“When the anointed minister of Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech a general blessing or a special advantage, is he the celebrant of a hollow, meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false premise? One does not know, but if one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless petition proves him by the inexorable laws of logic to be one or the other.”
–Ambrose Bierce, Selected Works
PRIEST, n. A holy individual who follows — often to excess — the divine injunction to “love the little children.”
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— from The American Heretic’s Dictionary (revised & expanded), the 21st-century successor to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. (The link goes to 50 sample definitions and illustrations.)
“. . . all the affairs of life are so regulated that the priest is everywhere indispensable; at all natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, in death, . . . the holy parasite appears in order to denaturalize them, in his words, to sanctify them.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
Sharp and Pointed 