Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 325 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  There is broad agreement that the incessant sexualization of women in media hurts girls. Even a brief exposure—to two thirty-second advertising spots embedded in a four-minute reel—has been found to undermine body image, erode self-esteem, and trigger self-objectification. Yet, rarely do we discuss how those one-dimensional images of women influence boys’ perceptions of female peers: the truth is, it affects them profoundly. One clue as to how can be found in a 2000 study by researchers from the University of Massachusetts. They edited together scenes from the R-rated movies Showgirls and 9½ Weeks that were judged as degrading to women, depicting them as objects to be exploited or manipulated sexually. None contained violence—they included scenes of a striptease, of a blindfolded woman—but they emphasized male dominance as well as female submission and availability. They also portrayed male, but not female, sexual satisfaction. Half the college-age participants watched those clips, and the other half, the control group, watched a cartoon from an animation festival. Afterward, both groups read a magazine account of either acquaintance or stranger rape. While there was little difference in their response to the stranger scenario, the men who watched the degrading videos were more than twice as likely as the control group to agree with the statement that the victim enjoyed the acquaintance rape and secretly “got what she wanted.” The effect held steady regardless of the men’s attitudes toward gender roles or sexually explicit material. Such sexualized images, again and again, appear to “spill over” and affect men’s perceptions of all women. In another experiment, men who had been shown objectified images of women were asked to rate the competence and intelligence of a female researcher for an unrelated task; they gave her lower marks than men who’d been shown neutral images. From the earliest ages, children are subject to messages that present women primarily as objects for male use, as rewards for victory, wealth, and fame; messages that disregard women’s perspective and inaccurately represent their gratification. Parents of little girls may surround their daughters with books and movies and images of complex female characters in an effort to offset all that, but rarely do parents of boys do the same: the distorted depiction of women in media is seen as a problem for girls alone. Yet little boys watch professional sports, where the sole women on the field are cheerleaders. Female characters in family-friendly, G-rated films are depicted in revealing clothing at about the same rate as in R-rated films. That, of course, is when women or girls are present at all. Despite their rising visibility in franchises such as The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games, and Star Wars, by 2018 only 31 percent of top-grossing Hollywood films featured female protagonists—a record high!—and women comprised just 35 percent of all speaking roles, a figure that has held steady over the ten years researchers have tracked it.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  When “Ite tnissa etf “(the Mass is over) is said for the last time, not in, but for, the Mass, there’ll be some hope of enlightenment. Even in the darkness of the Middle Ages there were a few who knew the fraudulent nature of this rite. The officiating priests of Rome would, sub rosa , change the words “Hoc est meum corpus “(This is my body) to “Panis es, etpanis manebis” (Bread it is, and bread it shall remain). And the poor, benighted people would bow their heads before the elevated Host and profess their unworthiness just as today. Such abject abasement, rite and ceremony are but a priestly mess of pottage paid for with the birthright of human dignity. If we must play hocus-pocus, let us know what we are doing. The wine and bread are symbols of the pure, virgin elements that on the lower planes became that Demon that is Deus inversus. It is Deus then that should remember His source—and the Revelator says so. Yet we too are these elements, and when we eat and drink their earthly symbols we too should remember our own cosmic source and nature. To elevate and sublimate our worldly and materialistic consciousness is the ritual’s only efficacy. This is the purpose of all religious rites, and every race of antiquity had its Judeo-Christian equivalents. In the Bacchic Mysteries a consecrated cup called the Agathodaemon was passed among the communicants, and bread and wine were served as symbols of our source. The Manichaeans partook of the “consecrated host,” while the Mithraists had their “sacramental meal.” In Egypt the communicants partook of a cake composed of flour, milk and honey on which the cross, the symbol of matter, was impressed. This is the origin of our “hot cross buns.” Then there was the ancient Agapé, or Love Feast, in which rich and poor alike joined in communion. For the first fifty years of the Christian era this and “holy communion” were jointly observed; thereafter, according to Pliny the Younger, the communion was celebrated in the morning, the Agapé in the evening. The Jews also had and still have their sacramental bread and wine, but their communion is not “in remembrance” of Jesus Christ. This scriptural “transubstantiation” is the key to much of the New Testament. By it the involutionary Jesus becomes the evolutionary Christ—Prometheus and Hercules, Elijah and Elias; by it “the kingdom of God” becomes “the kingdom of heaven”; by it “the Son of God” becomes “the Son of man”; by it Jesus takes His place “on the right hand of God,” Evolution. Because of it the involutionary disciples become the evolutionary apostles, with their “glad tidings” of a new “gospel,” biologic life. Here this gospel is transferred from the Old Testament Jews, symbols of the involutionary, to the New Testament Gentiles, symbols of the evolutionary.