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Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing

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Pete Greig

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“ALL kinds of criminals, except infidels, meet death with reasonable serenity. As a rule, there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast any discredit on his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold, with a priest on either side, smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in heaven. The man who has succeeded in making his home a hell, meets death without a quiver, provided he has never expressed any doubt as to the divinity of Christ, or the eternal "procession" of the Holy Ghost. The king who has waged cruel and useless war, who has filled countries with widows and fatherless children, with the maimed and diseased, and who has succeeded in offering to the Moloch of ambition the best and bravest of his subjects, dies like a saint. All the believing kings are in heaven—all the doubting philosophers in perdition. All the persecutors sleep in peace, and the ashes of those who burned their brothers, sleep in consecrated ground. Libraries could hardly contain the names of the Christian wretches who have filled the world with violence and death in defence of book and creed, and yet they all died the death of the righteous, and no priest, no minister, describes the agony and fear, the remorse and horror with which their guilty souls were filled in the last moments of their lives. These men had never doubted—they had never thought—they accepted the creed as they did the fashion of their clothes. They were not infidels, they could not be—they had been baptized, they had not denied the divinity of Christ, they had partaken of the "last supper." They respected priests, they admitted that Christ had two natures and the same number of wills; they admitted that the Holy Ghost had "proceeded," and that, according to the multiplication table of heaven, once one is three, and three times one is one, and these things put pillows beneath their heads and covered them with the drapery of peace. They admitted that while kings and priests did nothing worse than to make their fellows wretched, that so long as they only butchered and burnt the innocent and helpless, God would maintain the strictest neutrality; but when some honest man, some great and tender soul, expressed a doubt as to the truth of the Scriptures, or prayed to the wrong God, or to the right one by the wrong name, then the real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon his victim, and from his quivering flesh tore his wretched soul.”

GodDeathEvilJusticeDoubtAtheismHypocrisyIntoleranceAgnosticism
Book:The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 3 (of 12) Dresden Edition—Lectures
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“Although it might often seem that we are living in the worst possible world – a prison planet or cosmic lunatic asylum, ruled over by Satan himself, or by Satanic forces – it is in fact the best possible world in the end. Why? Because it’s the only one that can deliver perfection – divinity. It’s the only one that transforms us into Gods. It does so via the most brutal and imperfect of all processes – the dialectic. The dialectic is the supreme “atom smasher”. It launches dialectical opposites at each other to generate the biggest explosions and bloodbaths possible. Over time, the cosmic carnage turns into something wondrously unexpected – conscious reason, which can then set about rationally resolving all conflicts, all dialectical differences, and thereby create an Omega Point of perfection. The dialectic involves unconscious reason struggling to become conscious, and it does so through the most brute force of means: the opposition of logical opposites, which is of course a highly rational process, if you rationally reflect upon it!”

PhilosophyEvilDialecticBest Of All Possible Worlds
Book:The Science of Monads
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