Play, ritual, and the rationality of religious paradox

The thing that seems most of all to characterize [religious thought] is a natural taste for immoderate confusions as well as jarring contrasts. It freely tends to excesses m both directions. When it relates things together it confounds them; when it distinguishes between things, it opposes them. It knows nothing of restraint or gradations, it seeks extremes; as a result, it uses logical mechanisms in a clumsy way, but it does not overlook any of them. Durkheim