Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion Quotes

“In many ways, the vampire was spared the gross suffering of the werewolf but that is only because they suffered in many other ways at the hands of the supernatural doctrines of religion. They, however, were connected to the hyperbolic voice crying in the wilderness.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“The vampire was the third theological concoction made for the culture to drink from the mixologists of religion and the main ingredient of rabies. The vampire throughout the world arose concurrently with the werewolf and its origin again stemmed from the tortures of being “zombies” tied down in the wilderness.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“For just as Jacob and Esau came from their mother Rebecca and their father Isaac, so also both zombies and werewolves came from rabies and blind blessings of theology.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“We have failed to see truth right in front of us because we have been buried into an obfuscated mindset by theologies and cultural mores made by theologies that themselves have been created by diseases.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“...you have to understand who you are talking to and whether or not they are using the word in any proper context of its definition. Whether this is its primary literal meaning or any of the metaphorical constructs that we humans are fond of using.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“Perhaps the monsters of myth and legend are merely tormented diseased souls that were maltreated because of unseen forces we did not understand and labelled ignorantly and incorrectly out of fear and self-righteousness.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“Horrific many eyed, many winged angels, undead zombies and vampires are part of our cultures. Witches, warlocks, and demons as well. [...] In many cases what has given birth to some of them may never be known, but perhaps it is because we are not looking in the right places.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“Cain was sent the raven to bury his brother's body and hide his transgression from God, the supposed truth still came out in various holy books.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“The supernatural is a supposed ethereal realm of existence in most theological paradigms, but again it is predicated on the natural by definition. If you, therefore, cannot prove the natural as a fact then by definition you cannot ever prove the supernatural either.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“We create ourselves to be almost blind walking dead, where we are led by both negative aspects of religion and cultural conformity to gloss over people. We gloss over the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. We gloss over the Japanese internment camps that most likely would have been far worse had the war continued longer. We often marginalize those besides the ethnic and Jewish descent that died in the Nazi holocaust of World war II.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“when we talk about the occult, we need to understand what we are meaning to communicate and try to grasp what the individual might hear. You see, the occult to many religious persons can mean anything from benign supernatural or magical things to malignant forces that corrupt or seek to destroy us.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“The religions changed, the nuances of the demon, theologically, changed but the creature itself did not. So many diseases and illnesses were ascribed to demonic possession.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“These “witches” with their feline friends, pictured often as evil creatures of the night, were not the haggard, worn, and crooked nosed demonic evil creatures of myth nor were they pointed hat wearing broom riders. They were not cursed spinsters of the night riding phallic symbols with a black cat on their tail end. Neither were they Charmed Ones with misunderstood powers that were unjustly hunted for having said powers.

These were merchants with families, friends, and businesses that were most likely in their community for years before the events. They were not “synagogues of Satan” nor Satan worshipers at all.

They were often the elderly women, besides merchants, that were many times Christian in faith. Women who were midwives, herbalists, healers that helped their communities when they were needed to ease pain and suffering. They were also pagans, non-Judeo-Christian religionists, and were like their other counterparts and helpers of their communities. These were good people, ordinary people.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“...it should quickly pointed out that the Loup Garou legend of France is not only the French werewolf, and vampire but also the French zombie.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“The earliest documented appearance of rabies on our planet has been in Mesopotamia around 2000 B.C. ... The symptoms of rabies were diagnosed throughout history, following its inception, as being a form of undead or cursed type of creature, revenants if you will.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“When we walk a mile in another's moccasins, we can sympathize in a way that one cannot with just a pure clinical perspective.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“We must realize the truth around our past and within it and how not being willing to question the status quo has led to horrific deeds to victims in the past.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives