Contempt

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 184 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Cultish (2021)

  The fitness industry’s maximalist ethos that throwing yourself wholeheartedly into a program—that working harder and faster, never quitting, and intensely believing in yourself—will give you flat abs and inner peace is uncannily reminiscent of the prosperity gospel. This Amway-esque ambiance is subtler in some studios than it is in others, but across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body fat percentage will drop and your gluteus will elevate, and so will your life’s value, but only through sweaty, high-priced labor. You can hear swells of New Thought in CrossFit’s unswerving more-is-more rhetoric. Capitalizing on the athletic vernacular and warlike delivery of a drill sergeant, CrossFit trainers (or “coaches,” as they’re called on the inside) bellow slogans like “Beast mode,” “No guts, no glory,” “Sweating or crying?,” “The burden of failure is far heavier than that barbell,” and “Puking is acceptable. . . . Blood is acceptable. Quitting is not.” Invoking rituals like Hero WoDs (“hero workouts of the day,” move sequences named after fallen members of the military and law enforcement), they manufacture the atmosphere of soldiers in training. CrossFit boasts a staunchly libertarian atmosphere, derived from the personal politics of its founder, Greg Glassman , who has famously uttered quotes like “Routine is the enemy” and “I don’t mind being told what to do. I just won’t do it.” It’s no coincidence, then, that the CrossFit climate is one of lawlessness, where within the anarchical universe of the box, followers are not only allowed but encouraged to work out so hard they vomit, urinate, or end up in the hospital. Jason, a cancer survivor and ex-CrossFitter who joined his local box on a quest of self-empowerment after finishing chemotherapy, was forced to quit after developing chronic shoulder pain and a knee injury so severe, it required surgery. In a 2013 Medium post about his experience, he wrote, “The first year was exhilarating. . . . I began bragging about my lifting numbers, and quickly amped up the frequency of my visits from three to four, then five days per week. Without even realizing it, I became that evangelizing asshole.” But eventually, CrossFit’s ungovernable rhetoric, which conditions members to believe that pushing their bodies to injury is inevitable and even admirable, caught up to Jason. “The messed-up part is that injuries in CrossFit are seen as badges of honor, the price of getting righteously ripped, bro,” he revealed.* So when he complained to his coaches about the shoulder and knee pain he was experiencing, they gaslit him into thinking it was all his fault. “You’re supposed to push yourself to the limit,” Jason wrote, “but when you hit the limit and pay the price, you’re the idiot who went too far.” “No guts, no glory” may be a tagline, but it’s also among the thought-terminating clichés CrossFit might use to silence your grievances.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  between us. All of the other parties to the meeting had understood that it was agreed that the tapes, or transcripts of them, or both, would be released. After the meeting, Skinner refused his permission. I feel the profession was cheated. I have come to realize that the basic difference between a behavioristic and a humanistic approach to human beings is a philosophical choice. This certainly can be discussed, but cannot possibly be settled by evidence. If one takes Skinner as of some years ago—and I believe this is his view today—then the environment, which is part of a causal sequence, is the sole determiner of the individual’s behavior, which is thus again an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. All the things that I do, or that Skinner does, are simply inevitable results of our conditioning. As he has pointed out, man acts as he is forced to act, but as if he were not forced. Carried to its logical conclusion, this means, as John Calvin concluded earlier, that the universe was at some point wound up like a great clock and has been ticking off its inexorable way ever since. Thus, what we think are our decisions, choices, and values are all illusions. Skinner did not write his books because he had chosen to present his views, or to point to the kind of society he values, but simply because he was conditioned to make certain marks on paper. Amazingly to me, he admitted as much in one session in which we both participated. My experience in therapy and in groups makes it impossible for me to deny the reality and significance of human choice. To me it is not an illusion that man is to some degree the architect of himself. I have presented evidence that the degree of self-understanding is perhaps the most important factor in predicting the individual’s behavior. So for me the humanistic approach is the only possible one. It is for each person, however, to follow the pathway—behavioristic or humanistic—that he finds most congenial. Saying that it is for the individual to decide is not synonymous with saying that it makes no difference. Choosing the humanistic philosophy, for example, means that very different topics are chosen for research and different methods for validating discoveries. It means an approach to social change based on the human desire and potentiality for change, not on conditioning. It leads to a deeply democratic political philosophy rather than management by an elite. So the choice does have consequences. To me it is entirely logical that a technologically oriented society, with its steady emphasis on a greater control of human behavior, should be enamored of a behavioristic approach. Likewise, academic psychology, with its unwavering insistence that “the intellect is all,” has greatly preferred it over the humanistic approach. If the university psychologist accepted the latter view, he would have to admit that he is involved, as a subjective person, in his choice of research

