The universe would appear to be something like a piece of cheese it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways- and when one has chosen his own pattern of slicing, he finds that other men's cuts fall at the wrong places.

Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

Man is/the symbol-using (symbol making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.

The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actionsin other human agents.

Language does our thinking for us.

Man is rotten with perfection.

Creation implies authority in the sense of originator.

Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.

The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

Stories are equipment for living.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.