Mindaugas Orlovas

“Smith and Denton reporting on the spiritual lives of American teenagers found a common belief that, as they wryly put it, God was 'something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist', who was availabe on demand but undemanding. This has been popularly characterised as 'benign whateverism'. Its core is that we should try to be nice, kind, respectful and responsible, and by doing so achieve a state of 'feeling good, happy, secure, at peace.' Worse things might certainly be believed; but this is not enough to support a civilisation, inspire great art, induce fidelity, inculcate sanctity, motivate self-sacrifice, or lead us to insights into the nature of existence.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“To Heraclitus it was the logos; to Lao Tzu the tao; to Confucius lǐ; in Hinduism Brahman, and to the Vedic tradition Ṛta; in Zen ri; o Arabic peoples, since pre-Islamic times, Allah; to Hebrews YHWH. And in the Western tradition it is known as God.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

“When Solzhenitsyn asked himself what had given rise to the catastrophic brutalities of the twentieth century, his conclusion was that men had forgotten God. In a speech given in 1983, he repeated: 'If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again; men have forgotten God.' More than this, a positive 'hatred of God', he thought was the principal driving force behind the philosophy and psychology of Marxism-Leninism: 'militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The hatred of God is indeed a fascinating phenomenon, one more and more evident in out time - and not just in political philosophies, but in the vox pop of media scientists. Lucifer - 'the Bright' - cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he.”
― Iain McGilchrist

“It is in dealing with death that one is most forcibly made aware of how we yielded, hands down, to the forgetting of Being. One of the few occasions on which at last modern man might be able to grasp the enormity of existence is in the contemplation of death. Yet this is just what we ignore. It is a commonplace that while the Victorians did not talk about sex, they were open about death; we do not talk about death, but are clinically explicit about sex. Unfortunately for us, being open about something robs it of its power, while hiding increases it.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World