#ren

Sometimes I find that music is so much more attractive than love. I don’t know… It’s like some kind of euphoria, that love can’t bring to you. ↗

— Florence Welch

#florence-welch #love #music #love

Mungkin bukan shalatnya sehingga perbuatan keji dan mungkar masih merajalela. Bisa jadi, karena tata cara wudhu kita yang masih salah. ↗

— Ali Zaenal

#renungan #religion

I understood and appreciated the miracle of birth, but I did not understand motherhood, nor did I appreciate the oveselling of it. To me it was a choice, one of many options. To others it was what women did. We were supposed to breed. It had been decided for us. Society expected it. Religion demanded it. ↗

— Judy Morgan

#motherhood-once-removed #no-kidding #religion

Actually, the substitution of the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle denotes no dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in the new way an assured pleasure coming later. But the end psychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is mirrored in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in a future life for the—voluntary or enforced—renunciation of earthly lusts is nothing but a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. In logical pursuit of this prototype, religions have been able to effect the absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future life; they have not, however, achieved a conquest of the pleasure-principle this way. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in this conquest; science, however, also offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain at the end. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#delayed-gratification #religion #renunciation #science #religion

Warren is stuck in Sunday School-level, pretheological fundamentalism. It is religious infantilism of the kind that Freud to conclude that religion is nothing more than neurotic wishful thinking and the refusal to grow up. I believe there is a good bit more to religion than that, but I'm afraid Freud was right about Warrenism. It is a pinata, made of brightly colored paper, filled with sweet candy, and too easily knocked apart. ↗

— Robert M. Price

#rick-warren #religion

N'en déplaise aux bêtifications des nouveaux adultes occidentaux, n'en déplaise à cette nouvelle religion - la seule, au fond, qui tienne et fasse même l'unanimité - selon laquelle l'enfance, en tant que telle, serait pure, sainte, source de vérité, de beauté, de morale, on peut être un enfant et être un monstre. Alors, d'accord pour la cause des enfants suppliciés. D'accord pour, à l'Onu et ailleurs, lancer des actions en vue de tirer le maximum d'enfants de cet enfer que sont les guerres. Mais pas d'accord pour alimenter à travers ces actions le vieux préjugé de l'enfance innocente et sacrés. (ch. 19 La nuit des enfants-soldats ↗

— Bernard-Henri Lévy

#war #religion

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#dragons #narnia #past-watchful-dragons #potency #reverence

Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence. ↗

— Alain Badiou

#difference #god #identity #love #otherness

For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#independence #individuality #retire #self #self-assurance

In yourself right now is all the place you've got. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#empowerment #independence #individuality #self-assurance #self-awareness