Eric Elnes

“They will not ask what brings you alive in this world, but will demand instead that their world lives in you. They will not ask what is the specific good that you must do to live into your full humanity. Instead they will empower you to do only the good that keeps their specific processes alive and well, running seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. To be sure, the powers behind these processes will work hard to make you happy to do these “good” things. They will reward you financially, or at least promise financial gain. They will create endless amounts of entertainment that will shape your desires in such a way that their values become your ideals. They’ll shape business, politics, education, even the arts and religion, to support these values and they will make you feel “righteous” or “patriotic” for supporting them, too. Then they will own you. Your life will serve the lowest common denominator, whose only “high” comes from drinking the cheap beer of the Adversary.”
― Eric Elnes, Gifts of the Dark Wood: Seven Blessings for Soulful Skeptics

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Countless are the processes that seek to tame the wild energy inside you, just as they seek to tame the wild energies of the world. While this energy inside you is a direct gift from the Spirit, there are a number of processes governing everything about you, from your vocation to your vacation, that will attempt to shape your life until it is as palatable to the masses as that macaroni and cheese product. These cultural and economic processes start working on you early in life, long before you become aware of what is even happening. Far better to consume you this way. These processes that treat you as if you were nothing more than raw material on a production line are enormously powerful features of the culture we live in. Like fish in the ocean, we largely move through life unaware of the social, cultural, and eco-nomic waters we swim in because we are so thoroughly immersed in them. If you live an unreflective life, allowing these forces to shape you unawares, they will take away your name and give you a number.”
― Eric Elnes, Gifts of the Dark Wood: Seven Blessings for Soulful Skeptics