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This improvement, also, in the external condition of the clergy was often attended with a proportional degeneracy in their moral character. It raised them above oppressive and distracting cares for livelihood, made them independent, and permitted them to devote their whole strength to the duties of their office; but it also favored ease and luxury, allured a host of unworthy persons into the service of the church, and checked the exercise of free giving among the people. The better bishops, like Athanasius, the two Gregories, Basil, Chrysosotom, Theodoret, Ambrose, Augustine, lived in ascetic simplicity, and used their revenues for the public good; while others indulged their vanity, their love of magnificence, and their voluptuousness. The heathen historian Ammianus gives the country clergy in general the credit of simplicity, temperance, and virtue, while he represents the Roman hierarchy, greatly enriched by the gifts of matrons, as extreme in the luxury of their dress and their more than royal banquets;150 and St. Jerome agrees with him.151 The distinguished heathen prefect, Praetextatus, said to Pope Damasus, that for the price of the bishopric of Rome he himself might become a Christian at once. The bishops of Constantinople, according to the account of Gregory Nazianzen,152 who himself held that see for a short time, were not behind their Roman colleagues in this extravagance, and vied with the most honorable functionaries of the state in pomp and sumptuous diet. The cathedrals of Constantinople and Carthage had hundreds of priests, deacons, deaconesses, subdeacons, prelectors, singers, and janitors.153 It is worthy of notice, that, as we have already intimated, the two greatest church fathers gave the preference in principle to the voluntary system in the support of the church and the ministry, which prevailed before the Nicene era, and which has been restored in modern times in the United States of America. Chrysostom no doubt perceived that under existing circumstances the wants of the church could not well be otherwise supplied, but he was decidedly averse to the accumulation of treasure by the church, and said to his hearers in Antioch: "The treasure of the church should be with you all, and it is only your hardness of heart that requires her to hold earthly property and to deal in houses and lands. Ye are unfruitful in good works, and so the ministers of God must meddle in a thousand matters foreign to their office. In the days of the apostles people might likewise have given them houses and lands; why did they prefer to sell the houses and lands and give the proceeds? Because this was without doubt the better way. Your fathers would have preferred that you should give alms of your incomes, but they feared that your avarice might leave the poor to hunger; hence the present order of things."154 Augustine desired that his people in Hippo should take back the church property and support the clergy and the poor by free gifts.155 § 16. Episcopal Jurisdiction and Intercession.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  orthodoxy of the great departed became in this way a vital issue of the day, and rose in interest with the growing zeal for pure doctrine and the growing horror of all heresy. Upon this question three parties arose: free, progressive disciples, blind adherents, and blind opponents.1534 1. The true, independent followers of Origen drew from his writings much instruction and quickening, without committing themselves to his words, and, advancing with the demands of the time, attained a clearer knowledge of the specific doctrines of Christianity than Origen himself, without thereby losing esteem for his memory and his eminent services. Such men were Pamphilus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Didymus of Alexandria, and in a wider sense Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa; and among the Latin fathers, Hilary, and at first Jerome, who afterwards joined the opponents. Gregory of Nyssa, and perhaps also Didymus, even adhered to Origen’s doctrine of the final salvation of all created intelligences. 2. The blind and slavish followers, incapable of comprehending the free spirit of Origen, clave to the letter, held all his immature and erratic views, laid greater stress on them than Origen himself, and pressed them to extremes. Such mechanical fidelity to a master is always apostasy to his spirit, which tends towards continual growth in knowledge. To this class belonged the Egyptian monks in the Nitrian mountains; four in particular: Dioscurus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Enthymius, who are known by the name of the "tall brethren,"1535 and were very learned. 