Autofill and autocorrect are my worst enemas. 
And spellcheck can’t catch my intent. 
Pity for those bamboozled by conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ is probably in order, though.
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Depending on what’s the acceptable size of a pithy quote I really enjoyed the entire, but this part especially, of Nic Pizzolatto’s 2020 introduction to the rereleasing of Robert Chamber’s 1895 “ The King in Yellow”
“ The conceit of Chamber’s fictional play ( the king in yellow ) appears still more relevant today , among this landscape of cultural memes, narratives, who spread can be chased like pathogens , language going viral, fiction disguised as facts and news entertainment complex whose defining purpose appears to be waging relentless psychological warfare on its own audience almost entirely through stories. “
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“we are all stardust, or nuclear waste depending on your analysis”
― Christopher Hitchens
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What truth is that?
I’d say it is the truth that the same phenomena can be correctly described in more than one way. Thinking of ourselves as stardust has a romantic feel while thinking of ourselves as the result of the spent nuclear fuel within those same stars has a darker association.
Is the way we feel about such things irrelevant to what they are, or, is what they really are irrelevant to how we express the way we feel about being material beings?
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Do not exchange hostilities with your opponent;
repay your evil-doer with goodness.
Grant justice to your enemy;
show a cheerful heart to your foe.
Guide […] even the one who gloats over you.
Do not let him set your mind on evil.
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Sounds a little more like the Koran than the Bible, or maybe something else altogether?
Indeed it is 
It predates the Bible by one to half a thousand years. Jesus by one to one and a half, at least. Slight exaggeration. It’s been in the public arena for over 60 years. And nobody ever mentions it. Not in any Christian context.
The Akkadian Counsels of Wisdom.
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Unfortunately, this isn’t quite true. Tremper Longman interacts with the Akkadian C.o.W. in the introduction to his Baker commentary on Proverbs. And at certain points in his commentary proper.
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I’m really enjoying (and nearly through) the book “Holy Envy” by Barbara Brown Taylor. It’s challenging to any of us from Christian traditions who’ve grown comfortable with our own set of answers. And there are many quotable bits in it, but I’ll settle for sharing just this one I just recently read.
From her chapter: “The God You Didn’t Make Up”
…Maybe “spirituality” was another of those words we use without thinking very much about what we mean. So I started asking people what they meant by it, building a list of definitions that included everything from “Spirituality is an escape hatch for people who would rather live in heaven than on earth” to “Spirituality is anything that helps you feel closer to God.”
Finally I asked my friend Judy, who spent many years as a student of Sufism and who embodies fana - the self-annihilating love of God - as well as anyone I know. When I asked her to define spirituality for me, she thought for a moment and said, “Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn’t make up.” I loved that. I also did not know what it meant.
That’s a mediocre quote from her book. There are lots of even better ones that I should have noted in chapters back when I ran across them. It will be worth re-reading later.
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Sold. I’m putting it on hold.
Edited to add thank!
Edited again to share this quote which begins a review of the book I’ve just started reading.
The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor…Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
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You won’t be disappointed with this one, Mark … I just now finished it.
And I know you are “sold” already - but I still can’t resist sharing this further excerpt from near the end (just pages away from the excellent quote you shared above). It is probablhy longer than I should properly copy … but given that this is likely helping sell her book, (and more than that, given what I feel I now know of the author’s heart) - I seriously doubt she would begrudge one of her fans sharing her work this way here.
When I first began teaching Religion 101, students would sometimes tell me they were scared to study other religions for fear of losing their faith. It was an odd concern, on the face of it. Would studying Spanish make them lose their English? Would traveling to Turkey cost them their US passport? I had a stock response to their concern: engaging the faith of others is the best way to grow your own. Now, years down the road, I have greater respect for their unease. To discover that your faith is one among many—that there are hundreds of others that have sustained millions of people for thousands of years, and that some of them make a great deal of sense—that can rock your boat, especially if you thought yours was the only one on the sea. If your faith depends on being God’s only child, then the discovery that there are others can lead you to decide that someone must be wrong—or that everyone belongs, which means that no religion, including yours, is the entire ocean. The next time I teach the course I will try to be more honest. “Engaging the faith of others will almost certainly cause you to lose faith in the old box you kept God in,” I will say. “The truths you glimpse in other religions are going to crowd up against some of your own. Holy envy may lead you to borrow some things, and you will need a place to put them. You may find spiritual guides outside your box whom you want to make room for, or some neighbors from other faiths who have stopped by for a visit. However it happens, your old box will turn out to be too small for who you have become. You will need a bigger one with more windows in it—something more like a home than a box, perhaps—where you can open the door to all kinds of people without fearing their faith will cancel yours out if you let them in.
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy (p. 210). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
In other parts of the book, the author speaks of the ‘holy envy’ she felt when a Muslim Imam reassured her visiting Christian class that he would not be trying to convert them, but that he hoped that their visit would help them become even better Christians, better Jews, … better people. Taylor then wondered why her own faith tradition did not often extend such extravagent hospitality - too often instead remaining in a closed box with the fearful conviction that the gain of anybody else must be a loss for the Christian faith. Her book is full of inspiring things God taught her and her students … through practitioners of other faiths or even no faith at all.
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I also worry sometimes about sharing lengthy quotes but I relish the uplift I feel when I get to see the world from a more expansive perspective. When I was a kid I remember noticing that worldviews could vary between quite narrow to very large. There were times when I felt protective toward my current WV but then I realized that whenever a smaller one was eaten by a larger it was never simply destroyed; rather it would become integrated into a wider schema. Rather than be a defender of smaller views I’d rather be a defender of better understanding. None of it is really mine so may the more inclusive view win out!
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That does sound familiar. Belated merry Christmas, Dale.
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The discussion in the Bad things happen to good people thread reminds me of a book I read last year (Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths by Joseph Abraham) – parts of it were very bleak, but it made me think a lot, and part of its purpose was to dispel the myth of the “good king” and posit that most leaders in the history of the world were bullies of one kind or another. Anyway, @Mervin_Bitikofer’s points about how we forget how easy it is to become the oppressor reminded me of this quote:
The ancient Romans terrorized children with their version of the boogieman, 'Hannibal ad portas!" – ‘Hannibal is at the gates!’ Today we must constantly terrorize ourselves by repeating ‘Hitler ad portas.’ That, perhaps, is the highest purpose of Holocaust studies: to teach us that Hitler and a long line of would-be Hitlers are always at the gates. We are always one demagogue away, we are always one angry, jaded electorate away, from letting Hitler slip back inside the walls of civilization, assemble his brutalizers, and resume his slaughter.
To these concerns, we must also add the worry that just as we all are potential Jews, we are all potential Nazis as well. … To protect ourselves and each other, we must become aware that we are all recovering alcoholics, we all have the potential to relapse into Nazism. The solution is that we recognize and constantly guard against the pitiless and the evil within ourselves as well as in others.
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Too true.
Reminds me of a discussion in my JC Women in Film class before I transferred to Cal. I no longer recall the movie but it must have involved an oppressive ruler because at one point someone asked aloud “why don’t we ever give the power to a woman?” My comment was that if power was the kind of thing we awarded on merit we might find a much better class of men to award it to as well, Gandhi for example. Unfortunately it is something that must usually be seized and those with scruples rarely try.
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