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 62 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Another Country (1962)

  “We haven’t agreed on where to move because all you’ve done is offer objections to every place I suggest. And, since you haven’t made any counter-suggestions, I conclude that you don’t really want to move.” “Oh, Richard. I simply am not terribly attracted to any of those literary colonies you want us to become a part of—–” Richard’s eyes turned as dark as deep water. “Cass doesn’t like writers,” he said, lightly, to Eric, “not if they make a living at it, anyway. She thinks writers should never cease starving and whoring around, like our good friend, Vivaldo. That’s fine, boy, that’s really being responsible and artistic. But all the rest of us, trying to love a woman and raise a family and make some loot—we’re whores.” She was very pale. “I have never said anything at all like that.” “No? There are lots of ways of saying”—he mimicked her—“things like that. You’ve said it a thousand times. You must think I’m dumb, chicken.” He turned again to Eric, who stood near the window, wishing he could fly out of it. “If she was stuck with a guy like Vivaldo—” “Leave Vivaldo out of this! What has he got to do with it?” Richard gave a surprisingly merry laugh, and repeated, “If she was stuck with a guy like that, maybe you wouldn’t hear some pissing and moaning! Oh, what a martyrdom! And how she’d love it!” He took a swallow of his drink and crossed the room toward her. “And you know why? You want to know why?” There was a silence. She lifted her enormous eyes to meet his. “Because you’re just like all the other American cunts. You want a guy you can feel sorry for, you love him as long as he’s helpless. Then you can pitch in, as you love to say, you can be his helper. Helper!” He threw back his head and laughed. “Then, one fine day, the guy feels chilly between his legs and feels around for his cock and balls and finds she’s helped herself to them and locked them in the linen closet.” He finished his drink and, roughly, caught his breath. His voice changed, becoming almost tender with sorrow. “That’s the way it is, isn’t it, sugar? You don’t like me now as well as you did once.” She looked terribly weary; her skin seemed to have loosened. She put one hand lightly on his arm. “No,” she said, “that’s not the way it is.” Then a kind of fury shook her and tears came to her eyes. “You haven’t any right to say such things to me; you’re blaming me for something I haven’t anything to do with at all!” He reached out to touch her shoulder; she moved away. “You’d better go, Eric, this can’t be much fun for you. Make our excuses, please, to Vivaldo and Ida.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  What happened? Why did these two men meet such different fates? Some accounts suggest that Giulio was also in hot holy water, and that he had in fact fled Rome to avoid similar scandal and persecution. This theory, though, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. “Not only was Giulio untouched by the calamity that befell Marcantonio, but his Roman departure was serene,” writes scholar Bette Talvacchia in Taking Positions, the definitive modern account of the matter. The papacy came after Marcantonio because he took these images beyond their normal sophisticated and genteel audience into the public realm, a feat she says was “made possible by the print medium. The intrusion of imagery considered obscene into the public realm was an ingredient of Marcantonio’s transgression, and perhaps one of the most consequential.” This incident was the start of many centuries of war between censors and the censored. It was also the start of a proud tradition of using sexual text and imagery as a means of demonstrating the hypocrisy and impotence (literal and figurative) of the political and religious leaders of the day. Enter the writer. Pietro Aretino was a satirist, playwright and poet who kicked off his literary career with a satirical pamphlet that purported to be the last will and testament of Pope Leo X’s recently deceased pet elephant, Hanno. (The elephant was real; the will was not.) Pietro then went on to, among other things, invent modern pornography. He was already famous and controversial by the time this particular scandal broke. Pietro intervened on Marcantonio’s behalf and had him freed from prison. Incensed by the incident, he proceeded to write sixteen companion sonnets for I Modi. The images and poems were republished together (possibly some years later). Talvacchia quotes an acidic letter of Pietro’s explaining his motivations: “When I obtained from Pope Clement the liberty of Marcantonio Bolognese, who was in prison for having engraved on copper plates the Sixteen Positions et cetera, I felt a desire to see the figures that were the cause of [Cardinal Gian Matteo] Giberti’s complaints, who demanded that such a fine virtuoso should be crucified. And having seen them, I was touched by the spirit that moved Giulio Romano to design them. And because the ancient, as well as modern poets and sculptors, sometimes engaged in writing and sculpting lascivious works as a pastime for their genius—as attested by the marble satyr in the Chigi Palace who attempts to violate a young boy—I exhibit them above the Sonnets that stand below, whose lewd memory I dedicate to you, pace all hypocrites. I despair of the bad judgment and damnable habits that forbid the eyes what delights them most.” (That same anger can be seen in the words of many modern pornographers.) Pietro’s sonnets should also dispense with the idea that modern pornographers invented anything truly new or shocking. Here is a translation of part of the accompaniment to the third position: My legs are wrapped around you neck,

