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“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.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“But I cannot possibly penetrate to the core of the enigma of life by my own efforts. Nor can I willfully invent myths or rituals without their being trivial and empty. This is why we have traditions of art, philosophy and, above all, religion. The fetishisation of novelty and the repudiation of history are reflections of a capitalist culture that depends on dissatisfaction with what we have and the constant seeking after new 'improvements' in order to fuel demand. it is not only false but obviously immoral in a number of respects. A culture (and the point of religion is to embody the ethos of culture) is of critical importance for a society's survival. Cultures are living; but precisely because of that can be killed. A plant can be flexibly trained, but it cannot be avulsed from its roots and still live. And if our culture dies, so will we who live in it.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“Wittgenstein wrote: 'To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.' And he continued: 'To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that the life has a meaning.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“Speaking of the ground of Being, the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki writes: 'The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking; it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it.' In the Analects of Confucius it sis written: 'The Master said, does Heaven speak?' Famously Lao Tzu tells us that 'the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao'. In the Eastern tradition, then, there are many such statements of the impossibility of capturing the source of all things in language.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― 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.”
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Mindaugas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mindaugas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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49 books
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76 books
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1,316 books
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28 books
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81 books
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51 books
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