Detail from "The Sermon On the Mount" by Carl Heinrich Bloch
Adam Roberts at Aeon magazine:
“Christianity is not about [...] what you have but what you should give up; not about power but about the disempowered — this is the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount.
In fact, that’s the whole point of the Gospels. To reread these primary Christian documents is to remind yourself how radically concerned the Gospels are with the excluded, the non-chosen people, the scum, the chavs. And from this insight, I hew and plane a major plank of my own argument. Now that Christianity has gone from being a small-time sect to being the dominant religion on the planet, the key category of excluded has become precisely the unbelievers.”