SCHOLAR ISLAND
SIN, EVIL AND MISERY
I am Jehovah, and there is none else;
Former of light, and Creator of darkness
Maker of peace, and Creator of evil:
I, Jehovah, am Maker of all these.
Isa.45:6-9
"Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent."
-C.G. Jung
"People somehow fend off righteousness."
-Euripides, Hippolytus 93
"We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good; and it is well to accustom ourselves to profit by the evil which is so common, while that which is good is so rare."
-Blaise Pascal
"We ought never do wrong when people are looking."
-mark Twain
"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to so cannot, or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?"
-Epicurus ,300 B.C.
"As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky The brothers Karamazov
"Terrible is the temptation to be good."
-Berthold Brecht
"We scare ever hear any thing from (such moralists) of the bright Side of Humane Nature. They never talk of any kind instincts;, of natural affections to associate; of natural Affections, or Compassion, Of Love of Company, a Sense of Gratitude, a Determination to honour and love the Authors of any good Offices toward any Part of Mankind, as well as of those toward our selves; and of a natural Delight Men take in being esteem'd and honour'd by others for good Actions: which yet all may be observ'd to prevail exceedingly in humane Life."
-Francis Hutcheson
"Every degree of luxury hath some connection with evil."
-John Woolman American Quaker
'The seven deadly sins......Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift these seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted."
-G.B. Shaw
"I recently viewed the History Channel series on the seven deadly sins, that 1,600 year-old inventory of our universal shortcomings, pride, anger, envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, and lust.
I was surprised to learn that most philosophers and theologians consider sloth the single most insidious vice's I'd always thought sloth was one of the more amiable weaknesses. Does lounging front of ESPN with a bag of Doritos really constitute a great moral failure?
But the spiritual meaning of sloth is not laziness. It's apathy, hardness of heart, moral indifference, blindness, complacency, and "smallness of soul." Poverty, injustice and suffering exist, in part because we don't act. Sloth is the category that encompasses everything we should do but don't..."
-Alexander Green
Beyond Wealth: The road map to a rich life
"Hypocrisy, as a concept, required this boost. It's been the pariah among late-twentieth-century sins. The Seven Deadlies have all been fashionable. Envy and Covetousness in the Reagan administration. Anger whenever it's convenient to swat Saddam Hussein. And then there's Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony, or, as we call them these days, 'getting in touch with your sexuality," raising your self-esteem," "relaxation therapy" and "being a recovered bulimic." Accuse a person of breaking all Ten commandments, and you've written the promo blurb for the dustcover of his tell-all memoir. Call somebody a sleaze and you've hired him as your lawyer. But everyone is ashamed of the hypocrite tag.
Perhaps this is part of the cult of authenticity to which we orthodontically corrected, surgically enhanced, pompadour implanted, and Prozac-ed moderns adhere. Or maybe informing significant others that they look like hell and need to diet is simply more fun that clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. Hypocrisy is "the vice of vices," declared Hannah Arendt, supposedly one of the most prominent moral philosophers of our time.
"Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core," Arendt said that-and so did a whole bunch of teenage daughters dressed in black, with pierced eyebrows, stamping their platform shoes on the Idea kilim in the open-plan kitchen and shrieking, "You and Mom did drugs! You and Mom screwed around! You are such hypocrites!"
-P.J. O'Rourke
The Ceo of the Sofa
"Our envy of others devours us most of all."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind."
-William Shenstone
"Envy, mockery, contempt, anger, revenge, and the other affects which are related to hatred or arise from it, are evil."
-Baruch Spinoza
"A hypocrite is a person who-but who isn't?"
-Don marquis
"We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life."
-Franz Kafka
"In theory, since he is omnipotent, God can do anything he wants. He can, if he chooses, commit gross acts of evil: The Lord made everything for a purpose, even the wicked for an evil day' (Prov. 16:4) but most religious minds refuse to accept that. How can he create evil, they ask, for he is infinitely good? Abelard and John Wycliffe were both condemned (respectively at the Councils of Sens and Constance) for suggesting that God's power was limited by his goodness and this limitation prevented him, of necessity, from creating goodness and this limitation prevented him, of necessity, from creating evil. To avoid similar condemnations others have found subtler ways round. Augustine, for instance, judged that God 'would never all any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself' (Enchiridion, 11:3) but this ignores the crucial question: Where did evil actually come from in the first place if it was not created by God?
Augustine looked into it and flunked: 'I sought whence evil comes and there is no solution" (Confessions,7,7:11). One hundred years later the Roman philosopher Boethius thought he had solved the problem by declaring that evil cannot really exist at all: "Is there nothing than an omnipotent God can not do?" he asked, "No." "Then can God do evil?" "No." "So that evil is nothing, since that is what He cannot do who can anything"' (Consolation of Philosophy).
In trying to absolve God in this way, Boethius may have been guilty of the sin of blasphemy, for the Lord himself refutes Boethius in the book of Isaiah: 'I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things' (Isa.45:7). There is an alternative solution but nobody wants to give it a go: scrap the predicate 'infinitely good' and the problem disappears-jus' like that!"
-Alexander Waugh
GOD
"One must be positively blind not to see the colossal role that evil plays in the world. Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention men would have been lost."
-C.G. Jung
"It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons."
-Henry Miller
"God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills to permit evil to be done; and this is a good."
-Thomas Aquinas
"Evil is thought to abound on earth. But if you could see the plan of Providence, you would not think there was evil anywhere."
-Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy
"The goodness in human nature is in its suitability and aptitude for grace and that goodness can never be lost, not even by sin."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas
"Is (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able?
then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing?
then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing?
whence then is evil?"
-David Hume
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it was necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?....Socrates taught us know thyself.
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
"If you are ready for some radical-and possibly disturbing-self-knowledge, you might undertake an assessment of you L.Q.-love quotient. How much does the desire to be a more loving person figure in your life? How wide or narrow is the circle of those you love? How many of your daily activities are suffused with feelings of love? Which of the many varieties of love do you practice? (For suggestions, consult "Love" in Roget's Thesaurus)
Sam Keen
Hymns to An Unknown God
"the more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy or law-abiding citizen....He will become a compulsive wrongdoer."
-Dr. Albert Ellis quoted Time ,Sept 14, 1959
"How does one attain this quality of love? Anything you do will only make it forced, cultivated and therefore phony, for love cannot be forced. There is nothing you can do. But there is something you can drop. Observe the marvelous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good and bad, as saints and sinners and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant. You must drop your false belief that people can sin in awareness. No one can sin in the light of awareness. Sin occurs, not as we mistakenly think, in malice, but in ignorance. "Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing."
Anthony De Mello S.J.
The Way to Love
"There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman."
-Pythagoras
"Because thou has harkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou Shalt not eat of it, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life....In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
Genesis 3:17-19
* Ed note...God did not tell Eve not to eat of the tree
"TO RAISE the subject of SIN is to provoke the interest and usually the humor of everyone: it is also to discover how limited is the range of humor on the subject. People seem compelled to try to be funny about sin, but the jokes are only variations on the theme that sin is fun, and of course that Lust especially is fun. There are some attempts at merriment about Gluttony, and to a lesser extent about Avarice and Sloth, but there the humor begins to falter. No one seems able to take Envy lightly, the thought of anger is discomfiting, and that Pride is counted a sin causes mainly bewilderment! Everyone is responding differently to the "warm, disreputable" sins and to the "cold, respectable " ones..............."
-Henry Fairlie
The Seven Deadly Sins Today
"Mankind heads for sin and misery as predictably as flames
shoot upwards from a fire. "Job 5:7
"Sin is seeing your life through somebody else's eyes."
-Sebastian Moore
"I do not understand my own actions....I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what i do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells in me."
-St. Paul
"Curiosity is the beginning of all sin."
-Bernard of Clarivaux
"Selfishness is the root and source of all natural and moral evils."
-Emmons
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil."
-Douglas Hofstadter
"I begin to think that the only real sin is suicide or not being oneself."
-Sir John Woodroffe
"Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint increasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin."
-Franz Kafka
"All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride."
-Sophocles
"....all men make mistakes But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only Crime is pride."
-Sophocles
"The nymph still looks at herself and admires herself in the water, as she has done since the beginning of time. Long before Hubris entered Arcadia, the terrible intoxication was known. The graves crimes, the most senseless adventures have sprung from the self-regarding gaze, and though we make poetry of pride in the West, and pretend to ourselves that there are some forms of pride which are legitimate and others which are not so, the most deathly instrument placed in the hands of man remains the mirror."
