A Collection of Delightful
Irreverence
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If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountains, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot
--Nanao Sakaki, 1966 Kyoto
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Years ago, my mother gave me a bullet.
I put it in my breast pocket. Two years after that I was walking
down the street when a berserk evangelist heaved a Gideons Bible
out a hotel-room window, hitting me in the chest. The Bible would
have gone through my heart if it wasn't for the bullet.
--Woody Allen
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I have some obsesssion with how God exists.
Is he an essential god or an existential god; is he all-powerful
or is he, too, an embattled existential creature who may succeed
or fail in his vision?
--Norman Mailer
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FUTURE WAR
by D.H.Lawrence
After our industrial civilisation has broken,
and
the civilisation of touch has begun
war will cease, there will be no more wars.
The heart of man, in so far as it is budding, is
budding warless
and budding towards infinite variety, variegation
and where there is infinite variety, there is no
interest in war.
Oneness, makes war, the obsession of oneness.
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Before Buddha or Jesus spoke, the nightingale
sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into
oblivion, the nightingale will sing. Because it is neither preaching
nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing.
--D. H. Lawrence
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The world, and
whatever that be which we call the heavens, by the vault of which
all things are enclosed, we must conceive to be a deity, to be
eternal, without bounds, neither created nor subject at any time
to destruction. To inquire what is beyond it is no concern of
man; nor can the human mind form any conjecture concerning it.
--Pliny the Elder, 23-79 A.D.
Book ii. Sect. 1. |
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Famous
Commentaries On The Bible |
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to Spider |
Guidelines
For Enlightenment |
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I am myself a dissenter from all
known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief
will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious
belief has been a force for good . . . . I regard it as belonging
to the infancy of human reason . . . .
That man is the product of causes which had no provision of the
end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes,
his fears, his loves, his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental
collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity
of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the
grave; that all the labors of the ages, all devotions, all the
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system,
and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably
be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these
things, if not beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that
no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within
the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation
of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be
safely built . . . .
To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness
of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things
-- this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship.
--Bertrand Russell
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"As to the Christian system of faith,
it appears to me as a species of
atheism; a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe
in a man
rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of man-ism
with but
little deism, and is as near to atheism as twilight is to darkness."
--Thomas Paine
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