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  These dire predictions relate to conditions trillions of years ago, yet whenever this old earth trembles, or wars arise, our literalists turn to them and cry “The end is near” and “The second coming of Christ is at hand.” To have a “second coming” you must have a first, and the Christ of religion has not come yet, nor has the end of the world. Yet for two thousand years this Bible-garble has produced periodic waves of hysteria. So here again we see the tragedy of ignorance. It’s still with us. Our fundamentalists are looking for the “second coming of Christ” when what they’re going to get is just more violence—worldwide disaster. In this solar violence we have the solution to another scriptural absurdity, and deception. Immediately following the fifth miracle, we read about Jesus’ encounter with the wild man, whose name is Legion, and out of whom Jesus cast a host of devils. These devils are the terrible forces of the sun period, legions surely, which must be cast out ere a violent sun becomes a peaceful planet. At this same point in the Old Testament parallel, Saul was also wild and David pretended to be. He “scrabbled on the door of the gate and let his spittle fall down upon his beard” (1 Sam. 21:13). The gate on which David “scrabbled” is that “gateway of the gods,” the sun, and when the Creator, Jesus, said of His word that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” He was speaking of this cosmic Hades. His “word” is the genetic ideation, and neither the fiery sun nor the frozen earth can prevail against it, for it will come forth in Evolution. It is strange these devils all knew Jesus’ nature while His companions did not. At His approach they cried out, “What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” What time? The time for these violent forces to be cast out of the sun. And what were the swine that received them and “ran violently down a steep place”? Well, what receives the sun’s cast-off forces? The planets of course. These are the “swine” of Jewish mythology, and this is not the only place it speaks of them as such; later we will point it out again. These swine are matter, dirt to the mythologist. The Jewish mythologists had no respect for matter; their popular name for it was nechoshet . Necho means dragon, the rest is obvious. And so our world is but cosmic dragon dirt, yet why did the Creator labor so long to create it if it be so despicable? Medieval Christians dominated by Jewish ideology considered matter so vile they were ashamed of their own material bodies; to them only the original spirit was holy, and so these foolish ones lived and died in the hell this ideology brought them.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It seemed so unfair. Jacob had only recently started to have seizures. Did he not have enough to deal with? I wanted to blame somebody, and God was the obvious target, but somehow I could not get into this. Did I really believe that there was a Being up there somehow responsible for everything that happens on earth, including Jacob’s disabilities? No, I did not. Not only did it seem highly unlikely that there was an overseeing deity, supervising earthly events, apportioning trials and rewards according to some inscrutable program of his own, but the idea was also grotesque. If there was a loving providence, it bore no relation to any kind of love that I could conceive. I did not believe that this God existed, and as I sat that night beside Jacob in the semidarkness, I wondered if I ever really had. I heard movement below and realized that Jenifer was climbing cautiously up the wrought-iron staircase leading to the attic. Her lean, athletic frame appeared behind the frosted glass, and I watched her opening the door with the minimum of noise, stealing into the room with exaggerated care. She grimaced as one of the boards creaked in the course of her painful progress across the large, untidy room. “Everything all right?” she hissed. “Well, no: I’m afraid he had a fit. But he seems all right now.” “Oh!” Dismayed, she sank onto the bed and looked across at her son. Her face, which had retained the stimulus of a lively evening, collapsed. She was wearing one of her strange evening dresses: this one was emerald green and decorated with little jewels of mirrored glass. With its matching green stockings, it was an optimistic, slightly frivolous outfit that suddenly looked incongruous. “Oh, my dear! I am so sorry,” she said. “I know how awful it is. I do hope it didn’t upset you too much.” “No, no. Don’t worry about it.” I smiled reassuringly at her as I gathered my books together. “Karen,” she said abruptly. We were still whispering, of course, but I could tell from the tentative tone of her voice that she was nervous about what she was going to say. “Karen—do you think you—please feel free to refuse, that goes without saying, of course. You do more than enough as it is and Jacob is so fond of you. I always feel confident when he is with you. But do you think—I mean . . .” “Whatever is it, Jenifer?” I asked, amused but slightly alarmed. “Well, I wonder if you would consider taking Jacob to Mass with you at Blackfriars.” In her embarrassment, the words tumbled out in a rush.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  I’m not trying to demonize a particular behavior, but it’s important to look at young people’s motivations as well as the quality of their experience. A 2014 survey of anal sex among heterosexuals ages sixteen to eighteen found that for boys, porn was a driving factor. They viewed the act not as something to share with a partner, whom they believed would need to be (and could be) coerced into it, but as a form of competition with one another. Their strategies included a “try it and see” approach: inserting their finger or penis into a girl’s rectum without her consent and hoping she’d acquiesce. (The Mindy Project did an entire episode on this, in which the star’s boyfriend claimed, “It slipped.”) One boy said he would simply keep at it until he wore a girl down and she’d “get fed up and let you do it anyway.” Another finding: among heterosexual women, including those who currently watch the same levels of porn, sexual submissiveness and compliance were correlated with the age at which they first started viewing. According to Paul Wright, an associate professor of media at Indiana University who conducted that research, “It suggests that if I’m female and I see porn at a very young age, I see, This is what sex is. So later on, I’m going to initiate that behavior because I think that’s what a guy wants. Or if he wants to do something, I’ll be more likely to just go along with it. If I start viewing when I’m older, I’m more like, ‘Um, this is what people do in porn, not what they do in real life.’ So if a guy is like, ‘Hey! Can I strangle you and come on your face?’ they’re more likely to say, ‘Go to hell.’ That’s our explanation, anyway. We don’t know for sure.” Although Wright has yet to analyze his data on men, he hypothesizes a similar association between age of first porn use and expressions of sexual dominance. His previous coauthored research found associations both in the US and internationally between porn consumption and men’s desire to engage in a range of aggressive behaviors, especially if the men drank regularly before sex. Among male college students, porn use has been correlated with seeing sex as a purely physical experience; regarding girls as “playthings,” objects of conquest rather than people; and measuring virility, social status, and self-worth by the ability to score with “hot” women. College students of both sexes who report recent porn consumption have repeatedly been found to be more likely than others to believe “rape myths”: that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim “asked for it” by drinking too much or wearing “slutty” clothing or by going out alone.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee (Chap. 17). Here we bid farewell to Abram; he has acquired A, material being, and is now Abraham. It’s nothing new in mythology. “From this day forth thy name shall no more be Alkeides but Heracles (Hercules).” So spake Apollo through his priestess. And let us not forget the other is through a priest. And God made a covenant with Abraham, and what a strange covenant it is—circumcision. Some may wonder why this mark of the “chosen” wasn’t started with Adam. If the removal of the foreskin was so important to God, why did He put it on in the first place? Removing it is God correcting His own mistake. But no, the mistake was the Jews’ and one of the most ridiculous results of literalism in all history. This is Creation and the foreskin here is the Creator’s, not man’s. It is His generative obstruction that must be removed, and this takes place in Evolution, or more correctly Devolution, the planetary genetic getting rid of its physical “coats of skin.” In Involution it put these on. As the Kabbalah says, “The spirit clothes itself to come down and unclothes itself to go up.” The Secret Doctrine speaks of these, and to the earth, its Creator might well have said, “Cease thy complaints. Thy seven (fore)skins are still on thee.” See p. 72. Actually this rite was started with Adam, for Abraham and Adam are one. Racially, however, it was not started with either. According to Spengler “. . . it was in the Captivity that circumcision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.” All knowledge of occult meanings lost by then, they took their myths literally and mutilated their bodies. We wonder what they would have done if instead of circumcise the myth had said castrate , as in the Greek. But this, we presume, is another of those Jewish refinements of Greek mythology. Be this as it may, it is a priestly deception even in their mythology, for it does not belong here. Genesis 17:9-14 is a later interpolation by the priesthood. In their day circumcision had become a religious rite, hygienic in nature, but the priests, requiring a divine authority for it, inserted it in Genesis. Thereafter the Jews fell victim to their own ignorance not of its worth but of its origin. And then we are told it doesn’t matter what we believe; it’s what we do that matters. Do you not know that beliefs are stronger than facts? For thousands of years belief in a flat earth outweighed the natural fact. For thousands of years belief in a mythical hell terrified humanity, and for thousands of years belief in a covenant religion sustained an institutional parasite. Oh yes, it matters what we believe, and it’s time we had some facts to believe in.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Desire is the doer. I am not the doer. Desire is the agent. I am not the agent.” 3 And who made desire, and its astral source? And who put it in our “members”? These things neither Paul nor his forebears knew, and so he rambles on: 21. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. 24. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Rom. 7). Like all his kind, Paul’s wretchedness was due to his own ignorance. He understood neither the law nor the Lawgiver. So let us see if we can make this still clearer. In the course of world creation the Creative Principle, the genetic, developed mental, astral, etheric energies and physical matter. These, in Evolution, are the body and its energies. They are the source of body hunger and astral lust, and doing what they want is what we call sin. It is these that are warring in our flesh, and it is these we call the devil in us, whose sectarian name is God. In the course of Evolution man developed reason and morality, the epigenetic. These and the devil both indwell us and the warfare is between them. It is this devil that drives us to war both military and commercial. The moral and rational want peace and security, but cannot, as yet, secure them. Thus moral man has an incubus on his back and it antedates him by billions of years. This is the vital truth a cunning priesthood concealed from us. Only when we recognize the deception and learn who our enemy really is will we know what our problem is. If Paul had known these things there would have been no wretched Christendom, for he is mainly responsible for it. “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” And so taking his advice about the body and sex, the benighted saints castrated themselves, the illustrious Origen among them. And it wasn’t enough that he should suffer; during the Dark and Middle Ages he caused millions to suffer like him. You should read their lives; you should know about their self-inflicted tortures, their lice, their scabs, their starvation and flagellation to realize the havoc this man, or his creators, wrought. Nor is it now a thing of the past; our monasteries and nunneries are filled with people denying themselves the life that nature intended for them; missionaries go forth to die inspired by false doctrines and ideals; millions waste their lives saving souls from sin instead of God-ordained evils: savagery, cruelty and war. Neither God nor man demands such sacrifice. The only virtue required of anyone is social decency, beyond that lies only error born of ignorance.