-Robert Payne
Hubris: A Study of Pride
"Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men.....The good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him."
-Plato
"Sin is, has been, and ever shall be the parent of misery."
-Carlyle
"All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation."
-W.H. Auden
"Sin is the canoe that will land you in hell."
-Hawaiian Proverb
"We are too Christian really to enjoy sinning, and too fond of sinning really to enjoy Christianity. Most of us know perfectly well what we ought to do; our trouble is that we do not want to do it."
-Peter Marshall
"We should admit that we love evil too much to give it up."
-Gandhi
"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.....they do not mean to do harm....they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."
-T.S. Eliot
Sin, by its deadly infusions into the soul of man, wastes and eats out the innate vigor of the soul, and casts it into such a deep lethargy, as that it is not able to recover itself."
J. Smith
"You are all sinners in the hands of an angry God."
-Jonathan Edwards
"Sin cannot be undone, only forgiven."
-Igor Stravinsky
"The worst sins of men are spiritual."
C.S. Lewis
"There is only one sin-lack of love.
Be brave, be capable of loving,
even if love seems a terrible and treacherous thing.
Find joy in love. Find joy in victory.
Follow the dictates of your heart."
-Paulo Coelho
"God's love for poor sinners is very wonderful, but God's patience with ill-natured saints is a deeper mystery."
-Henry Drummond
"The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither."
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
"To be aware of what one has done amiss, and to blame one's self, is the part of a righteous man; but to be insensible to such things causes still more grievous evils to the soul, and the conduct of wicked men."
Philo of Alexandria
"Sin has been made not only ugly but pass�. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or, more particularly sick."
-Phyllis McGinley
'Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue."
-Moliere
"Finally, why does evil excite us so? Everyone feels its silky lure. Most of us-maybe just that one time-have blown a Commandment, lost our way, gone too far in the blurry hours after midnight. And no wonder: Evil seduces with promises of passion and excess0of transcendence over the merely physical and rational and present. It guarantees perfection, as the serpent did to Eve, which is why the figures of Dracula and de Sade and Hitler and Manson not only terrify and enrage but also beckon. "Evil" may sound like an echo from a bygone, candlelit era. Yet it can still send shivers down a modern spine-shivers of fear, shivers of delight."
William hart
Evil A Primer: A History of a Bad Idea From Beelzebub to Bin Laden
"No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
z
"Tis very strange Men should be so fond
of being thought wickeder than they are."
-Daniel Defoe
A System of Magic
"There are several good protections against Temptation, but the surest is cowardice."
-Mark Twain
"There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish; to bewail it senseless."
-W. Somerset Maugham
"Evil is the quiet acceptance of that which we know to be wrong. Noncooperation with evil is a Christian duty."
-Jim Wallis
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they had no good in them."
La RocheFoucauld
"Covenant breaking or betrayal of trust is the greatest of all sins."
Keith Intrater
"It is all over for priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such-it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, seed of all sin, the original sin."
-Nietzsche
"A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in time of trouble."
-Adlai Stevenson
"Who has not falsified, misstated, misquoted, misinterpreted, glossed over, disguised, colored, varnished, dressed up, embroidered, exaggerated, invented, trumped up, fudged, or doctored the truth? Who has not equivocated, quibbled, fenced, beat about the bush, dissembled, dissimulated, feigned, simulated, deceived, or malingered? Who has not been hypocritical, mendacious, artful, political, tricky, cunning, wily, sly, or faithless? Show me a man who denies all of this behavior, and you show me a liar!
Arnold Ludwig
The Importance of Lying
"It is easy to see the faults of others,
but difficult to see one's own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one's own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice."Buddha
"Though the west is still nominally Christian we have come
to be governed in practice by, the unholy triumvirate. . . -
Pluto (wealth) , Apollo (science) and Mercury (god of thieves) ."
Robert Graves
"What is sin?. . .We know the word and the practice, but the
sense and the knowledge of sin have been lost. Perhaps that is itself damnation, God-forsakenness, meaninglessness."Kafka
"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation."
-W.H. Auden
"Never preen yourself
that you are prideless:
for pride is more invisible
than an ant's footprint
on a black stone
in the dark of night.
Jami (1414-1492)
"If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, you are very conceited indeed."
-C.S. Lewis
"If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride."
-G.K. Chesterton
"Between the thirteenth and the nineteenth century one may sum up the change in the moral climate by saying that the seven deadly sins became the seven cardinal virtues. All the practices of the worldly life, which had hitherto been banned by the Church, were now either tacitly sanctioned or actively stimulated. Avarice ceased to be a sin: the minute attention to the care of worldly goods, the hoarding of pennies, the unwillingness to spend one�s surplus on others-all these habits were useful for capital saving. Greed, gluttony, avarice, envy, and luxury were constant incentives to industry: without envy, the potential enterpriser might be content with his lot in life instead of trying to climb out of it. Riches now acquired sanctity: they opened the gates of the Kingdom, they furnished the power, they created the glory. The Catholic church itself put no bridle on its own wants: it rather succumbed faster than any other institution to the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. One must not forget that it was partly to pay Raphael and Michelangelo that simony and indulgences flourished In Rome."
Lewis Mumford
The Condition of Man
"If it were once conceded that the act of disobedience (the Fall) was the seizing of power over fire, which is apparently essential to all material progress, then Man was irrevocably set on a course of irreversible progressions towards his own destruction. You cannot "uninvent" an invention. It is not so much a taint in the blood as a process, which once begun cannot be stopped. If anyone doubts the power of fire, let him look around-at the bricks of his house, the clothes on his back, the nails that hold his shoe-leather, his supper on the hearth. He could never wish to be without these amenities, but scientific discovery cannot be halted, and much of it leads to warfare and destruction. There is an inevitability about the progression of scientific knowledge, and if it leads to a holocaust the important thing will be, not the death of one person or of many or of millions, for "as in Adam all die" so must we all die. The important thing is in what frame of mind we meet our end."
Flavia Anderson
The Ancient Secret
"If it were all so simple!
If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds,
and it were necessary only to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
"Evil is a lack, a deficiency, a weakness, a disproportion, an error, purposeless, unlovely, lifeless, unwise, unreasonable, imperfect, unreal, causeless, indeterminate, sterile, inert, powerless, disordered, incongruous, indefinite, dark, unsubstantial, and never in itself possessed of any existence whatever"
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. (around 500 C.E.)
"That Calvinistic sense of innate depravity and original sin from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking minds is always and wholly free."
Herman Melville
"According to Christian teachings, the normal collective state of humanity is one of "original sin" Sin is a word that has been greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Literally translated from the ancient Greek in which the New Testament was written, to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence. It means to live unskillfully, blindly, and thus to suffer and cause suffering. Again, the term, stripped of its cultural baggage and misinterpretations, points tot he dysfunction inherent in the human condition."
-Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth
"...it is false that the "Adamic" myth is the keystone of the Judeo-Christian edifice; it is only a flying buttress, articulated upon the ogival crossing of the Jewish penitential spirit. With even more reason, original sin, being a rationalization of the second degree, is only a false column. The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity, first by the literal interpretation of the story of Adam, and then by the confusion of this myth, treated as history, with later speculations, principally Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told. In asking the faithful to confess belief in this mythicospeculative mass and to accept it as a self-sufficient explanation, the theologians have unduly required a sacrficium intellectus where what was needed was to awaken believers to a symbolic super-intelligence of their actual condition."
Paul Ricoeur
The Symbolism of Evil
"Perhaps the power of this archaic story, from which Christians have inferred a moral system, lies in its blatant contradiction of everyday experience."
Elaine Pagels
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent
"Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes"
-George Bernard Shaw
"What has been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the word of him who said, �Woe unto those who laugh here?�.He did not love enough: else he would also have loved us who laugh."
Nietzsche
How mankind must struggle. A man�s life is long and hard,
Job 7: 1
"It is our own vanity that makes the vanity of others intolerable to us."
La Rochefoucauld
"A man who is not a fool can rid himself of every folly except vanity."
Rousseau
"I had no idea what good and evil were, and whatever was allowed seemed fine to me. But the lower I sink into this inhumanly cruel world, the more I respond to those who, even in
such a world, speak to my conscience."Nerzhin (a character in The
First Circle - Solzhenitsyn)
"Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate�."
