Editor’s Foreword:
One of my friends sent me the following… think on them… then, think of those who support the Christian Atheism of the Tea Party… enlightening, no? I can’t say that these are MY choices, but they all made me THINK hard… that’s what friends are for… they make you see the OTHER. Give these a whirl, yourself… and THANK YOU to my friend for sending these on! This is MUCH longer than my usual production, but I wanted to give two longish quotes from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill and from the Pope of Rome at the end.
BMD
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When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they’re poor, they call me a communist.
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I don’t want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.
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Those who give nothing back, but preach to the rest of us, are just Christoholics, they are complete fakes and frauds.
Anonymous
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Euthanasia‘s a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger, as long, smooth-sounding words do, but the danger’s there, nevertheless.
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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it with religious conviction.
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If logic tells you that life’s a meaningless accident, don’t give up on life. Give up on logic.
Rav Shira Milgrom
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Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.
C S Lewis
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I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
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As editor of the largest newspaper in West Virginia, I scan hundreds of reports daily and I’m amazed by the frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It’s a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant.
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No can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with life to its bitter end.
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When religion is in the hands of the mere natural man, he’s always the worse for it; it adds a bad heat to his own dark fire, and helps to inflame his four elements of selfishness, envy, pride, and wrath. Hence, worse passions, or a worse degree of them, are to be found in persons of great religious zeal than in others that made no pretences to it.
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In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
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The Institutional Church (ecclesia) has killed only two kinds of people… those who don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and those who do.
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A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
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We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
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Brooks become crooked by taking the path of least resistance. So do people.
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Organised Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world.
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Learn from the waves… back up, but just to come back, to insist, tirelessly, ceaselessly, night and day, until God’s hand has waved, giving the sign of the plenitude of the high tide living waters.
Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara
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The human race, in the course of time, has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity, until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament.
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I love people. I love my family, my children … but inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Pearl S Buck
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He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother…
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Editor’s Afterword:
If we call ourselves Christians, we have obligations to our fellow man… if you’ve any doubts on that score, I’d suggest that you listen to His Holiness Patriarch Kirill and Benedict XVI the Pope of Rome (by quoting him,. I’m NOT saying that he’s “Orthodox”, simply that he has something good to say)… they agree on this topic; in fact, their agreement is total and absolute. Look at what they say:
The modern economy is built largely on fraud; it creates money out of thin air. Money’s a token of human labour and of our God-given resources, such as coal, ore, and oil, along with our intelligence, physical labour, culture, and spirituality. However, every company produces its own money in the form of shares, which is passed onto the secondary market, becoming not just simple securities; they are traded and used as items of speculation. If these mere phantasms earn billions, not even backed by labour or real capital, then, how can such an economy exist? Who’s going to pay for all of this? Why, the simple worker is going to, who produces the value behind all of this bubble. We need a fair economic system where money and capital are equivalent and are the expression of real work.
An economic system built only on the striving for profit, on indifference to the fate of people, on disregard for moral norms, is deprived of stability, and can collapse at any moment, burying the fate of people under its rubble.
If society embarks on the road of such recklessness consumption, our earth will go under. It’s already been proven that if the average level of consumption of the whole world matches that of the United States… our basic resources will run out in 40 to 50 years. God didn’t give us these resources to live like this. In this sense, the crisis may teach us much… such as restraint and rational use of our financial opportunities. The most important thing is to learn Christian asceticism. This doesn’t mean life in a cave or permanent fasting. It’s the ability to regulate one’s consumption and the condition of one’s heart, and win victory over one’s passions and instincts. It’s important that the rich and the poor alike possess these qualities. The trinkets of modern life make one giddy, and inebriate the human consciousness. People believe in advertisement, fashion, stereotypes, and this virtual world as if it were reality.
In Liberalism {His Holiness speaks of the ideology behind American “conservatism” (a European Liberal believes in laissez faire capitalism and hates traditional structures): editor}, every person’s autonomous, both from God and from other people. He creates his own system of values and this ultimately leads him to losing his inner control. There’s hope for an East-West dialogue, but the dialogue shouldn’t be between a “horse and rider”, but, rather, between equal partners. Holy Russia is a huge civilisational project. Others shall not guide it, it must generate its own ideas, it must offer another outlook, to which other cultures must give an answer.
His Holiness Kirill Gundyaev
Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias
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How could the idea have developed that Jesus’ message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation of the “salvation of the soul” as a flight from responsibility for the whole, and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation that rejects the idea of serving others?
We must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has, to a large extent, restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing, it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognise sufficiently the greatness of its task… even if it has continued to achieve great things in the formation of man and in care for the weak and the suffering.
A society unable to accept its suffering members and incapable of helping to share their suffering and to bear it inwardly through “com-passion” is a cruel and inhuman society.
The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is… in its origins and aims… a type of moralism… a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power can’t be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world wouldn’t be a just God, much less a good God. It’s for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there’s no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It’s no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it’s grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.
Benedict XVI Ratzinger
Bishop of Rome, Pope and Patriarch of the West
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As you can see, you can have the ideology taught by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill and by Benedict the Pope of Rome, based on hope in God and His Providence, or, you can have the ideology of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, based on the love of filthy lucre and worldly power… is that a hard choice, really? Get your mind right and get with Christ and His Church! Reject the Tea Party, reject Mammon, reject the GOP, and reject the Republican adoration of Filthy Lucre (and reject their endless and pointless wars all over the globe)… and accept Justice, Right, Mercy, and Charity (and accept the fact that there is much rebuilding to be done, not only abroad, but here in America)… your soul DOES depend on it!
BMD
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Voices from Russia 
22 October 2017. The “Liberal” LOVES You…
Tags: C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, Donald Trump, ethic, ethical orientation, ethics, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, moral, moral stance, morality, morals, political commentary, politics, United States, USA
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“Liberals” “love” humanity in the abstract. That’s why so many of them do what they do. “Conservatives” love profit so much that they don’t care whom it hurts to get it… gee, it looks like both sides of the neoliberal coin are equally evil! Neither side cares about individuals. One cares only about abstract “humanity”… the other only cares about filthy lucre and how to get it. Neither one gives a good goddamn for you or for me. That’s why I voted for Bernie in the primary and for Dr Jill in the general. Anyone who voted for Hillary voted for evil… as did those who voted for Trump. Trump was an open chiseler… the Clintons cloaked their greed and power-lust under fancy frou-frou. As for me, Trump was the more honest man. He’s made no pretence of doing good. The Clintons issued saccharine and smarmy pronouncements as they fucked our country up the ass unmercifully and without let-up.
Conservative tyranny is evil… as is liberal tyranny. Neoliberalism is a rum go, no matter which way you swallow it…
BMD