3. The opponents of Origen, some from ignorance, others from narrowness and want of discrimination, shunned his speculations as a source of the most dangerous heresies, and in him condemned at the same time all free theological discussion, without which no progress in knowledge is possible, and without which even the Nicene dogma would never have come into existence. To these belonged a class of Egyptian monks in the Scetic desert, with Pachomius at their head, who, in opposition to the mysticism and spiritualism of the Origenistic monks of Nitria, urged grossly sensuous views of divine things, so as to receive the name of Anthropomorphites. The Roman church, in which Origen was scarcely known by name before the Arian disputes, shared in a general way the strong prejudice against him as an unsound and dangerous writer. The leader in the crusade against the bones of Origen was the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis (Constantia) in Cyprus († 403), an honest, well-meaning, and by his contemporaries highly respected, but violent, coarse, contracted, and bigoted monastic saint and heresy hunter.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  While my mother prodded shrink-wrapped beef, thumbing the meat as if checking for its pulse, Dayi pushed me down an aisle wide enough for an airplane. The ceiling high as a church’s. I told Dayi this was a place of worship: sacred were the super-packs of socks on sale, so cheap we wished we had as many feet as a millipede. Holy were the baked hams, fat as infants, waiting to be adopted into our bellies. Dayi and I opened every door in the freezer aisle: peas, pies, poultry. Americans freeze everything, I said, and when she asked why, I said it was because their mouths were probably microwaves. Buy my casket at Costco, Dayi said. Better yet, don’t spend anything. Feed my body to the parking lot pigeons. The Costco pigeons landed on the pavement in bulk and panthered across the lot, pouncing on our feet. Outside, my mother bought us hot dogs with a coupon and we slicked them with mustard, eating the buns and feeding the meat to the pigeons. _ Dayi was born without blood. A doctor had to kill a goat and use tubes to siphon goatblood into Dayi’s empty veins. But the doctor accidentally pumped too much blood into her, turning her red-hard and bloated as an apple. When Ama bathed her in a bucket, she bobbed ass-up in the water. Every day, Dayi wore something red: a petal she slid under her thumbnail, a handkerchief, a red thread around her wrist, a scar on her belly where her blood was shepherded in. Even her favorite foods were red: pig’s blood cake, char siu buns, eels that grew scarlet gills after eating the corpsemeat of the drowned. Whatever she touched could only blush: Green guavas turned the color of biblical apples. Once, when she was a girl, a mutt that bit her on the ass became a bloodhound. When she drank out of the river, it unraveled like a ruddy ribbon all the way down to the sea. The missionaries called her blessed, a girl who could turn water to the color of wine, but Dayi never felt that way. Her molars grew in the color of raw meat, and her bathwater looked like a butcher’s sink. After Dayi touched three of her classmates by accident, the teachers told her to wear gloves to school. They were made of some animal’s hide, skin on the inside and fur on the outside. Dayi was converted by a Chinese missionary who wore two belts at a time—one to keep his pants up, the other to strip off and beat with. He taught the Bible in beatings: If they misspoke a verse, he flayed the brown off their backs.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I called her a racist and told her that cutting down trees is a cultural thing, he said. What’s a “cultural thing”? I said. Like a funeral or a wedding, he said. Like you. This was how my mother came to thank Duck Uncle for keeping us in a house we couldn’t afford: My mother had seen him bury a key under the bush by his front door, so she knuckled into the soil, uprooting the key like a seed. With her fingers wet, she unlocked his front door and found his room, doorless with a skin-thin curtain. Behind the curtain, Duck Uncle was changing into his work clothes—a suit vest embroidered with his name—and my mother could map the whole city of his body. The wet street of his skin, the forehead greased into sky. Duck Uncle was not surprised to see her in his doorway: It was like looking at himself, like looking into water and seeing your own face stitched there. After that, we ate for free at Duck Uncle’s dim sum restaurant, which had a name so generic we never learned it. The food was so greasy it shot down our throats before we could swallow. My brother and I tried hating him, but Duck Uncle’s Sichuan accent was honky and high-pitched and made us laugh until our throats tied themselves into bows. He even promised to teach us to hunt ducks, cutting targets out of shoeboxes and letting us shoot them with his BB gun. My brother had the best aim out of the three of us, threading the pellet through the penciled-in eye. I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe. _ In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Warfare was legitimate only if it restored the Way of Heaven by repelling a barbarian invasion or quashing a revolt. This “punitive warfare” was a penal exercise to rectify behavior. A military campaign against a rebellious Chinese city was therefore a highly ritualized affair, which began and ended with sacrifices at the Earth altar. When battle commenced, each side bullied the other with acts of outrageous kindness to prove its superior nobility. Boasting loudly of their prowess, warriors threw