Bertrand Russell
"It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and thirst and hunger don't claw at your sides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger. After all, you simply do not know; it might be your last act."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"
H.D. Thoreau
"The evil man is he who is consistently evil, who is sick in body, who is not master of his own body, who frets about his daily bread, is not at peace with his household, who neglects his talents and the good things that are his. That man is consistently evil who is always miserable. The man who is sick in body is he who is also sick in soul. The man man who is not master of his own body is he in whose body the Lie is violently active. The man who frets about his daily bread is he who is dissatisfied with whatever comes his way. The man who is not at peace with his household is he who ill maintains the fires, water, cattle, and men over whom he exercises authority. The man who neglects his talents and the good things that are his , is the man who does not do his own job."
Zoroaster
"Cruelty is, perhaps the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty."
G.K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
"Weak men are apt to be cruel, because they stick at nothing that may repair the ill effect of their mistakes."
Halifax
"Cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity."
Chesterfield
"People hate those who make them feel their own inferiority."
Chesterfield
"Man today is unclean and impure�.He cannot distinguish between the base and the Sublime, between eroticism and Poetry."
Antonin Artaud 1932
"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
Albert Camus
"Consider how difficult it is to tell the truth about oneself-the unpleasant truth; to admit that one is petty, vain, mean, frustrated, tortured, unfaithful, and unsuccessful�..if you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
Virginia Woolf
"Envy, malice, and jealousy are like a three-headed witch astride a single broom. Where you find one you will see the other two. This broom is rarely in its corner. Busily it stirs up a thick cloud of dust. It creates an allergy against one�s fellows. Sometimes the symptoms are recognizable; at other times the discomfort is unrecognized even by one who harbors them."
Peter J. Steincrohn M.D.
"Sin is geographical."
Bertrand Russell
"Our moral improvements has reached its finish, and our intellect grows by leaps and bounds."
Ann Rice
Memnoch the devil
"We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws. Ready to spring out at the first real opportunity."
Isadora Duncan
"What kind of man doesn't want to break the Ten Commandments?"
G.K. Chesterton
"The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood."
Thomas Jefferson 1816
"The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) listed the "varieties of disgust with life: (all sins, of course) as sorrow, laziness, weariness, spiritual negligence, lack of joy in general and particularly in prayer, despair in general and particularly of one�s own salvation, doubt, grief , tedium, and hatred of life. These were actually elaborations of Cassians concept of acedia, a state of mind representing the need to avoid anxiety and not care!"
Karl Menninger M.D.
The Crime of Punishment
"O blessed conceit, what should we be without you?"
Rudyard Kipling
"Vice is perhaps the desire to know everything."
Honore De Balzac
"Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots."
J. Petit-Senn
"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them."
G.B. Shaw
"Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise; because of impatience we cannot return."
Kafka
"As a matter of fact the sense of sin, so far from being a cause of a good life, is quite the reverse. It make a man unhappy and it makes him feel inferior. Being unhappy, he is likely to make claims upon other people which are excessive and which prevent him from enjoying happiness in personal relations. Feeling inferior, he will have a grudge against those who seem superior. He will find admiration difficult and envy easy. He will become a generally disagreeable person and will find himself more and more solitary�."
Bertrand Russell
The Conquest of Happiness
"A man must see and study his vice to correct it; they who conceal it from others, commonly conceal it from themselves; and do not think it close enough, if they themselves see it: they withdraw and disguise it from their own consciences: Quare vitia sua nemo confieteur? Quia etiam nunc illis est; somnium narrare, vigilantis est. (Why does no man confess his vices? Because he is yet in them; 'tis for a waking man to tell his dream.) The diseases of the body explain themselves by their increase; we find that to be the gout, which we call a rheum or strain; the diseases of the soul, the greater they are, keep themselves the most obscure; the most sick are the least sensible."
-Montaigne
"Whatever you condemn, you have done yourself."
George Groddeck
"To have sinned means that you are convinced, in some mysterious way, what you have done will bring misfortune on you in the future; that it has broken some mysterious law of harmony, and is a link in a chain of past and future discords."
Pavese
"There is no vice truly a vice which is not offensive, and
which a sound judgment does not condemn; for its ugliness and painfulness is so apparent that perhaps the people are right who say it is chiefly produced by stupidity and ignorance. So hard it is to imagine anyone knowing it without hating it. "Montaigne 1580
"Words come and go but many of the things they symbolize in
human experience remain. The word ' sin' sounds archaic, outmoded, and of ill-repute to the modern ear. Yet the type of human behavior it describes persists. Clothed in other words, like those of the immortal Shakespeare , sin strikes home as a considerable part of everyone's life. If to do were as easy to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men' s cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teachings. The brain may devise laws for the blood; but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree."(Portia to Nerissa,
Act 1, scene II)
Merchant of Venice
"Since the day of Creation two veiled figures, doubt and Melancholy have been pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world."
"What humanity needs is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy
on the day of judgment. "Conrad
"I.....create evil"
(Isa 45:7)
The sublimation of evil is precisely the function of religion.
Weyzacker
"It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical' that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface."
Hannah Arendt
"Evil is unspectacular and always human/ And shares our bed and eats at our own table."
W.H. Auden
"The Jews know hardly anything of a hell that might await
them. There hell is a personal dissatisfaction with themselves if they are mediocre. "Saul Bellow
"Man should avoid sin not alone from a utilitarian fear of
punishment but primarily because sin gives the lie to his own eternal nature, that nature of which our conscience is the expression.Unrestrained and objectless freedom, derived of God and his
grace and degenerating into self-will, ceases to be capable of making a choice and is handled about in opposite directions.' Then is the time that the two selves appear in a man and his personality is cloven apart. Nothingness is imminent in evil. The divided man can find salvation nowhere but in the second, final freedom, freedom in the grace and truth of Christ. To mend that inner cleavage and banish that nightmare of Satan a man must make a definite choice, and choose being itself.""One of the reasons that Dostoevsky may appear to be a
dangerous writer is that he must be read only in an atmosphere of spiritual manhood."The torments of a man ' s conscience are more frightening
than the severities of a whole code of law, and he looks at his legal punishment as a relief from his moral torture. He teaches plainly that evil is not a thing to be juggle with, that it is madness to think that a man can deliberately enter on a course of wickedness to get what he can out of and then throw himself into the arms of good: such an argument cannot be taken seriously and indicates a worthless state of mind. Certainly the tragic experience of evil can profit a man and sharpen his understanding, certainly he cannot thereafter return to his former state of development; but when a sinning man begins to think that evil is enriching him, that it is leading to good, that it is only a stage in progress, from that moment he has fallen completely; he goes all to pieces and every door to improvement and regeneration is closed to him."-Berdyaev
"The dream of destroying evil is only a reflection of the sense
of despair which comes from loss of faith."Of the Divine Omnipotence and man's free will, of the
origin of evil, and other subjects which have distracted the spiritual philosopher in every age, Swedenborg presents rational and adequate explanations. He shows that there is no real conflict between Omnipotence and free-will. Although God is all-powerful, He does not operate arbitrarily, but by law; and it is part of the Divine law that man shall be free in spiritual matters. He is held in equilibrium between forces of good and of evil, and must make his choice between them. At the same time the ability and will to do good are from the Lord alone though it is given to man to feel that they are from himself. All he can do, however, is to dispose his mind and heart to receive the Divine influences. The origin of evil is in man's free-will, which enables him to pervert the Divine blessings; all evil is the perversion of what was once "very good . "Geobridgeorge Tr
Swedenborg, Life & Teachings
"Evil, Theodorus, can never pass away, for there must always be an opposite to good. It has no place in heaven, so of necessity it haunts the mortal nature and this earthly sphere. Therefore we ought to escape from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and the way to escape is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and the way to become like him is to become holy, good, and wise..."
Plato (Theaetetus)
SIN (vanity)
"Many a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly.