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

  “Put a flag over her head and fuck her for the sake of glory.” That’s one I used to hear. “You don’t fuck the face,” with a leer. This is how men are still like the Greeks, this dismissal of the person in a woman, this snickering, winking acknowledgment that the act is separate from the relation. Not that women aren’t capable of it. Thompson’s equation—“Arrow is to wound as penis is to vulva”—can be reversed. “The force of the Goddess’s vulva shoots into the penis of the hunter.” But in the larger scheme of things the sensation is almost always the former. I ask a gay friend about the huge dildos I see in porn stores and expect him to agree with me, that these are largely jokes. But he answers seriously. “There is a—hunger there,” he says. Sometimes more is better, sometimes you just want more. A dildo in the ass rubs on a man’s prostate, penetration of the right kind can make a woman’s vaginal vault explode with fluid and shivering pleasure. Penetration isn’t fucking, just as fucking doesn’t have to imply penetration. Penetration is a specific, almost subtextural kind of fucking, it can be separate from or part of other sexual acts, it can be central, peripheral, or woven through. It can stand alone or inseparable from everything else sexual. Penetration anywhere but the vagina is so peculiarly offensive to so many people there is one multiply defined term for its manifestations, oral or anal, male or female. Two men or two women engaging in sodomy in private can be arrested in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, and Texas. Anyone engaging in sodomy with anyone else, even in complete privacy, can be arrested in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia. If I lean down to a loved friend’s crotch for a kiss, I can go to jail in those states. These aren’t idle, forgotten laws; they are enforced, a fact that doesn’t reflect whether or not these behaviors are common, whether or not the legislators and police and judges practice them, too. We call sodomy “Greek,” but to Shakespeare it was the “Italian habit.” The French call it “le vice allemand”; the medieval Christians called it “Turkish.” Anything but close to home, because heaven knows, we would never do such things.

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

  I know the belief that there is something unnatural about female desire is embedded in me no matter how much I fight it. Appetite in a woman is wanton by its very existence. Many sexual attitudes hinge on the belief that women either are not or somehow should not be as sexually aggressive, voracious, or emotionally disinterested during sex as men. “Women are more interested in relationships than in sex” is a cliché repeated in a thousand ways, ad infinitum. The real message is that women should be more interested in relationships than in sex. People will argue the truth of the assumption that women are not as sexually aggressive as men by nature by the fact that women don’t in fact act as aggressively, despite the fact that there are a thousand and one culturally imposed reasons why they don’t. They don’t because they’re not supposed to, because they’re punished if they do, and that’s proof they naturally should not. It’s a merry-go-round of illogic. Because they don’t need to have erections for sex, because they in fact show no objectively visible signs of arousal necessarily, women are doubly suspect—supposed always to be reluctant when it comes to sex but perhaps always ready for it at a moment’s notice. This is the weird, circular logic of misogyny, in which women are supposed to be the opposite of what they are suspected to truly be, and that suspicion fuels endless devious efforts at control. Clitoridectomies, oophorectomies, and sometimes complete hysterectomies were done in great numbers in the mid to late 1800s to cure female sexual appetite and various medical ills, including the rampaging epidemic of hysteria. I don’t think it’s an accident that religious and moral fundamentalism—of all kinds, in all religions—always has a core of misogynism. Religiously based antisex attitudes focus both on the evil power of female sexuality and the dread consequences to a pure woman soiled by sex. Likewise, religious and moral tolerance and celebration of sex as a life force, an expression of joy, love, and creation, tends to venerate women however it is constructed. My mother, far more than I, was raised to fear the free release of sexual impulse. A World War II marriage manual has this to say about undue desire: “The most common sign is an increase in weight.… Many of the great women writers and designers are those who have learned to use their sexual emotions along lines of creative endeavor. This requires great will power and persistent training.… The woman who is constantly on the go, who is active mentally and physically, will have little time left for morbid thoughts.”

