Originally posted by drjegcAmen.
"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
Isaac Asimov
A Satisfied Mind
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
Once I was waitin’
In fortune and fame
Everything that I dreamed for
To get a start in life’s game
Then suddenly it happened
I lost every dime
But I’m richer by far
With a satisfied mind
Money can’t buy back
Your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when you’re lonely
Or a love that’s grown cold
The wealthiest person
Is a pauper at times
Compared to the man
With a satisfied mind
When my life has ended
And my time has run out
My friends and my loved ones
I’ll leave there’s no doubt
But one thing’s for certain
When it comes my time
I’ll leave this old world
With a satisfied mind
How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way
But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind
-Johhny Cash-
Bedrock, by Gary Snyder:
for Masa
Snowmelt pond warm granite
we make camp,
no thought of finding more.
and nap
and leave our minds to the wind.
on the bedrock, gently tilting,
sky and stone,
teach me to be tender.
the touch that nearly misses--
brush of glances--
tiny steps--
that finally cover worlds
of hard terrain.
cloud wisps and mists
gathered into slate blue
bolts of summer rain.
tea together in the purple starry eve;
new moon set,
why does it take so
long to learn to
love,
we laugh
and grieve.
We are living in a time when... [p]hilosophically, you can believe anything, so long as you do not claim it to be true. Morally, you can practice anything, so long as you do not claim that it is a "better" way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is eastern, it is granted critical immunity; if western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus, a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same if the ceremony is from the eastern fold. Such is the mood at the end of the twentieth century.
R. Zacharias
"I had a kind of revelation in the Sinai desert, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Suddenly I experienced a total rejection of monotheism. In this very rocky, inspiring land, I said to myself that the idea of believing in only one God was cretinous. I could not think of another word. And the stupidest religion of all is Islam. When one reads the Koran one is devastated, devastated. At least the Bible is very beautiful because the Jews have a sacred literary talent which can excuse a lot of things." (Michel Houellebecq)
“V: What do you mean by “antisocial”? Do you mean that religions militate against a healthy society?
JGB: Absolutely. I was brought up in one of the very few societies on Earth which had no religious beliefs (and as far as I can tell, has never had any), and that is China. There’s a bit of animism and a bit of burning incense to ancestors, but there’s no belief in the supernatural – it’s rather like you and I talking about the spirit of Shakespeare – we don’t literally mean some sort of supernatural entity is floating around. When the Chinese talk about the spirits of their ancestors, they mean it as a metaphor – the Chinese have no religious beliefs. Confucianism is not really a religion at all, nor is Buddhism, and Taoism is not a religion in the strictest sense. There’s no supernatural element in any of those religions – which is why I like them. And the Chinese character is interesting for that reason.
It may be that the backwardness of China could be blamed on the absence of religion, because religions (whatever their faults) are energizing by virtue of the unconscious and psychopathic strains which enter into the individual’s mind and into the social mind. That is a very curious thing – that. Religions, for all they are to be campaigned against (if not actively despised) are vehicles for energizing psychopathic behavior. So it’s no coincidence that the fiercely Protestant countries of Northern Europe launched the industrial revolution and launched the United States, if you like. The Puritan fathers took that fierce Protestant work ethic with all its repressions and created the most dynamic society the world has ever seen.
So it may be that the absence of a religion in China acted as a sort of brake on that country’s industrial development…lack of religion may have had a restraining influence, turning China into a kind of eventless world. For something like 2000 years nothing happened! You read Chinese history, and nothing happened until 1910. There was this vast agricultural society run by a class of elite administrators who traveled around in sedan chairs…and nothing happened! Now and then they invented something like a moveable type of gunpowder or accurate timepieces, but they lost interest in them because there was no imagination to energize these discoveries. It’s very strange…”
J.G. Ballard / V. Vale Interview
( http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/jgballardinterview.html )
“I am interested in the surrealists altogether, because I am a great believer in the need of imagination to transform everything, otherwise we’ll have to take the world as we find it, and I don’t think we should. We should re-make the world…The madman does that…the psychopath does that…But the real job is to re-make the world is to re-make the world in a way that is meaningful.” (Ballard, in Metaphores #7, 1983)
