Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line lands like a blasphemy delivered in the calm tone of someone filing paperwork. “No God but has been in the loins of past gods” yokes divinity to biology, dragging the sacred down into heredity, sex, and the messy mechanics of continuity. It’s not just a clever scandal; it’s an argument in miniature. Gods, like kings, like ideas, like institutions, don’t arrive immaculate. They are begotten.

The verb choice is doing the dirty work. “Loins” is deliberately unpoetic: fleshy, embarrassing, insistently material. Butler is sabotaging the notion of a pure, singular revelation by treating theology as genealogy. The subtext is evolutionary, and it’s Victorian to the core: post-Darwin, the world is being re-read as an unbroken chain of descent, and Butler applies that pressure to religion itself. Deities are not eternal truths dropped from above; they’re cultural offspring, mutated versions of earlier divinities, carrying traces of older myths the way bodies carry traits.

There’s satire here, but it’s not airy wit; it’s a scalpel. The line implies that religious novelty is mostly rebranding, that each “new” God smuggles in the DNA of the old one while insisting on a clean break. It also turns worship into a kind of historical amnesia: believers are encouraged to forget the parentage so the current deity can pose as origin rather than product. In one sentence, Butler makes theology answer to the same rule as everything else in the modern age: nothing is self-made, least of all God.