pots of wine over the enemy’s wall. When a Chu archer used his last arrow to shoot a stag that was blocking his chariot’s path, his driver immediately presented it to the enemy team that was bearing down upon them. They at once conceded defeat, exclaiming: “Here is a worthy archer and well-spoken warrior! These are gentlemen!”40 But there were no such limitations in a campaign against barbarians, who could be pursued and slaughtered like wild animals.41 When the Marquis of Jin and his army came by chance upon the local Rong peaceably minding their own business, he ordered his troops to massacre the entire tribe.42 In a war of civilized “us” against bestial “them,” any form of treachery or deceit was permitted.43 [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Despite the ritualists’ best efforts, toward the end of the seventh century violence escalated on the Chinese plain. Barbarian tribes attacked from the north, and the southern state of Chu increasingly ignored the rules of courtly warfare and posed a real threat to the principalities. The Zhou kings were too weak to provide effective leadership, so Prince Huan of Qi, by now the most powerful Chinese state, formed a league of states that bound themselves by oath not to attack each other. But this attempt would fail, because the nobles, addicted to personal prestige, still wanted to preserve their independence. After Chu destroyed the league in 597, the region became engulfed in an entirely new kind of warfare. Other large peripheral states also began to cast aside traditional constraints, determined to expand and conquer more territory even if this meant the enemy’s annihilation. In 593, for example, after a prolonged siege, the people of Song were reduced to eating their children. Small principalities were drawn into the conflict against their will when their territories became battlefields of competing armies. Qi, for example, encroached so frequently on the tiny dukedom of Lu that it was forced to appeal to Chu for help. But by the end of the sixth century, Chu had been defeated and Qi had become so dominant that the Duke of Lu managed to retain a modicum of independence only with the help of the western state of Qin. There was also civil strife: Qin, Jin, and Chu were all fatally weakened by chronic infighting, and in Lu three baronial families effectively created their own substates and reduced the legitimate duke to a mere puppet.

• From The Art of Memoir

  5.The writing is more conversational than Levi’s—informality equals truth to many students. 6.It’s fragmentary, like traumatic memory or a movie flashback. 7.He puts in dialogue. Whereas Levi, the real survivor, is more sparing with dialogue, Wilkomirski has long conversations. 8.Levi uses too many proper names—how could he recall them all? (I assume he’s smart, or maybe he looked some up.) 9.Levi sounds too upper-crust or smart, which makes students see him as posed; they find the informality of Wilkomirski’s writing winning. (They also have this complaint with lefty Orwell—he sounds too highbrow!) 10.What if it’s true, and we don’t believe him? In 2008, of eighteen students, only three found Levi the more plausible; in 2012, of twenty-one students, three again found Levi more plausible. Which means to me that reasonable judgment is still losing ground. In cheating the public, hucksters cheat themselves out of their real stories. James Frey must’ve fought to get sober before A Million Little Pieces; just not in the ways he alleged. No doubt he suffered like hell, but he somehow deluded himself that his real misery wasn’t bad enough—or maybe his real character wasn’t macho enough, or nice enough to warrant scrutiny. But any addict’s overhaul is a nightmare. Surely his true story would’ve been worth a read. Truth is less set in stone now, more mutable. We know better than ever that people lie like crazy. They probably lied a lot before, too, but now cameras and a watchdog media seem way more adroit at catching out their lies. With the web, we’ve got more people trying to track down the adulterer or photograph the drunk celebrity who’s fallen off the wagon. We also often believe all manner of horse dookey based on prevailing winds—family denial systems stay impregnable based on that tendency. Or we’re swept up in a tale we want to believe. Millions of perfectly bright readers get drawn in and duped by bullshit stories. I fell for Lillian Hellman’s self-aggrandizing tales in Pentimento, until Mary McCarthy—known as a rigorous truth seeker —told Dick Cavett’s television audience, “Every word out of her mouth is a lie, including and and the.” Nothing protects us against practiced liars and hucksters; nothing ever will.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Puritans of Massachusetts had no qualms about killing Indians. They had left England during the Thirty Years’ War, had absorbed the militancy of that fearsome time, and justified their violence by a highly selective reading of the Bible. Ignoring Jesus’s pacifist teachings, they drew on the bellicosity of some of the Hebrew scriptures. “God is an excellent Man of War,” preached Alexander Leighton, and the Bible “the best handbook on war.” Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives “without provocation”—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but “a special Commission from God” to take their land.19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics. In 1636 William Bradford described a raid on the Pequot village of Fort Mystic on the Connecticut shore to avenge the murder of an English trader, contemplating the fearsome carnage with lofty complacency: Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.20 When the Puritans negotiated the Treaty of Hertford (1638) with the few Pequot survivors, they insisted on the destruction of all Pequot villages and sold the women and children into slavery. Should Christians have behaved more compassionately? asked Captain John Underhill, a veteran of the Thirty Years’ War. He answered his rhetorical question with a decided negative: God supported the English, “so we had sufficient light for our proceedings.”21