Fascinated they stand in front. They are absorbed, separated from reality alone with their dearest vice, vanity. However readily they spread out all other vices for all, they keep this one secret and disown it even before their most intimate friends. "Rose Selavy
(Marcel Duchamp
"It is not where sinfulness is most talked about that
its seriousness is most forcibly taught. There is not much about it in the Sermon on the Mount. But thanks to the longing for freedom from sin and for purity of heart which Jesus has enshrined in the Beatitudes, these form the great call to repentance which is unceasingly working on man. "Albert Schweitzer
Out of my Life & Work
"What has so far been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the
word of him who said, "Woe unto those who laugh here?.. ..He did not love enough: else he Would also have loved us who laugh. But he hated and mocked us howling and gnashing of teeth he promised us...Laughter I have pronounced holy; you higher men, learn to laugh. "Neitzsche
"He who has done ill and talks about it and thinks about it all the time does not cast the base thing he did out of his thoughts; and whatever one thinks, therein one is, one's soul is wholly and utterly in what one thinks, and so he dwells in baseness. he will certainly not be able to turn, for his spirit will grow coarse and his heart stubborn, and in addition to this he may be overcome by gloom. What would you? Rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-it will always be muck. Have I sinned, or have I not sinned -what does Heaven get out of it? In the time I am brooding over it I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven. That is why it is written: "Depart from evil and do good"-turn wholly away from evil, do not dwell upon it, and do good. You have done wrong? Then counteract it by doing right."
Rabbi of Ger
"WE all do stand in the front ranks of the battle every moment of our lives."
Thoreau
"And now here is the night with its false promise of sleep, its wind
leafing through the grass, its vacant spaces between stars, its endless memory of a world going down like a stag."Ed Hirsh
"There are three things which continually grow less. darkness, falsehood,
and death. There are three which constantly increase: light, life, and truth. "Druidic saying
"There are three kinds of lies / lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Mark Twain
"An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie..."
-Alexander Pope
"Curiosity is the beginning of all sin."
Bernard of Clarivaux's motto
"Misfortunes one can endure-they come from outside; they are accidents.
but to suffer for one's one faults-ah, there is the sting of life,"Oscar Wilde
"To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies-all this is indispensably necessary."
-George Orwell
"Lies are effective because we are insecure about many of our beliefs and are quite vulnerable to the suggestion that those beliefs might be false. and they work because we might be predisposed to believe them already. Othello doesn't know that Desdemona is faithful. Indeed, he fears the opposite. Iago is able to lie to Othello precisely because Othello's passions are enflamed by jealousy and it is possible for him to imagine Iago's claims as the truth.
And there is another dirty little secret about lying-in the pursuit of truth, some lying is invariably necessary. Kant, who was searching for some universal moral principle, believed that if everybody lied the world would fall into shambles. Nobody would ever trust another person. but everybody does lie, the world does function after a fashion, and it is not at all clear that if lying were eliminated the world would be a better place. My hunch is that if we ever find so-called intelligent life on other planets or in other galaxies, they will be adept liars, too."
-Errol Morris, from Seven Lies about Lying
"If someone refused to admit that he has "bad" elements within
him and sets out to live a life of extreme virtue, then one of two things is likely to happen. He is likely to find either that he gives way to unexpected tendencies to Behave in a ways which he thinks are deplorable and so suffers torments of guilt, or else that he develops a neurosis, which interferes continually with his chosen way of life. Such a neurosis can be regarded as a "compensation" for his attempt to live too narrow a life which does not give opportunity for his total nature -to develop, and if the man can be persuaded to see it in this light he may be led to a new approach to life and continuing development."Carl Jung
Modern Psychology
"In all we do, almost the first thing we think about is, what
will people say; and nearly half the troubles and bothers of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score; it is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solicitude about what others will say that underlies all our vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and swagger too. "Schopenhauer
"Pride in every form,'point d' honneur' and'punctilio' ,however varied their kind or sphere, are at bottom nothing but
this-anxiety about what others will say-and what sacrifices it often costs!"Schopenhauer
"The nymph still looks at herself and admires herself in the water, as she has done since the beginning of time. Long before Hubris entered Arcadia, the terrible intoxication was known. The gravest crimes, the most senseless adventures have sprung from the self-regarding gaze, and though we make poetry of pride in the West, and pretend to ourselves that there are some forms of pride which are legitimate and others which are not so, the most deathly instrument placed in the hands of man remains the mirror."
Robert Payne
Hubris: A Study of Pride
"�..all men make mistakes But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride."
Sophocles
"A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility."
C.S. Lewis
"Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride."
C.S. Lewis
"To avoid a man's society because he is poor or ugly or stupid may be bad; but to avoid it because he is wicked-with the all but inevitable implication that you are less wicked (at least in some respect)-is dangerous and disgusting."
C.S. Lewis
"The folly of our nature puts forth three shoots, ambition,
vanity, and pride."Schopenhauer
"We see the mark of the fall, then, as ambition, pride, egocentrism. And this mark of the Fall, as it is spun into a veil, into a mist that surrounds the ego, becomes an intellectual rationale, a philosophy that is devoid of God in the center. It becomes a materialistic science that needs no God. It becomes intellectual reasoning."
Elizabeth Clare Prophet
The Great White Brotherhood
"Such is the equilibrium of all and everything in the
other life that evil punishes itself, so that there is in evil the punishment of evil. It is similar in respect to falsity' which returns upon him who is principled in it, hence every one brings punishment and torment on himself. . The Lord never sends any one into hell , but is desirous to bring all out of hell; still less does he induce torment; but since the evil spirit rushes into it himself, the Lord turns all punishment and torment to some good and use. "(Arcana Coelestia, No. 696)
Swedenborg
"Not only are none sent to hell, but none need remain there who
wish to leave. We are told that evil spirits are sometimes granted their desire to enter heaven, but they immediately cast themselves down headlong, unable to endure its atmosphere of purity. Another striking statement of Swedenborg' s is that men are not punished for their misdeeds done in the body, but only for continuance of ill-doing. Nor are they punished for evil actions done with good, though mistaken intention; still less for hereditary evil, except in so far as they have made it their own. There is nothing vindictive in Divine punishment; indeed, as we have said, there is no such thing, really, as 'Divine' punishment; it only appears to be Divine, and the appearance is due to the evil setting themselves against the true order of life."
Faust: What hidden meaning in this riddle lies?
Mephisto: The spirit I, that endlessly denies.
And rightly, too; for all that comes to birth
Is fit for overthrow, as nothing worth;
Wherefore the world were better sterilized;
Thus all that's here as Evil recognized
Is gain to me, and downfall, ruin, sin,
The very element I prosper in."
Goethe Faust: ,part one trans Philip Wayne (London: Penguin, 1958) p.75
"The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is
no worse than the hell we make ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way."William James
"Pride is a deeply rooted ailment of the soul. The penalty is misery; the remedy lies in the sincere, life-long cultivation of humility, which means true self-evaluation and a proper perspective toward past, present and future."
-Robert Gordis
"The unhappiness of the damned surpasses all unhappiness of this
world. "Aquinas
"Ye suffer from yourselves, Ho: none else compels,
None Other holds you that ye lag and Stay
And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony its tyre of tears,
Its love of Nothingness:"
The Light of Asia
PRIDE
"It is the most persistent of our sins. The urge to the
others may wax and wane , but Pride is a fixture in our hearts. It comes early, it has been said, and it stays late.Henry Fairle
The Seven Deadly Sins
"Pride causes us, in the addiction of our self-pleasure, to
ignore others. It is a sin of neglect. Pride incites us, in its need for self-exaltation, to hurt others. It is a sin of aggression. Pride forces us, in its anxiety to feel superior, to patronize others. It is a sin of condescension. All of these are turned against our neighbors, often in our Pride not realizing how aloof from them we have become; looking down our camel-noses, we are unable to see how far we have drawn apart from what is closest to us, for which our responsibility is immediate.Henry Fairlie
"Christians have a special knowledge how natural and original an
a the desire to evil curiosity is in man: the thirst of knowledge, and the desire to become more wise, was the first ruin of human kind, and the way by which it precipitated itself into eternal damnation. Pride is his ruin and corruption: 'Tis pride that diverts him from the common path, and makes him embrace novelties, and rather choose to be head of a troop, lost and wandering in the path of perdition, to be tutor and teacher of error and lies, than to be a disciple in the school of truth, suffering himself to be led and guided by the hand of another, in the right and beaten road."Montaigne
"Pride was involved--and who is not proud to say. "I am here in
the name of a great people. I am chosen because I am shrewd and strong and it will be dangerous to provoke me."The Ambassador
Morris L. West
"The devilish strategy of Pride is that is attacks us, not in our
weakest points, but in our strongest. It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind."Dorothy Sayers
"Pride is the beginning of all sin."
Ecclesiastes
"Christians and proud! O poor and wretched ones!"
