I was thus moving from the ideal of Christian love to that of Buddhist wisdom, from agape to bodhi. I didn’t like Christian love as I saw it exemplified in the lives of those who preached it. They were always going to war with other people to save them. They believed that suffering was “good for you” and considered flogging their children an act of mercy. Formerly, they had even burned heretics at the stake in a desperate attempt to save them from their own fantasies of everlasting damnation. Indeed, there were people around me, such as Aunts Gertrude and Ethel, who really lived Christian love; but they never preached it. Trying, then, to put myself back into an adolescent’s point of view, it seemed to me that those who preached it didn’t have it. They were solemn bombasts who, as might have been expected, ended up with the atomic bomb. “O how great a thing it is when the Lord putteth into the hands of the righteous invincible might.”

— In my own way by Alan Watts