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Renaissance humanists, however, were far more sympathetic to the colonial project. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a fictional account of an ideal society, the Utopians went to war only “to drive invading armies from the territories of their friends, or to liberate oppressed people in the name of humanity from tyranny and servitude.” All very admirable, but there were limits to this benevolent policy: if the population became too great for their island to support, Utopians felt entitled to send settlers to plant a colony on the mainland, “wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied or uncultivated land.” They would farm this neglected soil, which “previously had seemed too barren and paltry even to support the natives,” and make it yield an abundance. Friendly natives could be absorbed into the colony, but the Utopians felt no qualms about fighting those who resisted them: “The Utopians say that it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle or waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it.”16 There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought.17 The so-called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. From the outset, however, the philosophy of human rights, still crucial to our modern political discourse, did not apply to all human beings. Because Europe was frequently afflicted by famine and seemed unable to support its growing population, humanists like Thomas More were scandalized by the idea of arable land going to waste. They looked back to Tacitus, an apologist for Roman imperialism, who had been convinced that exiles had every right to secure a place to live, since “what is possessed by none belongs to everyone.” Commenting on this passage, Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), professor of civil law at Oxford, concluded that because “God did not create the world to be empty,” the “the seizure of vacant places” should be “regarded as a law of nature”: And even though such lands belong to the sovereign of that territory … yet because of that law of nature which abhors a vacuum, they will fall to the lot of those who take them, though the sovereign will retain jurisdiction over them.18 Gentili also quoted Aristotle’s opinion that some men were natural slaves and that waging war against primitive peoples “who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit,” was as necessary as hunting wild animals.19 Gentili argued that the Mesoamericans clearly fell into this category because of their abominable lewdness and cannibalism. Where churchmen frequently condemned the violent subjugation of the New World, the Renaissance humanists who were trying to create an alternative to the cruelties committed by people of faith endorsed it.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  A tightly knit and isolated community, however, can develop an exclusivity that ostracizes others. In Asia Minor a number of Jewish-Christian communities, who traced their origins to the ministry of Jesus’s apostle John, had developed a different view of Jesus. Paul and the Synoptics had never regarded Jesus as God; the very idea would have horrified Paul who, before his conversion, had been an exceptionally punctilious Pharisee. They all used the term “Son of God” in the conventional Jewish sense: Jesus had been an ordinary human being commissioned by God with a special task. Even in his exalted state, there was, for Paul, always a clear distinction between Jesus kyrios Christos and God, his Father. The author of the Fourth Gospel, however, depicted Jesus as a cosmic being, God’s eternal “Word” (logos) who had existed with God before the beginning of time.89 This high Christology seems to have separated this group from other Jewish-Christian communities. Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the kingdom. They too had an ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,”90 condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.”91 Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of Revelation, probably written while the Jews of Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire.92 The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It was not a religious message but one that nevertheless resonated strongly as such with Bush’s base of 100 million American evangelical Christians, who still subscribed to the vision of America as a “city on a hill.” The first three months of the war against Afghanistan, where Taliban gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda, seemed remarkably successful. The Taliban were defeated, al-Qaeda personnel scattered, and the United States established two large military bases, at Bagram and Kandahar. But there were two ominous developments. Even though Bush had given instructions that