I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.
— Dorothy L. Sayers (Have his Carcase, 1932)
I found this on an unfamiliar website. looks like the website for a Lutheran church.. I don’t know if Dorothy really wrote it or not, but it’s wonderful satire:
Creed of St. Euthanasia
(Commonly called the Atheneum Creed)
I believe in man, maker of himself and inventor of all science. And in myself, his manifestation, and captain of my psyche; and that I should not suffer anything painful or unpleasant.
And in a vague, evolving deity, the future-begotten child of man; conceived by the spirit of progress, born of emergent variants; who shall kick down the ladder by which he rose and tell history to go to hell.
Who shall some day take off from earth and be jet-propelled into the heavens; and sit exalted above all worlds, man the master almighty.
And I believe in the spirit of progress, who spake by Shaw and the Fabians; and in a modern, administrative, ethical, and social organization; in the isolation of saints, the treatment of complexes, joy through health, and destruction of the body by cremation (with music while it burns), and then I’ve had it.
I especially like the part where the spirit of progress spake by Shaw and the Fabians.
This last one is a favorite of Eldest Daughter. Lord Peter says to Harriet Vane:
??I know you don?t want either to give or to take. You?ve tried being the giver, and you?ve found that the giver is always fooled. And you won?t be the taker, because that?s very difficult, and because you know that the taker always ends by hating the giver. You don?t want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.”
Dorothy Sayers, Have His Carcase
The Creed of St. Euthanasia is part of Sayers’s _Pantheon Papers_, which were published in the satirical magazine _Punch_: see Barbara Reynolds biography, p. 363.