Tuesday, April 10, 2012
“Devout hedonist … agnostic … secular humanist. Seriously, I hate labels. Having been brainwashed from birth as a Calvinist, it took me years to shake my religion entirely. Until recently I still prayed on airplanes, more from rote habit than a belief that a supreme being would protect the tin can I was flying in. I lost my religion by degrees. The first step was witnessing the hypocrisy of the Christians around me as a child. The second was escaping the rigid subculture I grew up in and meeting secular folks who were much more moral and trustworthy than the Christians I was told to revere.”
Julia Scheeres - Author of Jesus Land and A Thousand Lives
“I came up with the title years before the “red state” connotation entered the popular lexicon. I picked the title Jesus Land because the book deals in specious facades, like the amusement park. Beneath the much-hyped “family values” morality of the Bible Belt, you’ll find child abuse, intolerance and racism. Given the rise of the Christian Right in America, I think my book’s exploration of this sanctimony is timely.”
Julia Scheeres - Author of Jesus Land and A Thousand Lives
Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres
Monday, March 5, 2012
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
-
Joshua:
You drill us every day in the same movements, we practice the same brush strokes over and over, we chant the same mantras, why? So that these actions will become natural, spontaneous, without being diluted by thought, right?
-
Gaspar:
Yes
-
Joshua:
Compassion is the same way. That's what the yeti knew. He loved constantly, instantly, spontaneously without thought or words. That's what he taught me. Love is not something you think about, it is a state in which you dwell. That was his gift.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
Sunday, January 22, 2012
“The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the “Tantum Ergo” before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Hep me not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do. Her mind began to get quiet and then epty but when the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it, she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, “I don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be.”
The child, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” by Flannery O’Connor
Monday, December 26, 2011
From the introduction to “The Philosophy of Spinoza”
no-hay-camino:
“Even if there were a cosmic drama—which there is not—man is too trivial to play in it a leading rôle. The free man knows all this; but his heart is tempered and strong. He can contemplate his place in the universe without bitterness and without fear. For the free man’s love, as his worship, flows from his knowledge of God.”
Am I a free man?
“The multitude, ever prone to superstition, and caring more for the shreds of antiquity than for eternal truths, pays homage to the Books of the Bible, rather than to the Word of God.”
Spinoza (via no-hay-camino)
Thursday, December 8, 2011
“And so the great evangelical disaster of 2012 is on the way. And here’s the supreme irony: the man the evangelicals who have hijacked the Republican Party hate most — President Obama — is a faithful married man, good father and professing Christian who has described his born-again experience in detail. But he’s “liberal,” black and perhaps “not born in America,” or a “Muslim,” or “communist,” or “the Antichrist,” or something else pretty terrible: actually Christ-like in his compassion for the poor!”
Google Reader (1000 )
Sunday, November 6, 2011
“As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith…Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Chose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, like, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlines you…You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for…Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self…But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say the thinking twice…This, is it not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?…For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.’s?”
p. 107, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Monday, September 12, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
“What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to Heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like?”
ASLEEP IN THE LORD
“If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely. But it was maybe asking too much to begin with Herb.”
ASLEEP IN THE LORD
Thursday, May 19, 2011
“I used to be such a burning example,
I used to be so original.
I used to care, I was being cared for.
Made sure I showed it to those that I love.
I used to sleep without a single stir,
‘Cause I was about my father’s work.
Well take me out tonight,
This ship of fools I’m on will sink.
A milestone around my neck,
Be my breath, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give.
I used to pray like God was listening.
I used to make my parents proud.
I was the glue that kept my friends together,
Now they don’t talk and we don’t go out.
I used to know the name of every person I’d kissed.
Now I made this bed and I can’t fall asleep in it.
”
“Millstone” by Brand New