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Friedrich Nietzsche, of all people, felt enormously confident in declaring that the female penchant for femininity was part of her “instinct for the secondary role.” I say “of all people” because Nietzsche famously hated women; his biography is a study in the destructive potential of gender roles. His father died when he was very young and he was raised in a pious household of women. He was of delicate health, feared the sight of blood, longed to be a soldier or hero but found it impossible to tolerate military life. His greatest love was for a man, Richard Wagner, but even that romantic friendship broke up dramatically. Nietzsche probably had syphillis, perhaps went insane from it, likely died from it. Before he died, he wrote at length about women, saying that “woman” must accept not only her castrated status, but her actual castration. Only by submitting to her emptiness was a woman free to “dress up,” “fill up” her emptiness in other, insignificant ways. A masculinized woman was a great offense to Nietzsche, a total fake; she used masculinity as adornment. In the exact same way analysts dismiss the gay aesthetic of decoration and exaggeration as a sign of the gay man’s unnatural character. He is neat and natty because he is incomplete. He is emasculated and so he seeks the phallus of other men, and tries to fill his own lack with finery. I go into this detail because it still counts, these punishments are still real. They are maddening, outrageous, self-referential. Of course anyone as injured by gender expectations as Nietzsche is the last person to make pronouncements on the subject, but historically these are usually the people making the pronouncements and writing our laws. These ideals of gender inform fashion on a constant basis, form the fundament of advertising and public relations and celebrity, and influence everything from my choice of hairstyle to my embarrassment at saying a “dirty” word in front of my grandmother.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Thanks to my doctors, I was no longer neurologically impaired, no longer experiencing my emotions in a muffled way, no longer walled off from reality in remote Shalott. This time I let myself feel my outrage, frustration, and dismay to the full. This time I also, as if for the first time, felt the distress that, perhaps, I should have experienced on those other occasions when my career had collapsed, or when my doctors had not listened to what I was trying to tell them. I was very angry, and though my rage may have seemed negative to friends who tried to talk me out of it, it was actually an advance. And (although I did not know this at the time) because the ability to experience pain and sorrow is the sine qua non of enlightenment, my spiritual quest could begin. But how could I move forward? I seemed doomed to fail, fated to spend my entire life on the periphery. Indeed, I was even living in the back of beyond. When I left teaching, I had bought a Victorian cottage in North London. The little flat in Highbury had been marvelous when I was out at school all day, but I knew that I would go mad trying to write in one room, without a garden, balcony, or fresh air. The only house I could afford was in a drab district in East Finchley in North London, at least a mile from the tube station and a thirty-minute walk from a parade of dismal shops. The cottage itself was pretty: I had it painted in vivid, jewel-like colors, and it looked warm and welcoming. But it was very difficult to live there without a car. Visitors complained that it was so far off the beaten track that they needed their passports when they came to see me, and a dear American friend habitually referred to my neighborhood as “Scotland.” I had always intended to move one day, but now I seemed stuck there forever, miles from anywhere and anybody. I had come to hate the long dull road which led to my house but which always seemed to be heading nowhere. Yet it was while I was toiling up this hill one day, weighed down with plastic bags of uninspiring groceries, that an idea came to me, and (again without realizing it) I turned another corner. I needed to cheer myself up, start a new project, and this time I should do something more positive. For three years I had steeped myself in the deadly hostility that had separated Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Why not study something that they held in common? The Abrahamic faiths worshiped the same God, for instance. Why not study the way they had all seen this God over the centuries? Why not write a history of God? 8.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Aldous Huxley once said that, viewed with the eyes of history, the Puritan is “the most abnormal sexual pervert of whom we have record.” Sex would seem to be the ultimate example of what is meant by the solid American tenet to “live and let live.” But people who are uncomfortable with sex in their own lives find it almost impossible to leave the sex lives of others alone. Of all private matters, sex is the one that we can’t ignore, can’t quit wondering about, because we have sex, too. No human arena can compete with sex for the sheer amount of ill-thought emotional claptrap that surrounds it, and no human behavior seems less amenable to outside control. But attempts at control are ever with us. First Amendment decisions on obscenity and freedom of speech rely to some extent on the difference between “thought-like” and “act-like” speech. The more abstracted a work of art is, the more impersonal it is, the less likely it is to be censored. The more emotionally arousing, disturbing, and effective the work is, the more likely it is to be censored. As expression moves away from idea and into feeling, hackles rise. By any ordinary definition of art, the more artistic a work is, the greater its risk of suppression. Pornography is censored because it arouses people—by its own definition, it works. That’s why it’s bad. The single most important thing to consider whenever such words as “moral,” “immoral,” “obscene,” and “degrading” are used is whether or not the speaker presumes these ideas to be absolute. Questioning the meaning of these words is useful. Sex outside of marriage is “immoral”? To whom, when, where, and why? Sex with someone of the same gender, of a different race, with an object, is wrong, degrading? How, when, and why? Immoral, immoral—the speaker means necessarily immoral, that morality is a fixed object, a given, a law.