It is not wise to belong to any religious party.

 

"I suppose it is not wise, not being natural, to belong to any religious party . . . Now if a person is wise, . . . he will say to himself, 'I am not a member of that or of any party.  I am God's child, . . . a fellow disciple with Christ' . . . A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a person from the vexation of thinking . . . The difficulty is that we do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all, and this accommodation is, I say, a loss of so much integrity and, of course, of so much power."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photo: Twin Sisters Peak with a solitary ponderosa pine lit up in the day's last light, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, December 2, 2011