The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud

“…all the gods of antiquity have been condensed. The people which first succeeded in thus concentrating the divine attributes was not a little proud of the advance. It had laid open to view the father who had all along been hidden behind every divine figure as its nucleus. Fundamentally this was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea of God. Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father. But if one had done so much for one’s father, one wanted to have a reward, or at least to be his only beloved child, his Chosen People. Very much later, pious America laid claim to being ‘God’s own Country’; and, as regards one of the shapes in which men worship the deity, the claim is undoubtedly valid.”

The idea of a small group being labeled God’s Chosen People has always weirded me out …
(just as the phrase ‘weirded me out’ weirds me out).

Does God play favorites? Regardless, it seems everybody just wants to be daddy’s favorite.

Tertullian

Credo quia absurdum

"I believe it because it is absurd"










Possibly taken from Tertullian's De Carne Christi

"Natus est Dei Filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est: et mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus credible est, quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossible"
or
"The Son of God was born: there is no shame, because it is shameful. And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is innapropriate. And, buried, He rose again: it is certain, because impossible"

without shame, because it is shameful
credible because it inapropiate...

a familiar train of thought?

Masquerade

This is an excerpt from Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History For Life

...the individual becomes timid and unsure and can no longer believe in itself. It sinks into itself, into the inner life. That means here only into the piled up mass of scholarly data which does not work towards the outside, instruction which does not become living. If we look for a moment out to the exterior, then we notice how the expulsion of instinct by history has converted people almost into nothing but abstractis [abstraction] and shadows. A man no longer gambles his identity on that instinct. Instead he masks himself as educated man, as scholar, as poet, as politician.

simone de beauvoir was a clever and thoughtful woman

What do you think?

“if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoevsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable. If it is claimed that, whatever the case may be, this earthly stake has no importance, this is precisely because one invokes that inhuman objectivity which we declined at the start. One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure. And if it is again said that nothing forces him to try to justify his being in this way, then one is playing upon the notion of freedom in a dishonest way. The believer is also free to sin. The divine law is imposed upon him only from the moment he decides to save his soul. In the Christian religion, though one speaks very little about them today, there are also the damned. Thus, on the earthly plane, a life which does not seek to ground itself will be a pure contingency. But it is permitted to wish to give itself a meaning and a truth, and it then meets rigorous demands within its own heart.”

First of all, this is not an attack on Australians but towards David Nason because he is an idiot.


Ok, so the NYC correspondent for The Australian is set up to have an interview with, as i see it, the greatest American writer alive today...and he hasn’t read any of his work!

“Three days before we're due to meet at a French restaurant, I haven't read a single word. So I mumble something apologetic and promise to devote the coming weekend to this task, before blurting out: "I should be right, mate, it's only a short book." This is a very dumb and potentially interview-crushing thing to say to an author, but thankfully Vonnegut doesn't seem to mind.”

He later gets into a debate with KV on suicide bombers where Vonnegut argues that we are not so different from them...and frankly I am surprised...usually Australians are more thoughtful, but hey, he’s the NYC correspondent...so he’s weird. Vonnegut is a humanist and a moralist. His word choice would be better understood if you had read some of his work.

He writes “At this point, I give up. I can't be bothered asking him about any of the things I'd thought about: his mother's suicide, how he raised his sister's kids, the great writers he knew and partied with, how he looks back on Dresden.”

Ok, so you were going into the interview with a great writer who is known for liking his privacy and normal living...and you have only read a short bio on him...and decide you would ask about these tender and cool subjects and write a touching article. Do you think he would go 50 years without having other idiots trying to write the same article? Whatever. I just needed to vent some feelings on this journalist who decides to bastardize a wonderful author when he is trying to help people see the world for what it is. So in the end it’s an article about how the book is discredited because it isn’t happy and the author sees good in even those people who happen to be enemies.

Full Article: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au
/common/story_page/0,5744,17256664%255E16947,00.html

I like Kurt Vonnegut

"WE DO DOODLEY DO,
DOODLEY DO, DOODLEY DO,
WHAT WE MUST,
MUDDILY MUST,
MUDDILY MUST,
MUDDILY MUST,
UNTIL WE BUST,
BODILY BUST,
BODILY BUST,
BODILY BUST.

BOKONON -Kurt Vonnegut