The Mind Has A Complex

If You Had To Summarize The Old Testament, The Summary Would Be: Stop Doing This To Yourselves.

I Would Advise You Against Defensiveness On Priciple. It Precludes The Best Eventualities Along With The Worst. At The Most Basic Level It Expresses A Lack Of Faith.

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

The Great Truth That Is Too Often Forgotten Is That It Is In The Nature Of People To Do Good To One Another.

There Is A Saying That To Understand Is To Forgive, But That Is An Error, So Papa Used To Say. You Must Forgive In Order To Understand. Until You Forgive, You Defend Yourself Against The Possibility Of Understanding. ... If You Forgive, He Would Say, You May Indeed Still Not Understand, But You Will Be Ready To Understand, And That Is The Posture Of Grace.