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Abhijit Naskar

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“We don't need to believe in a grand design to be good people, but we do need to be good people to create a grand design. It's neither about atheism, nor about the so-called religiousness - rather it's about plain, ordinary humanness.”

“And yet, and yet; it is a strange dance that the Fool must learn as he encounters the Devil on his path. Like the serpent who offered Eve the fruit of knowledge, or Samuel who seduced Lilith away from paradise, all knowledge comes from darkness, and so we are drawn towards it. But darkness and evil are not the same thing. We go to the darkness willingly, so we can, as Cormac McCarthy wrote, “learn how to carry the fire”, but sojourn too long and we open the door to forces we may not be able to pry ourselves from. Indifference, doubt and scepticism form, as Kelly Braffet describes, the “logic that the Devil likes most”, to trap us into the conviction not just of the absence of evil, but more cynically, the non-existence of virtue. Thomas Aquinas rather beautifully defined sloth as "sorrow about spiritual good", for perhaps it is not that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is to convince the world that he doesn’t exist” (Baudelaire), but rather the far superior and more hellish of hoaxes, that God doesn’t either.”

“What saves me is people. Strangers. Old women. Shopkeepers. Young lovers and milkmen doing their rounds and window cleaners with ladders fixed on top of their vans. Individuals oblivious to one another and yet, in a way, they act like insurance. An invisible web. Nothing too bad will happen on the street of a small town like this because people are everywhere. If something heinous occurs, then it's likely to be short-lived. Terrible acts are more difficult to conceal in a place like this. Someone will eventually step in or call the police. Horrors can still take place, but people look after people even though they might never think of it that way.”