Dante (Purgatario)
"It is necessary to emphasize the terribleness of Pride, because
we are all inclined to think that there is indeed, a "proper pride" that we may take in ourselves and our works. Whenever its name is raised in conversation, the first inclination is to ask with some cunning, whether it is not right that we should not sometimes be proud of ourselves. The simple answer is: it is never right."Henry Fairle
The Seven Deadly Sin
"As for me, I adopted the airs of a prince's son, and was as arrogant
as if I had been descended from one of the twelve apostles or the four evangelists of the most "serene Republic; I would not have turned aside to make way for the Doges, and I do not believe that there has been anyone more insolent since Satan fell from heaven. I went to the Ridotto and played the devil's own game. I frequented the Best society, sons of ruined noble houses, actresses, swindlers, parasites and cut-throats. "
The Beautiful Vampire
Theophile Gautier
"Since 1953, no President has mentioned sin as a national failing. Neither Kennedy, Johnson, nor Nixon. To be sure, they have skirted
the word. The Republicans referred to the problems of "pride" and "self-righteousness." The Democrats referred to "short-comings. " But none used the grand old sweeping concept of sin. I cannot imagine a modern President beating his breast on behalf of the Nation and praying "God be merciful to us sinners" though experts agree this is one of the best ways to begin. "Frederick Fox
Princeton University
Theology Today 29 : 260
(Oct 1972 )
SIN: transgression of the law of God; disobedience of the divine
will; moral failure. Sin is failure to realize in conduct and character the moral ideal, at least as fully as possible under existing circumstances; failure to do as one ought towards one's fellow man.Suggested reading: Christian Understanding of Sin in the Light
of Medicine and Psychiatry-Medical Arts and
Sciences,20:35-49(1966)
The Nature and Destiny of Man Reinhold Niebuhr
Scribners
Sin, Liberty, and Law Louis Monden-Sheed & Ward
Values and Christian Morality -Gill &
macmillan
The Seven Deadly Sins Henry Fairley
Dante's Inferno
also "The Talk of theTown" The New Yorker
October 14,1972
Me miserable! which way shall I Fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; I myself am hell?
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
-Milton
"We grow weary of being human beings at all-of possessing real
individual flesh and blood. We--are ashamed of being human-we account it beneath our dignity. "Dostoevsky
"Pride, perceiving humility honorable, often borrows her cloak."
-Thomas Fuller
"Nothing to look backward to with pride , and nothing to
look forward to with hope. ""Poor, dismal, ugly, sterile, shabby little man. . .with your
scrabble of harsh oaths. . .joy, glory, and magnificence were here for you, . .but you scrabbled along. . ,rattling a few stale words. . . and would have none of them. "Thomas Clayton Wolfe
"O unhappy men , what is this horror come upon you? A night
shrouds your heads, your faces; it creeps down to your knees. Weeping and wailing flash back and forth. Cheeks stream with tears and a dew of blood beads over the smooth wall-panels. Ghostly forms throng the entrance and pack the hall itself , shuffling in long file through the murk towards hell. The sun is lost out of heaven and a dire gloom prevails. "Odyssey
T.E. Lawrence translation
"Day of sadness and of temptation,
age of tears, of anxiety and of Atonement,
Time of weariness and of damnation. "
Eustache Deschamps
"Today, harlequin's cape , or the red cloth which frames the
proscenium, descends directly from Harlequin�s mantle with which was draped the mouth of hell. "Gustave Cohen
"They never had a glimpse of the underlying idea, when, through
the hidden, secret door-opened in all its horror only through a flash of precognition-one penetrates into the dark realm of sighs-when one sees the crushed victims of seduction and ensnarement and the icy cold of the tempter. "Soren Kierkegaard-diary
"The existence of evil is a proof of the existence of God. If
the world consisted wholly and uniquely of goodness and righteousness there would be no need for God, for the world itself would be god. God is , because evil is, and that means that God is because freedom is. "Dostoevsky
USURY
"The old commentator Gelli observes brilliantly that the Sodomites and Usurers are classed together (in Dante's Inferno) because the first make sterile the natural instincts which result
in fertility, while the second make fertile that which by its nature is sterile-i.e. they "make money breed. " More generally, the Usurers may be taken as types of all economic and mechanical civilizations which multiply material luxuries at the expense of vital necessities and have no roots in the earth or in humanity. "Dorothy L . Sayers
(Penguin books-the Comedy of Dante)
"Men know what is good , but do what is bad"?
Socrates
"The avarice of mankind is insatiable."
Aristotle
"None of the most furious excesses of love and ambition are, in any respect, to be compared to the extremes of avarice."
David Hume
(Essays, of Avarice ) 1760
"Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I awoke to find myself in a dark wood,
where the right road was
wholly lost and gone. "
Dante-Inferno Canto I
"Of all malicious wrong that earns heavens hate
The end is injury; all such ends are won either by force or fraud.
Both perpetrate Evil to others; but since man alone is capable of
fraud, God hates them worst; the fraudulent lie lowest, then, and
groan deepest. . . . "
Dante-Inferno Canto XI
"The Flatterers. These, too, exploit others by playing upon their
desires and fears; their especial weapon is that abuse and corruption of language which destroys communication between mind and mind. Here they are plunged in the slop and filth which they excreted upon the world. Dante did not live to see the full development of political propaganda, commercial advertisement, and sensational journalism, but he has prepared a place for them. "Dorothy L. Sayers
(Commentary on the VIII circle
" was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause.
The cause is AVARICE. '
Ezra Pound (last thoughts on the subject before the
poets death)
"I believe there is "sin" which is expressed in ways which
cannot be subsumed under verbal artifacts such as "crime" , "disease", delinquency, " deviancy. " There is immorality; there is unethical behavior; there is wrongdoing. And I hope to show that there is usefulness in retaining the concept, and indeed the word , SIN, which now shows some signs of returning to public acceptance. I would like to help this trend along. "Dr. Karl Menninger
Whatever Became of Sin
Hawthorn pb
"There is a mysterious fact about the great words of our
religious tradition: they cannot be replaced, all attempts to make substitutions-including those I have tried myself-have failed. . .they have led to shallow and impotent talk. There are no substitutes for words like "sin" and "grace". But there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depth of our human existence .In that depth these words were conceived; and there they gained power for all ages ; there they must be found again by each generation, and by each of us for himself. "Paul Tillich
"And what would be the good of that? someone asks . Do we need -more breast-beaters Shall we add depression to the already mentioned gloom and world uneasiness? why not a "no-fault" theology, equivalent to no-fault casualty insurance: no one to blame.
Things just happen, alas? The assumption that there is sin in it somewhere implies both a possibility and an obligation for intervention. Presumably something is possible which can be reparative, corrective, ameliorative, and that" something involves me and mercy-we want them, too. But we want to think we can help ourselves and our fellows if only a modicum. Hence sin is the only hopeful view. The present world miasma and depression are partly the result of our self-induced conviction that since sin has ceased to be, only the neurotics need to be treated and the criminals punished. The rest may stand around and read the newspapers . Or look at television. Do your thing and keep your eye on the road leading to the main chance. As it is, vague, amorphous evil appears all about us , and when this or that awful thing is happening and this terrible thing goes on and that wretched circumstance has developed, and yet, withal, when no one is responsible, no one is guilty, no moral questions to despairing helplessness. We wait from day to day for improvement, expectantly but not hopefully. Therefore I say that the consequence of my proposal would not - be more depression, but less. If the concept of personal responsibility and answerability for ourselves and for others were to return to common acceptance, hope would return to the world with it.Dr. Karl Menninger
Whatever Became of Sin
"Have the men of our time lost a feeling of the meaning of sin?
Do they realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that 'sin should not be used in the plural, and that not our sins , but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life/to be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation.Paul Tillich
You Are Accepted
"If the word "sin ' is unacceptable to you, I challenge you to
suggest a better one. "B. Karl Menninger
Who feels responsible for the world's suffering? Illness
only partially conquered, crime miserably controlled, individual and collective depredations abundant. A sense of personal moral responsibility is faint and apparently growing fainter. erosion, discouragement, acedia, and likewise megalomania world -flaunting widespread. We each do our part in a total excess of wasting, spending, polluting, defiling, stealing, hoarding, exhausting, and destroying. We pause occasionally to gaze about in alarm and apprehensiveness; we acknowledge a general pall of depression. But no corrective peccavi or mea culpa escape our lips."Dr. Karl Menninger
"Why do human beings have to suffer and die? Anyone who believes in one God can easily be perplexed by this question. That is also evident from the answers which are formulated in the Bible. On the whole there is no question of a 'dogmatic' unity and unanimity. Monotheism is a 'game' with no more than two players, God and human beings. The origin of evil and human suffering cannot be sought outside these two players. Prophets confront human beings with their guilt towards God. That is why human beings suffer, and that is why the people of Israel was led into captivity.
