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Quote by François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận

“644 Every day the press emphasizes sensational events and political upheavals. You should be aware of these events in order to share in humanity’s anxieties. These should have a positive effect. They should urge you to build a new world in which the press will not find such events to report on. You have to build the kingdom of God right now in this world with all the means at your disposal.”

Quote by François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận

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The Road of Hope: A Gospel from Prison

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François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận

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“The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We’re all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else’s affair. In our societies, the state has a monopoly on good. In order for a society to function in even the most basic way, the state has to have a monopoly on violence – but even more crucial is for the state to have a monopoly on good.”

“he economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality, as economics is.”

“One of the six components of every endogroup is an existential threat from external forces. Another is an identity which enables exclusive membership. An empire which includes everyone cannot be exclusive or have plausibly threatening external forces. If there is no external threat, the equally inherent human tendency to egalitarianism creates a counter force which will dismantle any endogroup power structures created in times of emergency.”

“An endogroup, as explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, is an emergency power structure that humans instinctually create and support in response to external threat. A mono-empire has no external endogroup to act as an existential threat and so a mono-empire cannot form or maintain its defensive structure. It dissolves even as it attempts to form.”