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  In all other ancient cosmologies we find the Creator battling with some cosmic monster, out of whose body the world was formed: Sosiosh with Tiamat, Odin with Ymir, the Rig-Veda gods with Parusha, etc. This we say is pagan ignorance and Genesis the Hebrews’ superior wisdom. This, for instance: “Where the Babylonian poet saw only the action of deified forces of nature the Hebrew writer saw the working of God. And that insight was Inspiration.” 1 And right there natural creation became supernatural, and that “inspiration,” superstition. The result was twenty-five hundred years of benighted worship instead of welfare. This is the error and the evil this book fastened upon Western man and only now are we beginning to suspect it. By the time this account was written the Hebrews had lost all knowledge of Causation and Creation and Genesis 1 is the result. In writings much older than this we find their Yahweh battling with Leviathan, the dragon, the serpent, Isaiah, 27:1. Psalm 74 reads thus: “Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.” And in the Apocryphal Book of Enoch we read: “In that day shall be distributed for food two monsters; a feminine monster, whose name is Leviathan, dwelling in the depths of the sea, above the springs of waters; and a male monster whose name is Behemoth. . . .”In job41:10, God and Leviathan are as one: “None is so fierce that dare stir him (Leviathan) up: who then is able to stand before me?” Why then is this aspect absent in the Priestly account? Besides the fact that the priests needed the divine, the perfect, the supernatural for their religion, its absence is due to the translators’ ignorance of the words they were translating, words such as bārā tebōm, tōhū, bōhū , and others. These do convey a hint of warfare and violence. The original Hebrew reads thus: “In the beginning Elohim (many gods) bārā (not created, but cut out) the heavens and the earth. And the earth was tōbū and bōhū , and darkness was on the surface of the tehōm” Tebōm is the primordial ocean, space or Absolute. Tōbū and bōhū , mistranslated “without form and void,” connotes the monstrous and the violent. As Professor Jeremias, the German orientalist, says: “There can be no doubt that tōhū is connected with Ti(h)amat and bōhū with Behemoth. Bōhū is the equivalent of the Babylonian Apsu, the male mate of Tiamat.” Thus bōhū and Behemoth arc the Hebrew equivalents of Tiamat, Ymir, Purusha, and so on, all therianistic symbols of the violent elements with which the Creator had to contend. Elsewhere they are called turbulentos . According to its apologists, the Bible is a Hebrew refinement of all pagan theologies and cosmologies, a process that completely obscured all knowledge of Causation and Creation.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  A stewardess came down the aisle with headphones for rent, and the young man pulled out his wallet. “’Course, I try and stay out of politics, you know. Figure it’s none of my business. Same thing back home—everybody on the dole, the old men in Parliament talking the same old rubbish. Best thing to do is mind your own little corner of the world, that’s what I say.” He found the outlet for the headphones and slipped them over his ears. “Wake me up when they bring the food, will you,” he said before reclining his seat for a nap. I pulled out a book from my carry-on bag and tried to read. It was a portrait of several African countries written by a Western journalist who’d spent a decade in Africa; an old Africa hand, he would be called, someone who apparently prided himself on the balanced assessment. The book’s first few chapters discussed the history of colonialism at some length: the manipulation of tribal hatreds and the caprice of colonial boundaries, the displacements, the detentions, the indignities large and small. The early heroism of independence figures like Kenyatta and Nkrumah was duly noted, their later drift toward despotism attributed at least in part to various Cold War machinations. But by the book’s third chapter, images from the present had begun to outstrip the past. Famine, disease, the coups and countercoups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks—if Africa had a history, the writer seemed to say, the scale of current suffering had rendered such history meaningless. Poor buggers. Godforsaken countries. I set the book down, feeling a familiar anger flush through me, an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target. Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now, his glasses askew on his fin-shaped nose. Was I angry at him? I wondered. Was it his fault that, for all my education, all the theories in my possession, I had had no ready answers to the questions he’d posed? How much could I blame him for wanting to better his lot? Maybe I was just angry because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a black American, might naturally share in his dim view of Africa; an assumption that in his world at least marked a progress of sorts, but that for me only underscored my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And the Lord said unto Joshua, Fear them not: for I have delivered them into thine hand; there shall not a man of them stand before thee. 9. Joshua therefore came unto them suddenly, and went up from Gilgal all night. 10. And the Lord discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth up to Bethhoron, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah. 11. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword (Chap. 10). And what had these people done that they should be stoned from heaven? Nothing except that they were in the way of “the chosen of the Lord,” for which he will do anything—miracles, murder, massacre and mayhem. “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Psalm 2:8. Today the Arabs are in their way so Ali Baba beware. That Joshua’s maneuvers were a military impossibility makes no difference to the believers; nor does the fact that the Jews at the time were nomads, shepherds, not warriors. Such race-glorification was common in those days; the Babylonian tablets tell a similar tale about the king of Akkad plundering city after city, the source, perhaps, of the Hebrew story. 