But are human beings really always guilty? Job opposes this notion with all his might. He knows that he is righteous and therefore he cannot simply accept the disasters with which he is tried. They cannot be a punishment for his sins, since he refuses to see himself as a sinful man.
In the history of the Jewish people the lament of the righteous Job becomes increasingly relevant. Those who are righteous-in other words, those who observe the commandments of the Torah-discover that they are not free of suffering in this world, On the contrary, experiences teaches that obedience to the commandments has consequences, and can sometimes result in death. ....."
C.J. Den Heyer
Jesus and the Doctrine of The Atonement
"There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring:
impatience and laziness."Kafka
"Lust is not a sin of the flesh so much as a sin against it."
Henry Fairle
"Lust is a humiliation of the flesh, of another's and of one's
own; and it is a perversity of our time that, in the name of freedom which is delusive, we not only tolerate this humiliation but exalt it as a wonder of the modern age. "Henry Fairle
"Lust dies at the next dawn and, when it returns in the evening
to search Where it may, it is with its own past erased. Love wants to enjoy in other ways the human being it has enjoyed in bed. But in the morning Lust is always furtive. It dresses as mechanically as it undressed, and heads straight for the door, to return to its own solitude. Like all the sins, it makes us solitary. "Henry Fairle
Sometimes I am possessed by a most powerful feeling, a
despairing bewildered jealousy which, when deepened by drink, turns into a desire to destroy myself by my own imagination-not at least to be the prey of -ghosts-"Malcolm Lowry
Under the Volcano
"Or she makes some remark that could be taken two ways, that
strikes the lovers ardent heart and rankles there like fire; or he may thing She turns her eyes too often toward another and gazes elsewhere; or he thinks he see the traces of a conspirational smile. "Lucretius
"Being trampled to death by geese is a slow way of dying and
letting oneself be torn and worn to death by envy also is a long-drawn-out process . "Kierkegaard
"Given the vast inequalities we are daily confronted with, the most notable feature of envy may be that we manage not to envy everyone. There are people whose enormous blessings leave us wholly untroubled, even as others' negligible advantages become a source of relentless torment for us. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like-we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals."
Alain de Botton
Status Envy
"We can believe almost anything if it be necessary to protect our pride."
-Dr. Douglas A Thom
"It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. a great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison."
-David Hume
A Treatise on Human Nature (Edinburgh, 1739)
"Envy wounds with false accusation.
The moment that virtue is born it gives birth to the envy it provokes: and a body may more readily be separated from its shadow than virtue from envy.
Envy: It is said of the kite that when it sees its nestlings grow too fat, it pecks their sides out of envy and leaves them with out food.
Envy is represented making an obscene gesture towards heave for, if she could, she would use her powers against God....She wears a mask over her fair face. Her eye is wounded by the palm and the olive branch, her ear by the laurel and myrtle, for triumph and truth offend her. Lightning flashes from her to symbolize the wickedness of her language. She is gaunt and wrinkled, for perpetual desire consumes her; a fiery serpent gnaws at her heart. She carries a quiver with tongues for arrows, for she often wounds with the tongue.....She carries in her hands a vase of flowers in which lie concealed scorpions, toads, and other venomous beasts. She rides astride death, over which she triumphs, for she is immortal....She is laden with diverse weapons, and all are weapons of destruction."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
"There is lust for revenge, which is called rage; a lust for
having money, which is called avarice; a lust for victory at all costs, which is called stubbornness; a lust for self-glorification, which is called boastfulness. There are many and varied kinds of lust, some of which are specifically named, others not. For who could easily give a name to the lust for domination, which, as we know from the civil wars, is never the less very powerful in the minds of tyrants. "st. Augustine
"Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it?
Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up. "Ghandi
"We push one another into vice. And how can a man be recalled
to salvation when he has none to restrain him, and all mankind on?"Seneca
"If you can avoid evil by suffering it yourself, do so.
Try to help your enemy by overcoming him with kindness and meekness. If this does not help, then it is better that one perish than both of you. It is better that you be enriched with the advantage of patience than to render evil for evil.It is not enough to practice the golden rule in this matter. The greater your position the more ready you ought to be to forgive another's crime. "Erasmus
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time
of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality."Dante
"Crime and willed evil are rare, even rarer perhaps than
of by God in the Last Judgment, which plays no role whatsoever in life on earth. "Hannah Arendt
"The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of
human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made the discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense."Hannah Arendt
"Desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming
horror , surrounding him without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly, blood-freezing, heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its presence. "William James
"Being in the wrong-can any feeling be thought of more painful than this? do we not see that men would rather suffer
anything than admit they are in the wrong? We do not approve of such stiff-necked pride either in ourselves or in others. "Soren Kierkegaard
Either/Or vol II
"Hitler's world was built on the central dogma of the irreversibility of evil. Just as there could be no quarter
for the Jews , so the acts that eliminated them were equally irreversible and there could really be no excuse for the Nazis themselves. Even the arguments of an Eichmann, pleading obedience, suggest deep faith in an irreversible order which could not be changed but only obeyed. Such was the finality of Hitler' s acts and orders that all the trials of all the Nazis who have been caught, whether they have been executed or liberated or put in prison for short terms, have changed absolutely nothing. It is clear that Hitler was in one thing a brilliant success: everything he did bears the stamp of complete and paranoid finality. In St. Thomas Aquinas , we find a totally different view of evil. Evil is not only reversible but it is the proper motive of that mercy by which it is overcome and changed into good. Replying to the objection that moral evil is not the motive for mercy since the evil of sin deserves indignation and punishment rather than mercy and forgiveness , St. Thomas says that on the contrary ' sin itself is already a punishment 'and in this respect we feel sorrow and compassion for sinners. "
Thomas Merton
"Sin it may be ,
to think such thoughts
that come from within.
hell ' s heart (if there be one)
But I know that God
Our Father will forgive us
From his heart ,
Which definitely exists."
Brooke Shields (written age 11)
The Brooke Book
Wallaby Pocket Books
Simon & Shuster
"The damned-up instinct-forces in civilized man are immensely
more destructive, and hence more dangerous, than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living with his negative instincts."Jung
"There are six things that God hates: yea, seven things that are an abomination to him: a haughty look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that weaves a wicked plot and feet that are swift in running to mischief, a false witness that lies with every breath and one who sows discord among brethren." (Prov. 6:16-19)
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting....but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."
Kurt Vonnegut
"I love the wicked man who knows he is wicked more than
the righteous man who knows he is righteous.Hasidic rabbi of Lublin
"There is a deep doctrine in the legend of the fall. it
is the expression of a dim presentiment that the emancipation of ego consciousness was a Luciferian deed, man's whole history consists From the very beginning in a conflict between his feeling of inferiority and his arrogance . "Jung
"The second fact to learn about evil, real evil, is that
it is quite stupid, like all fetishes and compulsions."Robert Anton Wilson
"Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake."
-Pascal
"My blood was so set on fire by envy
That if I had seen a man with cause to be glad
You would have seen my face all discoloured.
As I sowed straw so I must reap it now.
O human race , why do you set your hearts
On benefits which cannot be shared with others?"
Dante Purgatorio XIV
"O proud Christians, wretched and exhausted,
Who, sick in mind, and not seeing aright,
Go confidently in the wrong direction."
Dante Purgatorio
"All our faults have their uses. There is nothing humble in discouragement; on the contrary, it is the sign of a vexed, despairing, cowardly
ego; nothing could be worse. If we stumble, even if we fall, our one thought should be to pick ourselves up again and continue on our path."Fenelon
"Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life
is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our time has not yet comprehended,"Jung
The Soul & Death in Spring 1940 pp-4l5
"The teaching of eternal damnation is not Christian and it cannot
be traced back to any true Christian source . "
Trevor Ravenscroft
The Cup of Destiny
"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has
to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense,"
Carlyle
"The doctrine of original sin is not found in any 0f the writings of
the Old Testament. It is certainly not in chapters one to three of Genesis. This ought to be recognized today, not only by Old Testament scholars, but also by dogmatic theologians."
