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Quote by Louis de Bernières

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Corelli’s Mandolin

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Louis de Bernières

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“The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behaviour at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad together. Now for the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, ‘make people good by Act of Parliament’, just because laws are man-made and therefore partake of the imperfect and self-contradictory nature of man. Humanly speaking, it is not true at all that ‘truly to know the good is to do the good’; it is far truer to say with St. Paul that ‘the evil that I would not, that I do’; so that the mere increase of knowledge is of very little help in the struggle to outlaw evil. The delusion of the mechanical perfectibility of mankind through a combined process of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for a great deal of heartbreak. It is, at bottom, far more pessimistic than Christian pessimism, because, if science and progress break down, there is nothing to fall back upon. Humanism is self-contained - it provides for man no resource outside himself.”

ChristianityProgressHuman NatureEvolutionEnlightenmentHumanismPessimism
Book:Creed or Chaos?: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster; Or, Why It Really Does Matter What You Believe
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“We do not need to eliminate religion, or let me be a bit articulate and say – we cannot eliminate religion from the human society, as long as there is misery and malnourishment in this world. God is nature’s antidote to misery, and religion is the capsule it comes in. And those who try to take away religion from the people, are simply fools - and the irony is, some of them are scientists, and quite brilliant ones in their fields. Religion is far too valuable in the human society, that’s why it has survived so long. So, we do not need to eliminate religion, but to make it evolve at par with our civilized conscience.”

PhilosophyGodReligionAtheismHuman NatureFundamentalismSecularismNeuropsychology
Book:Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human
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