Richard Lawrence

“It is also the portrait of Christ many people prefer today. It is a portrait that enables and encourages Jesus’s followers to embrace violence, vengeance, domination, and exploitation, to do whatever it takes to assert their will on others.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End

“We no longer -bless- fields to reap abundant crops because scientifically-informed farming methods are more reliable for achieving that end. Thus, the claim of ritual inefficacy is based on the laws of physics, not Western prejudice.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources

“Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on... So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything... The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all... We do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors...but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal... Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody’s ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West