "Of all human inventions the organization, a machine constructed of people performing interdependent functions, is ..."
• "One simple way to keep organizations from becoming cancerous might be to rotate all jobs ..."
• "Speaking of insects, entomologists have found that life is pretty good for those insects that ..."
• "That the more authoritarian organizations survive and prevail goes generally unnoticed because people focus on ..."
• "The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability ..."
• "The early Gnostics were egalitarian in structure and acknowledged that any member-even females!-might have a ..."
• "The Gnostics were rapidly driven out of business by the hierarchical orthodox Christians. "
• "The key element in tragedy is that heroes and heroines are destroyed by that which ..."
• "This whole phenomenon of the diversion of organizations from their purposes and ideals does not ..."
• "Thus we see owners of baseball teams who lack any understanding of the sport, heads ..."
• "Thus we see, in Communist countries, the party runs everything from the state police to ..."
• "To reject even one major tenet of the religion or to violate one major rule ..."
• "Ultimately we may still ask, why can't humans design a perfect society? "
• "When it comes to inter-corporate fighting, an engineer who knows how to design a superlative ..."
• "Whereas among the so-called social insects, the individual's well-being is largely sacrificed to the needs ..."
• "While Francis of Assissi was still alive, the religious order he founded, dedicated to poverty, ..."
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• "You are attached to what you attack. "