(no subject)
"Oh, brother," I muttered to myself as I turned away. Sometimes you just feel like Charlie Brown but a real one, not a two-dimensional black-and-white line drawing. Such is the totality of the rejection of everything that is "you." It's all part of it, though. The natural healing process that seems to take forever while experiencing but is summed up by a dismissive "Yeah, that was a fucked-up time for me" once it's finally over and done with."
"Over five years have passed since that visit, but I remember it like it was an hour ago: the slams of her tiny fists against that ugly barrier, her instinctual rage against it--the state-made blockade raised under the rubric of security, her hot tears. They haunt me."
"One of the most quintessential features of theists is the tendency to proclaim knowledge of some divine metaphysical “reality” when in fact such knowledge is completely absent and at best one is functioning on intuition, but more likely socialization. In order to be an atheist one must not make claims to know what they do not know, they may simply assert that one does not believe in what is purely speculative. This flaw in perception is quite common to theists in that consistently, if you read some of the works of modern religious apologists, you will find that theists succumb to viewing atheism through the theistic prism, but there is an entire separate paradigm at work that makes any such assertions crucially flawed. Essentially, the rebuttal to such an argument would be that not all claims are equally meretricious. Religion has not the intellectual merit to stand on equal footing with doubt."
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
"Over five years have passed since that visit, but I remember it like it was an hour ago: the slams of her tiny fists against that ugly barrier, her instinctual rage against it--the state-made blockade raised under the rubric of security, her hot tears. They haunt me."
"One of the most quintessential features of theists is the tendency to proclaim knowledge of some divine metaphysical “reality” when in fact such knowledge is completely absent and at best one is functioning on intuition, but more likely socialization. In order to be an atheist one must not make claims to know what they do not know, they may simply assert that one does not believe in what is purely speculative. This flaw in perception is quite common to theists in that consistently, if you read some of the works of modern religious apologists, you will find that theists succumb to viewing atheism through the theistic prism, but there is an entire separate paradigm at work that makes any such assertions crucially flawed. Essentially, the rebuttal to such an argument would be that not all claims are equally meretricious. Religion has not the intellectual merit to stand on equal footing with doubt."
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”