Word: heathen
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...fire-god of Sinai; he is merely one of many gods that dwell in the hills. When Gilead's warriors capture maidens in battle, they no longer sacrifice them to Yahweh; they marry them instead and adopt their alien gods. Even Gilead, the great judge, takes a heathen concubine to his bed and loves their son Jephta* more than his legitimate children. So, when Gilead dies, his other sons deny Jephta his inheritance and drive him into the wilderness. There Jephta grows tough and strong, and raises around his standard so doughty an army of outcasts and freebooters that...
VICENTE BLASCO IBÁÑEZ. terrible-tempered, anticlerical novelist, was looking for a female lead for the movie of his novel. Blood and Sand, when at a party he met pious, vixen-toothed Actress Nita ("Nixie") Naldi, who screamed forthwith: "You Bolshevik! You heathen! . . . You worm! You Pagan! You anti-Christ!" Ibanez shrilled back so excitedly that his -'upper plate fell out of his mouth into Nixie's bosom." Whereupon the hostess, "who had hoped for a stimulating evening, but not this stimulating, quickly reached down into Nixie, pulled out the teeth, rinsed them in the punch...
Critics charge that the message in contemporary juveniles is one of tame social "adjustment" and of a vast, undifferentiat-ing tolerance. "Love thy neighbor." they say, has been replaced by "Love that minority." Books by the hundred set out to show that "the little Zulu or heathen Chinee is absolutely like you and me." Sociologist David Riesman analyzes Tootle as appropriate for bringing up children "in an other-directed mode of conformity": a story about a locomotive that learns to stay on the track like other docile little engines, instead of wandering happily in the fields. In Play With...
...This college is for all conditions and classes of men without regard to color, nationality, race or religion. A man may be white, black, or yellow; Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution for three, four or eight years, and go out believing in one God, many Gods, or no God. But it will be impossible for one to continue with us long without knowing what we believe to be the truth, and our reasons for that belief...
...There is a tendency, a product of the egotism in all of us, to mock the unfamiliar in other men's faith and worship. Such words as 'heathen,' 'idolatry,' 'superstition.' are used more often as smear words or in derision than in their legitimate meanings. They are words we hurl at others; seldom do we apply them to ourselves. Yet every man should command respect in the moment when he bows before his god. We may believe that his conception of the Divine lacks valuable, even essential, elements. His forms of worship...