Herbert Haag
Is Original Sin in Scripture
"The idea that Adam's descendants are automatically sinners because
of the sin of their ancestor , and that they are already sinners when they enter the world, is foreign to Holy Scripture."Herbert Haag
"All our faults have their uses. There is nothing humble in
discouragement; on the contrary, it is the sign of a vexed, despairing, cowardly ego; nothing could be worse. II we stumble, even if we fall, our one thought should be to pick ourselves up again and continue on our path. "Fenelon
"Hildegarde of Bingen warns that those who lose their juciness,wetness, greening power, fall into a "dryness of carelessness. Carelessness-not caring, apathy, coldness of heart, loss of passion all these are deeply sinful. In the Bible it is coldness of heart,
not hate, that is the opposite of love. This is why Dante makes ice and not fire represent the lowest pit of hell. Not caring, losing all passion, here lies the way to no compassion and therefore to sin."
Matt Fox
Original Blessing
Bear & Co Santa Fe
DIA BOLLEIN* to tear apart
SYM-bollein to throw together
"As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive
and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too."Dostoevski
In Dante's work, Hell exists for those who fall into three classes
(This he derived from Aristotle) :
I. incontinence- lack of control of natural appetites or desires,
such as carnal pleasures, gluttony, avarice,
anger
II. Violence & Brutishness
III, Fraud & Malice
"Modern sins are impersonal. The hurt passes into that vague mass, the
'public' and is there lost to view,"EA, Ross
Sin &Society 1907
"Be not hasty to condemn other's sin. How knowest thou that in their
place thou couldst have resisted the temptation? And even were it so, why shouldst thou despise one who is weaker than thyself? Be thou well sure of this, that in slander and self-righteousness is sin. Pardon therefore the sinner, but encourage not the sin. The Master condemned not the adulterous woman, but neither did he encourage her to commit sin."Israel Regardie
"Modern man is sometimes apt to regard original sin as an outmoded
problem in theology. What, however, did Pascal say but: "Undoubtedly nothing offends us more than this doctrine. And yet without this obscurest of all mysteries, we are the greatest of enigmas to ourselves. The question of original guilt-which is also implicit in Greek tragedy-reveals itself to every man who has glanced into the abysms of life. Nor can we deny that evil must have a supernatural foundation, for it exceeds the scope of human reason."Walter Nigg
The Heretics p-137
Alfred A. Knopf
"Pascal:Pensees, Fragment 443
"The so-called Cardinal (or "deadly" or capital) sins are not sins at
all but seven disorderly propensities in our personality that lead us to sinful behaviour. Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth are sound and healthy human proclivities gone askew . self-respect, self-preservation, communion, personal freedom, self-expression, celebration, relaxation. The cardinal sins result not from fundamental evil but from fundamental goodness running out of control, from human love that is confused and frightened and not trusting enough of love. The cardinal sins have nothing to do of course, with the members of the Sacred College, who, as we all know, commit hardly any sins."Andrew M. Greeley
The Cardinal Sins
"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one
in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people , except Christians , ever imagine that they are guilty of themselves, I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards, I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice...there is no Fault...which we are more unconscious of in ourselves, And the more we have it our-selves, the more we dislike it in others, The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit...Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind,. it is Pride which as been the chief cause of misery in every Family since the world began. Other vices sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellow-ship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity-it is enmity. And not only between man and man, but enmity to God. For Pride is spiritual cancer it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
"Sin came in many forms in the sixteenth century, but initially avarice was the sin discussed and abhorred at greatest length in manuals for confessors, with lust following a close second. by the end of the century, however, lust had emerged in the confessionals as the number-one sin. There is no simple explanation for this, but the historian Carlo Ginsburg believes it may be that, with the spread of printing and the increased circulation of images, sight was emerging as the pre-eminent erotic sense. This, combined with the counter-Reformation's repression of sexual life in Catholic countries and Calvin's equivalent repression in Protestant countries, perhaps turned lust into the primary sin."
Joanna Pitman
On Blondes
"Unfortunately there is no doubt about the fact that man is,
as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual�s conscious life, the blacker and the denser it is. There is something terrifying about the fact that man has also a shadow-side to his nature which is not just made up of small weaknesses and blemishes, but possesses a positively demoniacal impetus. . .a delirious monster. . .the bloodlust of the beast. ..Out of a dim presentiment of the possibilities lurking in the dark side of human nature, we refuse to recognize it. We struggle blindly against the healing dogma of original sin...In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil."Jung
"Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One
can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply he disbelieved--indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can be pushed aside as trivial exceptions."Bonhoeffer
Letters & Papers from Prison
SIN (Avarice)
"Avarice begins where poverty ends."
Balzac
"Acquisition may not be the most profound or intense of the instincts,
but it is the most perennial. We tire of eating, or of playing, or of fighting, even of loving; but we seem never to tire of acquisition."Will Durant
"It is this disease of acquisition that destroys equality as civilization grows."
Will Durant
"The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know
how to stay quietly in his room. "Pascal
"But trespassing is an everyday occurrencey which is in the
very nature of action's constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents , only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new. "Hannah Arendt
"In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original
trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, through being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus' teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which encloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end. "Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition
"We lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the
excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension,
possessing which we can continue with a good conscience
to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes."
-Aldous Huxley
"Myth in history Western men must have; and if Christian myth-history fails them, they will find it elsewhere."
Lynn White,jr.
HYPOCRISY
"Hypocrisy shows love, but is hatred; shows friendship, but
is an enemy shows peace, but is at war; it shows virtue, but is wretched and wicked. It flatters; it curses; it praises; it slanders. It always has two sides of a question; it possesses what it does not pretend, and pretends what it does not possess. Men are afraid of slight outward acts which will injure them in the eyes of others, while they are heedless of the damnation which throbs in their souls in hatreds, and jealousies.T,L. Haines C L.W. Yaggy
The Path-of Life
1881
"He who frets is never the one who mends, heals, or repairs
evils more, he discourages, enfeebles, and too often disables those around him, who, but for the gloom and depression of his company, would do good work and keep up brave cheer. And when the fretter is one who is beloved, whose nearness of relation to us makes his fretting, even at the weather, seem almost like a personal reproach to us, then the misery of it becomes indeed insupportable, Most men call fretting a minor fault, a foible, and not a vice, There is no vice except drunkenness which can so utterly destroy the peace, the happiness of a home,"ibid
" The tongue that feeds on mischief, the babbling, the tattling, the sly whispering, the impertinent meddling, all these tongues
are trespassing on the community constantly.ibid
" Envy, like a cold poison, benumbs and stupefies, and thus, as it is
conscious of its own impotence, it folds its arms in despair and sits cursing in a corner. When it conquers it is commonly in the dark, by treachery and undermining, by calumny and detraction. Envy is no less foolish than detestable; it is a vice which they say, keeps no holiday, but is always in the wheel, and working upon its own disquiet. Envy* jealousy, scorpions and rattlesnakes can be made to sting themselves to death."ibid
"Reader, if envy is ranking in your bosom, declare war against
it at once ; a war of extermination; no truce, no treaty, no compromise-. Like the pirate on the high seas, it is an outlaw, an enemy to all mankind, and should be hung up at the yard arm until it is dead,Dead,DEAD."Haines Yaggy
Royal Path of Life
1881
SLANDER
Slander whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue
Out-venoms all the worms of Nile; whose breath Rides on the posting winds, and doth belie all corners of the world: Kings, queens and states, Maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave This viperous slander enters."There is a natural inclination in almost all person to do it-a kind of inhuman pleasure in pelting others with stones. Our right
hands ache to throw them. There is such wicked enjoyment in seeing them dodge and flinch and run. This is human nature in the rough. There are so many who never get out of the rough."ibid
No two feelings of the human are more different than
pride and humility. Pride is founded on a high Opinion of oneself, humility on the consciousness of the want of merit. Pride is the offspring of ignorance; humility is the child of wisdom. Pride hardens the heart; humility softens the temper and the disposition. Pride is deaf to the clamors of conscience; humility listens with reverence to the monitor within."ibid
"In the list of those Seven deadly Sins Which the Church
officially recognizes there is the sin which is called Sloth, and sometimes Aecidia. The one name is obscure to us; the other is a little misleading. It does not mean lack of hustle: it means the slow sapping of all the faculties to indifference, and by the realization that life is pointless and meaningless, and not worthwhile, It is , in fact, the very thing which has been called the disease of Democracy.'Dorothy L. Sayers
Unpopular Opinions
Harcourt brace Co.
