The Diabolical Self

"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 I 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

He talks about Daniels  pagan education in Babylon at the best university with Nebuchadnezzer.

"Babylon has one simple goal to eliminate Daniels distinctiveness as a god follower and absorbed into the values of their culture."

- Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality 

Lies About Love

We talk like love comes naturally and we have nothing to learn. Same attitude about motherhood and fatherhood. Because we birthed a child we naturally could not have any level of incompetence, or lack of knowledge on the subject. We were born knowing how to raise chuldren.  

"Many of us believe loving well is learned automatically. 
We underestimate the depth of our bad habits and what is needed to sustain long-term... change in our relationships."
- Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality -

Liberal Gospel

He perfectly characterized liberal Christianity as that in which

“A God without wrath

brought men without sin

into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

- Richard Niebuhr The Kingdom of God in America (1937)

Re-Branding Sin

"There was a time when the people who worried about "sin" were impertinent wrongdoers. Today, the wrongdoers aren't worried any more. The people banging on about "sin" are those who think it's someone else's problem.....

Some in the churches, fearful of moral anarchy, have tried to cling to the old rules. Others have switched attention to newer, more fashionable issues, still thumping the pulpit, but now warning against fossil fuels rather than fornication. The older "sins" have been replaced by newer ones; the fierce energy of earlier moralisms has been transferred now to issues like ecology, feminism, and international debt. Others again have thrown over the whole idea, so that self-righteousness - the idea that "our way of life" is superior to "theirs" - is the only sin left."

- N. T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began.

We Are The Same As He Is

“No, Lise, it’s not contempt,” Alyosha answered, as though he had prepared himself for the question. “I was thinking of that on the way here. How can it be contempt when we are all like him, when we are all just the same as he is?"

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov

Hate Your Own Sin Not Somebody Elses

"Love the sinner, hate the sin? How about: Love the sinner, hate your own sin! I don't have time to hate your sin. There are too many of you! Hating my sin is a full-time job. How about you hate your sin, I'll hate my sin and let's just love each other!” ~ Mark Lowry

"This side of eternity, we never can fully rid ourselves of our faults. They simply take on new and subtler guises, but they never fully disappear. There are always more moral battles to be fought."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire 

"Accident in history is Rife; unintended consequences and perverse outcomes are the rule."

- Stephen Kotkin. Stalin. Paradoxes Of Power.

I Rage At Injustice But My Own Heart Is Selfish

"I talk about love, forgiveness, social justice; I rage against American materialism in the name of altruism, but have I even controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself, and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the needy. Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me."

- Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz. 

Where Is The Problem.

"The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest."

- Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz.

Deeper Than A Sin Problem?

"The Bible, then, offers and an analysis of the human plight different from the one normally imagine. "Sin" is not just bad in itself. It is the Tell-Tale symptom of a deeper problem; and the biblical story addresses that deeper problem; it includes the sin problem but goes much further. The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they rejected; that this rejection involves a Turning Away From the Living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols - "forces" within the creation - a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of a genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the creator."

- N.T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began. 

ONLY Two Kinds Of Sinners

"There are only two kinds of men: the righteous, who believe themselves sinners; the rest, sinners, who believe themselves righteous."

   

... Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensees

"I simply began to pray for forgiveness, thinking the cherries might line up and the light atop the machine would flash, spilling shiny tokens of good fate. What I was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality. But it worked. .... I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back."

- Donald Millar. Blue Like Jazz

Saving Money To Be Scoundrels

"As I get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up more and more, simply for myself, my dear son Alexey Fyodorovitch. You may as well know. For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you. For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly."

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov 

Human Evil Versud Cancer and Earthquakes

Evil enters the world with self-consciousness....

 Their mere factual reality is sometimes sufficient to turn even a courageous person against life. It has been my experience, however, that human beings are strong enough to tolerate the implicit tragedies of Being without faltering - without breaking or, worse, breaking bad. I have seen evidence of this repeatedly in my private life, in my work as a professor, and in my role as a clinical practitioner. Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer - we're tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world..... 

Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules For. 

Fake Confessions

"Many of the brothers disliked going to the elder, and went against their own will because everyone went, and for fear they should be accused of pride and rebellious ideas. People said that some of the monks agreed beforehand, saying, “I’ll confess I lost my temper with you this morning, and you confirm it,” simply in order to have something to say."

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov

Vice Needs No Ministers

"Vice has universally an ill effect on everybody, being in itself a sufficient producer of infelicity, needing no instruments nor ministers. For tyrants, anxious to make those whom they punish wretched, keep executioners and torturers, and contrive branding-irons and other instruments of torture to inspire fear  in the brute soul, whereas vice attacks the soul without any such apparatus, and crushes and dejects it, and fills a man with sorrow, and lamentation, and melancholy, and remorse. "

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals 

Your Government Deifies Jesus

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed:

Astonished He Could Sob So

"He recalled out loud his wife's tears, hold years of tears: some due to love notes she had found in his trousers, some to some woman's underpants in his overcoat pocket, stuff there hurriedly in his automobile and forgotten. And when he was thus torn by burning self-pity, his armor of evil energy fell away, and before us was a ruined and clearly a good person. I was astonished that he could sob so."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.