Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.
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¡Ay mísero de mí, y ay infelice!Apurar, cielos, pretendo,ya que me tratáis así,qué delito cometícontra vosotros naciendo.Aunque si nací, ya entiendoqué delito he cometido;bastante causa ha tenidovuestra justicia y rigor,pues el delito mayordel hombre es haber nacido.Sólo quisiera saberpara apurar mis desvelos-dejando a una parte, cielos,el delito del nacer-,¿qué más os pude ofender,para castigarme más?¿No nacieron los demás?Pues si los demás nacieron,¿qué privilegios tuvieronque no yo gocé jamás?
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Katja kneeled in the Parisian streets, shaking and weak from the pain in her head and heart. It had come a second ago—a vague vision from another decade, nearly forgotten by its sender and screaming with emotional turmoil. And only moments after she‟d fed. In the now decrepit walls of a place she once knew, she stared down at a child in despair. In the room where a man breathed his last and a young woman‟s sorrow grew, he lay weeping in a rage only the heart of all sorrow can know. Death and fear came off of him in waves as lightning shared the secret of the man inside the child—the man who would be her beginning and her end if she allowed it.
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Crossing the meadow, he came again to the mouth of the cave where he had stood so undecided only the twilight before. Knowing what he would find, he yet wanted the final confirmation. Pushing the evergreen branches aside from the smooth rock on the right side of the opening he found, deeply carved in the rock, an Ankh, Egyptian symbol of ever-lasting life, made possible only by the union of male and female. Partly covered by lichens, weather-worn by centuries of storm, it remained as he had seen it in his first dream. It was the first cross, and on it, generation by generation, humanity had crucified itself in order that future generations might live.("The God Wheel")
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When man subverted order he did a great deal more than merely fall away from the rationality of his nature, diminish his own humanity, which is all that he does in Aristostle's ethics, nor he did merely compromise his destiny by an error, as it happens in the Plathonic myths; he brought disorder into the divine order, and presents the unhappy spectacle of a being in revolt against Being. [...] Every time a man sins he renews this act of revolt and prefers himself to God; in thus preferring himself, he separates himself from God; and in separating himself, he deprives himself of the sole end in which he can find beatitude and by that very fact condemns himself to misery.
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God wants man to be His creature. Furthermore, He wants him to be His PARTNER. There is a causa Dei in the world. God wants light, not darkness. He wants cosmos, not chaos. He wants peace, not disorder. He wants man to administer and to receive justice rather than to inflict and to suffer injustice. He wants man to live according to the Spirit rather than according to the flesh. He wants man bound and pledged to Him rather than to any other authority. He wants man to live and not to die. Because He wills these things God is Lord, Shepherd, and Redeemer of man, who in His holiness and mercy meets His creature; who judges and forgives, rejects and receives, condemns and saves.
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To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.
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Oh, how an animal that is hurt looks up at you, John! An animal’s actions can inform you if it is in pain. It don’t hop and jump around as usual. No. You find a sad, crouching, cringing, small bunch of fur or hair, whining, and plainly asking you to aid it. It isn't hard to find out what is wrong, John; any man or woman who would pass by such a sight, just isn't worth knowing. I just can’t withstand it! Why, I think that not only animals, but plants can know pain. I carry a drink to many a poor, thirsty growing thing; or, if it is torn up I put it kindly back, and fix its soil up as comfortably as I can. Anything that is living, John, is worthy of Man’s aid.
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How good is it to remember one's insignificance: that of a man among billions of men, of an animal amid billions of animals; and one's abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in comparison with Sirius and others, and one's life span in comparison with billions on billions of ages. There is only one significance, you are a worker. The assignment is inscribed in your reason and heart and expressed clearly and comprehensibly by the best among the beings similar to you. The reward for doing the assignment is immediately within you. But what the significance of the assignment is or of its completion, that you are not given to know, nor do you need to know it. It is good enough as it is. What else could you desire?
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I have hated you in every hour that has gone by, I hate you so that I would happily give my life for your death, and happily go to my own doom if only I could witness yours, take you with me into the depths. When I let this hate free, I am almost overcome by it, but I cannot change this and do not really know how it could be otherwise. Let no one deprecate this, nor fool himself about the power of such hatred. Hate drives to reality. Hate is the father of the action. The way out of our defiled and desecrated house is through the command to hate Satan. Only so will be earn the right to search in the darkness for the way of love.In our hatred, we are like bees who must pay with their lives for the use of their stingers.
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Well, God be with you,’ she said as she finally left him. ’I’m sure He is,’ he replied. She gave a start. ’Are you certain of that?’’He has every reason to be. Obviously He’s Lord over all Creation, but it can’t be anything special to be god of animals and mountains. It’s really us human beings that make Him what He is. So why shouldn’t He be with us?’Having delivered this impressive speech, Rolandsen looked rather pleased with himself. The curate’s wife would be puzzling over him as she walked home. Ha-ha, it was not so surprising that the little dome resting on his shoulders should have made such a great invention after all! But now the cognac had arrived.
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For this reason the gentleman will employ a man on a distant mission and observe his degree of loyalty, will employ him close at hand and observe his degree of respect. He will hand him troublesome affairs and observe how well he manages them, will suddenly ask his advice and observe how wisely he answers. He will exact some difficult promise from him and see how well he keeps it, turn over funds to him and see with what benevolence he dispenses them, inform him of the danger he is in and note how faithful he is to his duties. He will get him drunk with wine and observe how well he handles himself, place him in mixed company and see what effect beauty has upon him. By applying these nine tests, you may determine who is the unworthy man.
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God abides in men""God abides in men,These are men who are simple,they are fields of corn...Such men have mindslike wide grey skies,they have the grandeurthat the fools call emptiness.God abides in men.Some men are not simple,they live in citiesamong the teeming buildings,wrestling with forcesas strong as the sun and the rain.Often they must forgo dream upon dream...Christ walks in the wildernessin such lives.God abides in men,because Christ has put onthe nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.He has put on everyone's life...to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...Christ has put on Man's nature,and given him back his humanness...God abides in man.
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Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not.
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Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically "meaningful," while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the "meaningless." Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man. Positivist man and Existentialist man are no doubt offspring of the same parent epoch, but, somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are divided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice they make of their own being.
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