28. And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain: and he did to the king of Makkedah as he did unto the king of Jericho. 29. Then Joshua passed from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, unto Libnah, and fought against Libnah: 30. And the Lord delivered it also, and the king thereof, into the hand of Israel; and he smote it with the edge of the sword, all the souls that were therein; he let none remain in it; but did unto the king thereof as he did unto the king of Jericho. 31. And Joshua passed from Libnah, and all Israel with him, unto Lachish, and encamped against it, and fought against it: 32. And the Lord delivered Lachish into the hand of Israel, which took it on the second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein, according to all that he had done to Libnah. 33. Then Horam king of Gezer came up to help Lachish; and Joshua smote him and his people, until he had left him none remaining. 34. And from Lachish Joshua passed unto Eglon, and all Israel with him; and they encamped against it, and fought against it: 35.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Therefore he must be humbled; he must be made to see he too is but “a worm of the dust.” To this end he is stripped of all his possessions, including his children; he is afflicted with boils “from the sole of his foot unto his crown.” And all this because he is indifferent to the virtues of God. In this we have another racial touch. To the Hebrews, hell hath no fury like Jehovah scorned, and so He must be continually praised to keep Him pacified. If Job will but devote his life to this, God’s omnipresent good will make him whole. This pretty well summarizes the Hebrews’ error: suffering is the result of sin, not existence; God is conscious of it in everyone and as consciously punishes it; He wants praise and honor and man must furnish it; He accepts it all and equates it with material blessings; His Creation, matter, is evil but He is morally good, and being infinite, that good is omnipresent; this includes justice and so justice rules the universe. What nonsense! There is no moral justice in the universe; there is only dynamic justness. There is no omnipresent good; there is only unqualified quantity. This is the universal , in which resides local morality, man’s own humanly qualified soul, and its qualitation is morally superior to God’s entire prehuman creation. Why then should the one praise the other? Man owes God nothing, not even thanks. Whatever is, exists because of necessity, not divine sufferance; and whatever exists suffers because of nondivine Causation. Our world is full of suffering, tragedy, disease, disaster, pain; we demand a better reason than religion has to offer. The above was Job’s position—until the priest got round to him. “My righteousness is more than God’s,” and “It profiteth a man nothing that he should delight himself with God”—the prophet’s truer vision —and the accusing figure upheld by facts excels the penitent cast down by fear—man’s plight since the dawn of religion. Since then every tale that tells of his “lost faith” ends in its recovery. What we need now is the moral courage and mental ability to think this thing through to unbelief and stick to it. Job is the actual Reality, his God but a priestly hypothesis, his sin but the sin of being, his punishment but the consequence of living. He is life personified, therefore in reading his story let us not think of him as a man, or his troubles as personal, but as though it were the travailing earth itself speaking. 10. Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? 8. Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me. 7. Thou knowest that I am not wicked; and there is none that can deliver out of thine hand (Chap. 10). 2. Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! 4.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I talked with the student politely, then came home and raged, reading parts of the mother’s op-ed aloud. “A transgender child brings a parent face to face with death,” the mother laments. “The daughter I had known and loved was gone; a stranger with facial hair and a deep voice had taken her place.” I couldn’t tell what made me more upset—the terms with which the woman was talking about her child, or the fact that she had chosen to publish them in a major newspaper. I told you I was sick of stories in the mainstream media told by comfortably cisgendered folks—presumably “us”—expressing grief over the transitions of others, presumably “them.” (“Where does it fit into the taxonomy of life crises when one person’s liberation is another’s loss?” Molly Haskell asks in her anguished account of her brother’s MTF transition. In case her question is not rhetorical, I’d suggest the following answer: pretty damn low.) To my surprise, you did not share my outrage. Instead, you raised an eyebrow and reminded me that, just a few years ago, I had expressed related fears, albeit not articulated in exactly the same terms, about the unknown changes that might be wrought by hormones, by surgery. We were standing in our kitchen when you said this, at the same countertop where I suddenly remembered scouring the teeny print of a Canadian testosterone information pamphlet (Canada is light-years ahead of the United States on this front). I had indeed been trying to figure out, in a sort of teary panic, what about you might change on T, and what would not. By the time I was scouring the pamphlet, we’d been trying to get pregnant, without success, for over a year. I stayed busy trying to puff up my uterine lining by downing gobs of foul-smelling beige capsules and slick brown pellets from an acupuncturist with “a heavy hand,” that is, one who left my legs covered with bruises; you had begun to lay the groundwork to have top surgery and start injecting T, which causes the uterus to shrivel. The surgery didn’t worry me as much as the T—there’s a certain clarity to excision that hormonal reconfiguration lacks— but part of me still wanted you to keep your chest the way it was. I wanted this for my sake, not yours (which meant it was a desire I would need to dispose of quickly). I also discovered that I harbored some unexamined butch bravado on your behalf, like—You’ve had a beard for years and already pass 90 percent of the time without T, which is more than many folks who want such things can say; isn’t that enough?

