We humans are surprisingly proud given our lowly and inauspicious entrance into the world. In a line often attributed to St. Augustine, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: we are born betwixt feces and urine. And we revert soon enough to something of equal value: dust and ashes. Entry through a vagina, exit through a smokestack. On and off the stage in a manner most unbecoming and most unlike our proud strut upon it.
Jesse 'The Body' Ventura once opined that religion is for the weak. He didn't realize how right he was, as explained here.
Question for classicists: where did the Bishop of Hippo deliver himself of the line lately quoted? Logically prior question: Is the line rightly attributed to the good bishop?
UPDATE (26 July). Mike Gilleland writes:
I can't find "Inter faeces et urinam nascimur" in St. Augustine, although many people attribute it to him (sometimes with "urinas" for "urinam" and sometimes with urine and faeces reversed). Freud, e.g., makes the attribution.
Aristotle mentions the proximity of the organs of generation and the organs of evacuation in On the Generation of Animals, book I (e.g. chapter 13).
C.J. Rawson seems to have investigated this question in "Notes and Queries" (1972), but his article is unavailable to me.
Google makes some of us appear more erudite than we really are.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.