"There you've got it, in black and white.
"All in one word, too, one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime. "Living in sin'; not just doing wrong.....doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting. That's not what they mean. That's not (her virtuous brother's) pennyworth. He means just what it says in black and white.
"Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of (asprin) if it's fretful"
Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
'Sin is a disproportionate seriousness."
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
"sin is behovely; and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
-Lady Julian (14th Century)
"There are only three sins-causing pain, causing fear, causing
anguish, the rest is Window dressing"Roger Caras
"In reality, there is, pride, one of our natural passions nothing is
so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it as one pleases, it is still alive.Benjamin Franklin l775
"There is something wrong with a man if he does not
want to break the ten commandments. "G.K, Chesterton
Evil always pays good the compliment of masquerading as it, but the
unfailing diagnostic indicator of it is lack of compassion, or, those other much misunderstood terms, charity, humanity, or the love of God . "Gareth Knight
"What are the greatest needs of the Church today? Do not let our answer surprise you as being over simple or even superstitious and unreal; one of the greatest needs is defense from that evil which is called the Devil�We find it (evil) in the kingdom of nature where so many manifestations seem to us to indicate a disorder�Evil is not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting. A terrible reality, mysterious and frightening�It is contrary to the teaching of the Bible and the Church to refuse to recognize the existence of such a reality, or to regard it as a principle in itself which does not draw its origin from God like every other creature; or to explain it as a psuedo-reality, a conceptual and fanciful personification of the unknown causes of our misfortune."
Pope Paul VI
Nov 1972
"I searched for the origin of evil, but I searched in a flawed way and did not see the flaw in my very search."
Saint Augustine
Confessions
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."
La RocheFoucauld
"The seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to eliminate it."
Thaddeus Golas
"Non resistance to evil which takes the form of paying no attention to it is a way of promoting it."
John Dewey
"Good and Evil are not two opposing fabrics or principles; Good is that which exists and Evil that which does not exist, which will not live, and which will cease�"
Antonin Artaud
"....Back in the Garden, God didn't interfere with either the serpent's "crooked and invidious will" or even the devil's "perverse inclination." And throughout the rest of history, God continues that policy. In the book of Job, he positively endorses Satan's murderous plans. When the high jacked planes flew into the World Trade Towers, he didn't prevent the horror of 3,000 innocent deaths, And to cap it all, he himself, in the Person of his only-begotten Word, not only allows the barbarity of the cross but, in his "high and hidden justice," takes it into himself in his beloved Son. GOD IS NOT, NEVER WAS, AND NEVER WILL BE AT WAR WITH EVIL."
Robert Farrar Capon
Genesis: The Movie
"IN Islam the Devil is a trivial little character, stupid and unaware. When the Iranians described America as the Devil, they didn�t mean it was an evil country but a stupid one, the great trivializer"
Karen Armstrong
"Like panic-stricken slaves in the presence of a jealous and suspicious despot, they -the Christians have tortured themselves ever to devise any flattering sophism by which they might appease him (God) by the most contradictory praises, endeavoring to reconcile omnipotence and benevolence and equity in the Author of an Universe where evil and good are inextricably entangled, and where the most admirable tendencies to happiness and preservation are forever baffled by misery and decay. The Christian, therefore, invented or adopted the Devil to extricate themselves form all difficulty."
Percy B. Shelley
Essay on the Devil and Devils 1819
"We can assume his sinister action where denial of God becomes radical, subtle and absurd, where hypocritical and blatant lies assert themselves against evident truth, where love is extinguished by cold, cruel selfishness, where the name of Christ is employed with willful and rebellious hatred, where the spirit of the gospel is watered down and denied, where despair has the last word."
Pope Paul II
"It was very necessary to reconfirm in our own times the existence of the Devil which has been put to doubt by a culture of humanism, rationalism and materialism. The Church has never had a doubt that the Devil exists. Our language may be more discreet today, but the idea remains the same."
Father Gabriele Amorth
exorcist of the Diocese of Rome
"All religions issue bibles against him, and say most injurious things
about him, but we never hear his side."
Mark Twain
(How about' Memnoch' the Devil by Anne Rice?)
"The Devil�s deepest wit is to persuade us that he does not exist."
Charles Baudelaire
"Sine diabolo Nullus Dominus
Without the Devil, no God."
(Traditional saying)
"Though it is tantamount to heresy in the mainstream churches today to mention the fact, the New Testament is a story of the war between Jesus and the Devil, between good and evil."
Peter Stanford
The Devil
"I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered, The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. but if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."
-Vasily grossman
Life and Fate
"The Devil has been one of the organizing principles of world politics for as long as Christian civilization has existed. The Devil serves to identify what evil is and became an entity who was responsible for evil that let God and ourselves off the hook, that has been the function of the Devil in history."
Leslek Kolakowski
"The Devil is not to be regarded as a mere mythological personification of evil in the world; the existence of the devil cannot be denied."
Karl Rahner
"To admire Satan�is to give one��s vote not only for a world of misery but also a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement towards it in each one of us."
C.S. Lewis
"In our days�those who follow the Evil one seem to conspire and strive All together under the guidance and with the help of that society of men spread all over and solidly established, which they call Free Masons.*"
Pope Leo XIII
Humanum Genus
* The Free Masons have never graced any of the Popes charges against them with a reply in over 300 years of Calumny
"A religion can no more afford to degrade its Devil than to degrade its God."
Havelock Ellis
"When I hear people doubt the existence of the Devil, I shudder�"
Billy Graham
"Few educated people believe in the Devil as a reality. Yet, those who deny the existence of evil altogether remain a minority. The rest inhabit various staging posts on the way from one position to the other � that there are evil actions but not evil individuals, or that people can be evil but that evil is within them. Such formulas can seem thin and inadequate when faced by daily news reports of terrible and terrifying acts of cruelty and barbarity around the world. Can the hatred that crated Auschwitz be found only within humanity or is there a greater force of evil out there? The fundamental question of evil remains � and with it the Devil."
Peter Stanford
The Devil, a Biography
Henry Holt & Co N.Y.
"Who, or what he is, his origin, his habitation, his destiny, and his powers are subjects which puzzle the most acute theologians and on which no orthodox person can be induced to give a decisive opinion. He is the weak place of the popular religion, the vulnerable belly of the crocodile."
Percy B. Shelly
On the Devil and Devils
"Now at the beginning, the twin spirits have declared their nature, the better and the evil�Of these two spirits, the evil one chose to do the worst things; but the most Holy Spirit, clothed in the most steadfast heavens, joined himself unto righteousness."
Zoroaster
"As long as we believed in the Devil, everything that happened was intelligible and clear; now that we no longer do, we must look for a new explanation for each event, an accounting that will be as laborious as it is arbitrary, one which intrigues everyone and satisfies no one."
E.M. Cioran
"My conviction is that it is profoundly Satanic to believe in the Devil."
Gerald Messadie
*************************************
See Article: "Seven Deadly Sins: Science is looking inside the brain to untangle the roots of our bad behaviour." by Kathleen McGowan Discover Magazine September 2009
Book: "The Concise Book of Lying" by Evelin Sullivan
Book: "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent" by Elaine Pagels
Book: "Original Sin: A Cultural History" by Alan Jacobs
Book: "In Defense of Sin" ed by John Portman
Book: "Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins" by Francine Prose
Book: "Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins" by Simon Blackburn
Book: "Greed: The Seven Deadly Sins" by Phylllis A. Tickle
Book: "Deliverance from Evil Spirits; A Practical Manual" by Francis MacNutt
Book: "Think No Evil: Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting.....and Beyond" by Jonas Smucker
Book: "Evil: An Investigation" by Lance Morrow
Book: "Evil in Modern Thought" by Susan Neiman
Book: "Evil: An Investigation" by Lance Morrow
Book: "The Natural Depravity of Mankind: Observations on the Human Condition" by Ferdinand Lundberg
Book: "Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins" by Robert A.F. Thurman
Book: "Evil: A Historical and Theological Perspective" by Hans Schwarz
Book: "The Many Faces of Evil" Amelie Oksenberg Rorty ed.
Book: "The Prince of Darkness" by Jeffrey Burton Russell
Book: "EVIL: A Primer" by William Hart