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Thus intelligized and rationalized she would not believe mythology to be “the word of God,” or oppose the truth when she heard it. She has in this verse an excellent case could she but see it. Were her maternal lot the result of this curse, she should rise up in protest; she should charge the Creator with cruelty and injustice, for the command not to eat of the tree was not given to the woman; it was given to man before woman was created, as per the Jhwhist. Furthermore, Eve, poor girl, had no mother to tell her about the birds and the bees. And, of course, her father was too busy. But since we know this was not biologic woman, we withdraw the charge and also the sympathy. But not the original responsibility, for woman’s biologic lot is the Creator’s decree, and it is both cruel and unjust. How any woman who has borne the pangs of childbirth can believe in a God of love and mercy is difficult to see. Such a God would not have made her all-important part painful; such a God would not have made disease germs to kill her children; such a God would not have devised the jungle, or decreed that life must live on life. Only something devoid of all the finer qualities can be responsible. We have a name for it; we call it Nature. This understood, we see that these decrees are not punishment for “sin” but simply the nature of Nature. And blind and cruel as that nature is, it is not the result of an act half way in the process, but the inherent nature of the Life Principle itself. This is the Creator, therefore we should see clearly the distinction between God and Creator. The Creator created man and ruthless Nature, then man in his turn created God, a human ideal necessary to spiritually aspiring man, a goal he, himself, will someday become. So let us see clearly the difference between this man-made ideality and the ruthless Reality. 17. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife (matter), and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Well, is not sorrow also inherent in life? Death is, and it causes sorrow. So does love. Our preachers have always told us this world is a vale of tears, but their only explanation of it is the literal word of a myth, and not original either. It was copied from the older Babylonian account. George Smith, speaking of this, writes thus: “Our fragment refers to the creation of mankind, called Adam as in the Bible; he is made perfect . . .

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  From this we may conclude that the Gospels are the gist of a considerable secret literature on the subject of Creation and Evolution, its central figure a selective synthesis from all known sources. Long before the alleged time of Christ, the word Jesus, meaning Savior, was used by the ancients—Joshua, Jonah, Jason, Ionnes, etc. There was a Jesus cult among the Nazarites long prior to 1 A.D. It was also this symbolic Jesus that the Essenes referred to as “the teacher of righteousness.” The authorities for this pre-Christian Jesus are Epiphanius and the modern scholar, W. B. Smith. In spite of the Christians’ destruction of their source material, commentary still exists that proves beyond a doubt that Christianity did not spring from the gospel Christ. No less an authority than Saint Augustine, “Founder of Christian Theology,” made this statement: “That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the very beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity.” On the same subject Eusebius had this to say: “That the religion published by Jesus Christ to all nations is neither new nor strange. For though, without controversy, we are of late and the name of Christians is indeed new; yet our manner of life and the principles of our religion have not lately been devised by us, but were instituted and observed, if I may say so, from the beginning of the world.” And speaking of the Essenes, sometimes called Therapeutae, he makes this astonishing remark: “These ancient Therapeutae were Christians and their writings are our Gospels and Epistles.” This, we think, should prove our point, namely, that not only the Gospels and Epistles but the entire New Testament is but a priestly rewrite of the Ancient Wisdom. The significance of this pre-Christian body of literature is not realized by our scholars; as for the masses, they have never been told it existed, much less that the Christian Fathers destroyed it. Determined, as these were, to build a religion upon a historical Christ, they had to annihilate all evidence of his mythic nature. This they did with a vengeance, to conceal as Carpenter said, “the evidence of their own dishonesty.” And confirming this, Gilbert Murray said: “The polemic literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant; the books of the pagans have been destroyed.” By the fifth century the destruction was so complete Archbishop Chrysostom could boast of it thus: “Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth.” Doane, Bible Myths, p. 436. It is common knowledge that the present Gospels are not the originals. As with the manuscripts of the Old Testament, those of the New were soon lost to the world; not even the earliest Church Fathers claimed to have seen them.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  At the Council of Trent he wondered out loud: “How is it possible that the cardinals should choose a good pope, seeing that they are not good themselves?” Some of the elections were so violent that the Holy Ghost had no more chance than it has in an American nomination of a President. So with some of the investitures, that of Alexander III, for instance. As the cope was placed upon him, Cardinal Octavian tore it from him and putting it on himself, backwards we are told, proclaimed himself pope. The cope was then torn from him by one of Alexander’s supporters, but here by prearrangement, a group of soldiers burst in and declared Octavian the winner. And that is how Victor IV was chosen. But not for long; Alexander fled to France where he raised an army and returned. In the battle that followed several churches were wrecked and the floor of St. Peter’s was, as the historians tell us, “strewn with corpses.” The outraged Romans drove the invader out but on a second attempt he won and for three years thereafter