#civil

From the Renaissance until today, Christianity, and also to some extent Judaism, in the West have had to carry out a constant battle against ideologies, philosophies, institutions and practices which are secular in nature and which challenge the authority of religion and in fact its very validity and legitimacy. These challenges to religion have varied from political ideas which are based on secularism to the denial of the religious foundation of morality and the philosophical denial of the reality of God and of the after life or of revelation and sacred scripture. The history of the West has been marked during the last few centuries by a constant battle between the forces of religion and secularism and in fact the gaining of the upper hand by secularism and consequently the denial of the reality of religion and its pertinence to various domains of life. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#secularism #western-civilization #life

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood. ↗

— Laurie Lee

#civilization #life #panic #religion #sacrifice

She silently chanted the rules of the civilized: Thou shalt not make love on a balcony even if it’s thirty-something stories up because someone might see you. Thou shalt not make love with a dinosaur no matter how sexy he is. Thou shalt not make love on a balcony when a werewolf is in the room, even if said werewolf is asleep. And last but not least, thou shalt not make love outside when it’s cold because goose bumps are never attractive. ↗

— Nina Bangs

#civilized-behavior #love

I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land. ↗

— Mark Kemp

#southern-culture #the-south #love

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#henry-david-thoreau #nature

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph ↗

— Robert E. Howard

#civilization #nature

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#dissent #nature

To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself. ↗

— Dee Brown

#indians #nature #nature

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him. ↗

— Will Durant

#commanding-nature #eternal-recurrence #history #history-repeating-itself #science

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible. ↗

— David Wong

#eye #sight #nature