| A sexy eden is preferable to a sexless heaven. This is why the vista of mortality is more delicious to contemplate than any vision of immortality. Bodily existence can satisfy; bodiless can't even tantalize. —Dwight Lyman |
esli Boga net — znachit, vsio pozvoleno May 29, 2006
Posted by Rastaban in : Ethics & Morality , add a commentWhile attempting to track down exact wording and attribution for Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” — which supposedly was uttered by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, I discovered David Cortesi’s assertion that the famous quote is not to be found in English translations of The Brothers Karamazov or in any of Dostoevsky’s novels. Cortesi suspects, instead, that the famous phrase comes from Sartre, who supposedly wrote
“The existentialist…finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven….Dostoevsky once wrote, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted,…” — www.science.wayne.edu/~mlee/antipsyc/duerf2.html
Even Christiaan Stange’s Doetoevsky Research Station website admits the uncertainty of the quote.
But apparently the phrase does occur in the novel’s original Russian (more…)
Christian ‘BattleCry’ to save America’s Soul
Posted by Rastaban in : Bush Wars,Christinsanity,State & Church , add a commentSunsara Taylor reports on a recent BattleCry rally of 17,000 young people in Philadelphia. BattleCry is Ron Luce’s effort to engage young Christians in order to return the United States to “Christian” values. Taylor reports,
‘A featured speaker, Franklin Graham, who delivered George Bush’s first inaugural prayer, was introduced. . . .
The “heart” of Graham’s speech was a call for holy war. He preached about the “battle for souls of men and women from North to South, East to West, over the entire earth.” There is, he declared, “No way to God but through Jesus Christ.”‘
Franklin Graham and Ron Luce seem to be off the same religious block as Charles Stanley, head of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who declared in a sermon that “God is in favor of war” during the propaganda run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (more…)