wreaked vengeance on his rivals. Now why isn’t this disgraceful record known as well as that of the good popes? Why aren’t Catholics told it was such men as these that caused the Reformation and not “that devil Luther”? Protestantism sprang not from Luther exclusively but from centuries of protestation against the crime and corruption of the Catholic Church. Satan Peter had outraged all Europe; as Draper tells us, “Erasmus and Luther heard with amazement the blasphemies and witnessed with a shudder the atheism of the city. Things steadily went on from bad to worse, until at the epoch of the Reformation no pious stranger could visit it without being shocked.” In time the shock produced reformers but instead of heeding them, the divinely guided burned them at the stake: Huss, de Molay, Savonarola, Arnold of Brescia, and others. And let us not forget the lesser known millions the “Holy Inquisition” destroyed. A thing of the past, you say. Yes, but not the authority; it still exists and was reaffirmed in our own century, under Leo XIII. “The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its end when rebels act against it and disturbers of the ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics and heresiarchs, cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to derange the ecclesiastical order and impelling others to all sorts of crime. . . When the perversity of one or several is calculated to bring about the ruin of many of its children it is bound effectively to remove it, in such wise that if there be no other remedy for saving its people it can and must put these wicked men to death.” Institutiones Juris Ecclesiastici Publici , by Father Marianus de Luca, Papal University, Rome. “Wicked men” like the aforesaid reformers, and we have just seen the nature of the “ecclesiastical unity” that must be maintained.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Karen!” Rebecca’s voice was unchanged. It was still soft, controlled, and peaceful despite the violence that she had done to herself. “Thank you for coming! And so quickly too!” I had thought she had looked bad the last time I saw her, but now it seemed astonishing that she was still alive; her face was already a death’shead. I said nothing, however, and if Rebecca noticed my own weight loss, she also kept a tactful silence. We stared at each other bleakly. That morning I had received a postcard, written in Rebecca’s characteristically spiky script. She had been moved from Sussex to the London convent, had been sent into Oxford Street on an errand, had collapsed and been brought to the intensive-care department of the West Middlesex Hospital. She was not yet quite out of danger. “How are you?” It seemed a stupid question. I sat beside the bed, trying not to flinch from the horror of her profile and the shallowness of her chest. Her skin now had a bluish pallor, and her eyes protruded even more starkly than before. “Much better. Really much better now.” That was difficult to believe, and I felt a sudden rush of pure rage. How could the community have sat back and watched her waste away like this, day after day? What on earth had they been about? Had they wanted to kill her? “I’m sorry,” I said, turning my gaze with relief from Rebecca to the tray of food in front of her. “I seem to have interrupted your lunch.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon—an odd time to be eating lunch, but obedient and docile as ever, Rebecca plunged her fork into a steaming, smelly mess of sausage, baked beans, and chips. She shook her head, swallowed a mouthful, and loaded her fork again. I blenched. “No, I’m being given something to eat every hour. They won’t let me out of here until I’ve reached at least ninety pounds, and I have a long way to go. I’m still not putting on weight,” she reflected calmly, “even though I’m eating all this, but at least I’m not losing any.” “Oh, let’s look on the bright side, by all means,” I said dryly as a nurse bustled into the room and deposited a fruit yogurt on the tray. “Are you getting any other help?” “Yes. I’m seeing a psychiatrist twice a week. He’s a Catholic. That should help.” Again we looked at each other. I recalled Mother Frances’s words: “You and Rebecca!” We both seemed bent on a destructive course. I watched Rebecca spoon up the pink, sugary yogurt, which her body refused to absorb. Like me, she seemed to be losing her hold on life, seemed unable to move forward into the future. We did not know how to live anymore. We had somehow lost the knack.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I think Butler is generous to name the diffuse “commodification of identity” as the problem. Less generously, I’d say that the simple fact that she’s a lesbian is so blinding for some, that whatever words come out of her mouth—whatever words come out of the lesbian’s mouth, whatever ideas spout from her head—certain listeners hear only one thing: lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. It’s a quick step from there to discounting the lesbian—or, for that matter, anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a “postracial” future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present—as identitarian, when it’s actually the listener who cannot get beyond the identity that he has imputed to the speaker. Calling the speaker identitarian then serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can resume his role as speaker. And then we can scamper off to yet another conference with a keynote by Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, at which we can meditate on Self and Other, grapple with radical difference, exalt the decisiveness of the Two, and shame the unsophisticated identitarians, all at the feet of yet another great white man pontificating from the podium, just as we’ve done for centuries. In response to a journalist who asked him to “summarize himself in a nutshell,” John Cage once said, “Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.” He knew his name was stuck to him, or he was stuck to it. Still, he urges out of it. The Argo’s parts may get replaced, but it’s still called the Argo. We may become more used to jumping into flight, but that doesn’t mean we have done with all perches. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don’t—or at least, we don’t quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won’t need to stare as long.