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

  [image file=image_rsrc10D.jpg] Jackie Daniels has never been arrested. “There was a shift in me, personally, where I realized I was doing sex work and that it was fun. I was making people happy, I was contributing to their lives, and I didn’t see anything wrong at all with what I was doing. I was deeply confused about why this would be illegal. Then I realized some people just have this very small mentality. ‘Well, it’s illegal.’ ‘Because I’m the mommy, that’s why!’ There’s no good reason. ‘Because I said so.’ Because God said.” The age of consent in Victorian England was twelve. One reason for the traffic in virgins was the prevalence of venereal disease. The Contagious Diseases Act of the mid-1800s set up a system whereby working-class women seen talking to soldiers on the sidewalk—or simply reported as having been seen doing so by a single citizen—could be arrested, imprisoned, subject to forced medical exams, and sentenced to hard labor for refusing to comply. If diseased, women could be kept forcibly hospitalized for up to nine months. Men were not examined or isolated even after contact with a prostitute found to have a venereal disease; they simply went to the next whore or the next town and infected another one, who would in turn be punished for “spreading” disease. This sounds like the brutal ignorance of history. But today, in England and in various parts of the United States, women thought to be prostitutes can be prohibited from talking to men on the street. Anyone who thinks the “legalization” of prostitution—that is, government regulation by ordinance—is a good idea either harbors hostility toward prostitutes or hasn’t taken a good look at Nevada, where this is the case. In the parts of Nevada where prostitution is regulated, prostitutes aren’t allowed to live in the same town where they work. They aren’t allowed to go into casinos or bars at all or be in the company of men in public—any men. They are tested weekly for venereal diseases, including AIDS, though their clients are not. A recent law requires clients to wear condoms. Condoms are, in fact, evidence of prostitution; both in England and the United States possession of a quantity of condoms is considered enough reason to arrest a woman. In England it’s been the sole evidence cited in court when a woman is found guilty.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  “Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe” (John 19:5). The cross is the entire sign of Libra, as we have made it, the dense, material earth, otherwise known as Egypt, “where our Lord was crucified.” And everything else with him, hence “the martyrdom of man.” That man should suffer as he does and the Cause remain blameless is a priestly lie that must be refuted. The cross itself is that refutation but because of the lie we cannot see it. We still believe that God, in his infinite love, sacrificed his Son to save us from perdition. This we call “vicarious atonement,” but for what? It was not man that committed the “original sin”; it was the Creator, yet man is atoning for it. This he cannot see, nor dare he accuse. I think it was St. Anselm who sensed these subtle truths; a metaphysician as well as a bishop, his words imply a suspicion that Christ came not to save man from the condemnation of God, but to save God from the condemnation of man. Having made a world of pain and suffering, God felt he needed exoneration, and so sent a representative to plead his case before mankind. This is the love and mercy teaching of his dutiful Son, who died to save his Father from the growing suspicion of pagan enlightenment. And he did it so well he deceived all Christen-dumb. Taken either way, it’s still mythology, and the fact that western man can believe it literally is the key to the mess he has made of his world. He just doesn’t know he’s going about in a state of appalling ignorance. Had our Gospel writers been metaphysicians, like Anselm, we would now know the true nature of Causation and our place in its creation; but no, they were religion-makers and their purpose was to procure a soft spot for themselves on the real cross, life itself. And so, with diabolical cunning, they took the facts of natural creation and wrote them up in such a way as to deceive the entire world; they diverted the race from the natural to the supernatural and thus confused the human mind. Of man, the only moral part of God, they made an immoral ingrate grieving the heart of his loving Father ... He must be saved from this “sin” instead of his God-ordained ignorance, and this by way of a priesthood that holds up the cross as a symbol of God’s love instead of his monstrous cruelty. Our priests see no theistic lesson in Managua destroyed at Christmas, or part of Alaska at Easter. Not even a church struck by lightning while its people worship can teach them anything. Some of them are looking for the Second Coming of Christ but, as we said, what they are going to get is worldwide disaster.

• 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 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 Another Country (1962)

  If all you can do is beat her, well, then, you ought to leave her.” Rufus seemed to smile. “I guess there is something the matter with my head.” Then he was silent again; he twisted his body on the bed; he looked over at Vivaldo. “You put her in a cab?” “Yes,” Vivaldo said. “She’s gone to your place?” “Yes.” “You going back there?” “I thought, maybe, I’d stay here with you for awhile—if you don’t mind.” “What’re you trying to do—be a warden or something?” He said it with a smile, but there was no smile in his voice. “I just thought maybe you wanted company,” said Vivaldo. Rufus rose from the bed and walked restlessly up and down the two rooms. “I don’t need no company. I done had enough company to last me the rest of my life.” He walked to the window and stood there, his back to Vivaldo. “How I hate them—all those white sons of bitches out there. They’re trying to kill me, you think I don’t know? They got the world on a string, man, the miserable white cock suckers, and they tying that string around my neck, they killing me.” He turned into the room again; he did not look at Vivaldo. “Sometimes I lie here and I listen—just listen. They out there, scuffling, making that change, they think it’s going to last forever. Sometimes I lie here and listen, listen for a bomb, man, to fall on this city and make all that noise stop. I listen to hear them moan, I want them to bleed and choke, I want to hear them crying, man, for somebody to come help them. They’ll cry a long time before I come down there.” He paused, his eyes glittering with tears and with hate. “It’s going to happen one of these days, it’s got to happen. I sure would like to see it.” He walked back to the window. “Sometimes I listen to those boats on the river—I listen to those whistles—and I think wouldn’t it be nice to get on a boat again and go someplace away from all these nowhere people, where a man could be treated like a man.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and then suddenly brought his fist down on the window sill. “You got to fight with the landlord because the landlord’s white! You got to fight with the elevator boy because the motherfucker’s white. Any bum on the Bowery can shit all over you because maybe he can’t hear, can’t see, can’t walk, can’t fuck—but he’s whiter!” “Rufus. Rufus. What about——” He wanted to say, What about me, Rufus? I’m white. He said, “Rufus, not everybody’s like that.” “No?

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  To escape its tragic consequence we must reverse this process; we must begin with nothing qualitative, thus giving meaning to Evolution, namely, qualitation; we must realize that the glory of Creation lies in its consummation, not its inception. As this consummation is perfected humanity, this gives meaning to man as well. In due time he becomes a divine being, and so, divinity is made by man, not man by divinity. This the scriptural authors did not know and so they put divinity at the wrong end of Being. And what good does that do man? Though God were divine to infinity it would not change savage-nature-molded humanity. For divinity to become factual on earth it must first become functional in man. This is the goal of Evolution and the purpose of man, both concealed from us by priestly falsehoods. If we would understand Creation, Evolution and ourselves, we must put these aside and learn an entirely new system of thought. And by this I do not mean that of science. Its theories of Creation and Evolution are also false. Prephysical creation is a metaphysical subject and neither the scientist nor the religionist can deal effectively with it. The religionist begins with a “living God” and the scientist with “dead matter,” whereas matter is the end of world creation not the beginning. No, only the metaphysician can reach out and grasp the totality of things, and it is still a mystery only because there has not been a genuine metaphysician in the world for six thousand years. If there had been, he would have seen the fallacies of both science and religion and exposed them. Planetary ElementsWith science, as stated, everything begins with matter, no intelligence, no ideation, no prephysical process. In all ancient cosmologies there were seven stages in the creative process, each producing a different element and rate of vibration. Were the nature and purpose of these known to us, life would not be the mystery that it is. Time was when they were known, but our scientists brand all reference to them as “mere metaphysics,” yet without them they cannot explain such things as sentiency, emotion, mind or even life, neither can they solve the riddle of the universe. Thus they lay themselves open to the taunt of religion, equally ignorant of them: “The evolutionary expositor . . . cannot pretend to have no lacuna in his history.” Martineau. With the addition of the missing elements the lacunae in both science and religion could be filled and the “mysteries” now “known only to God” explained. That the scientist does not recognize these elements is no proof that they do not exist; they are but the eka elements of a system beyond his ken. When someday he wearies of the physical and needs them to explain the superphysical, he will admit them; then, as always, they will become another “great scientific discovery”—like the Van Allen belt, known always to the metaphysician.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day, according to all that he had done to Lachish (Chap. 10). Such is the record, but only part of it. Little wonder the poet E. A. Robinson on reading it exclaimed: “A most bloodthirsty and perilous book for the young. Jehovah is beyond a doubt the worst character in fiction.” We blame the movies and the comics for juvenile delinquency but there is nothing in them to compare with Joshua and his God. To help His “chosen” this God destroyed Egypt and drowned its people; He even drowned “all in whose nostrils was the breath of life.” And we’re supposed to worship him. If so, then we are all devil-worshipers. The Jews firmly believe they are “the chosen people”; what they do not know is that that which chose them is the devil. If the reader cannot accept this, he should read again the book of Joshua. There this Jehovah commanded Joshua to kill thirty-one kings and possibly a million men, women and children. If this be not the devil’s work, what is it? And whom did this killer choose to do His dirty work? Jacob, Joshua, Moses and David, criminals all. Yet they were men “after God’s own heart.” If so, God must be like His men. This is what the Torah is telling us, and only when the Jews realize it will they understand themselves and their tragic history. Now this is not anti-Semitism. The scriptural Jews are but symbols of life and that includes us all. Their ancient priests deceived us but so did their Christian counterparts and for 2,000 years. These see no theistic lesson in Joshua. On the contrary, they use it to show us the rewards of faith in God. He stopped the sun, He divided the sea for His chosen; He sent down manna from heaven for them—and hailstones for their enemies. This is that false security the scriptures offer. On the basis of it fools let serpents sting them to prove their faith, others refuse inoculation and deny their children blood transfusion. Such false faith must be destroyed. A mythical God is a spiritual “Maginot Line”—a comfort when all is well but useless in time of trouble, war, for instance. When that occurs both sides pray to this God, but God is on the side of the heaviest cannon. Here cannon power is God’s aid, and whoever gets there with “the mostest” wins. Now, that aid is El Shaddai’s power, atomic energy, and this is our security today not the God of religion. Lacking any diviner aid some of our preachers tell us that God withdrew from his world after this miraculous age; they must now learn that this miraculous age was mythology’s age, and its God but mythology’s stage equipment.