prisoners be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, it seems that in practice troops were told that they could “deviate slightly from the rules” since terrorists were not covered by the laws relating to prisoners of war. Bush had been careful to insist that this was not a war against Islam, but that was not how it appeared on the ground, where there was little punctiliousness about religious sensibilities. On September 26, 2002, a convoy of mujahidin were captured in Takhar. According to one Muslim account, U.S. troops “hung one mujahid by his arms for six days, questioning him about Usama bin Laden.” Eventually they gave up and asked him about his faith: he replied that he trusted in Allah, the Prophet Muhammad and the holy Qur’an. Upon receiving this answer, the U.S. troops replied that “Your Allah and Muhammad are not here, but the Qur’an is, so let’s see what it will do to us.” After this, one U.S. soldier brought a Holy Qur’an and began urinating over it, only to be joined by other U.S. and Northern Alliance troops who did the same. 79 Despite their manifest contempt for Islam, this does not mean that U.S. troops saw themselves as fighting a war that was specifically directed against Islam. Rather, the unconventional nature of the campaign, defined as a “War on Terror,” a “different kind of war,” had changed the rules of engagement. With this terminology the United States had liberated itself from the rules of conventional conflict. 80 Ground troops seem to have absorbed the view that terrorists were not entitled to the same protection as regular combatants. Since 9/11, the United States, which still regards itself as a uniquely benign hegemon, has, with the support of its allies, indefinitely retained people who deny any involvement in any conflict, conducted violent and humiliating interrogations, or else sent prisoners to countries known to practice torture.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Locke assumed that the separation of politics and religion was written into the very nature of things. But this, of course, was a radical innovation that most of his contemporaries would find extraordinary and unacceptable. It would make modern “religion” entirely different from anything that had gone before. Yet because of the violent passions it supposedly unleashed, Locke insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all things necessary” for the creation of a peaceful society.117 In Locke we see the birth of the “myth of religious violence” that would become ingrained in the Western ethos. It is true that Western Christianity had become more internalized during the early modern period. This is evident in Luther’s conception of faith as an interior appropriation of Christ’s saving power, in the mysticism of Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), and in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). In the past the exploration of the inner world had compelled Buddhist monks to work “for the welfare and happiness of the people” and Confucians to engage in a political effort to reform society. After his solitary struggle with Satan in the wilderness, Jesus had embarked on a ministry of healing in the troubled villages of Galilee that led to his execution by the Roman authorities. Muhammad had left his cave on Mount Hira for a political struggle against the structural violence of Mecca. In the early modern period too, the Spiritual Exercises had propelled Ignatius’s Jesuits all over the world—to Japan, India, China, and the Americas. But modern “religion” would try to subvert this natural dynamic by turning the seeker in upon himself, and inevitably, many would rebel against this unnatural privatization of their faith. Unable to extend the natural human rights they were establishing to the indigenous peoples of the New World, the Renaissance humanists had already revealed the insidious underside of early modern ideas that still inform our political life. Locke, who was among the first to formulate the liberal ethos of modern politics, also revealed the darker aspect of the secularism he proposed. A pioneer of tolerance, he was adamant that the sovereign state could not accommodate either Catholicism or Islam;118 he endorsed a master’s “Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power” over a slave that included “the power to kill him at any time.” Himself directly involved in the colonization of the Carolinas, Locke argued that the native “kings” of America had no legal jurisdiction or right of ownership of their land. Like the urbane Thomas More, he found it intolerable that the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America be left to nature, without any improvement, tillage and husbandry,” when it could be used to support the “needy and wretched” of Europe.119 A new system of violent oppression was emerging that would privilege the liberal, secular West at the expense of the indigenous peoples of its colonies.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I took my seat in the middle of the first row, pulled out my notebook and made ready. In a few minutes Whitman came on the platform from the left: he walked slowly, stiffly, which made me grin for I did not then know that he had had a stroke of paralysis and I thought his peculiar walk, a mere pose. Besides, his clothes were astonishingly ill-fitting and ill-suited to his figure. He must have been nearly six feet in height and strongly made, yet he wore a short jacket which cocked up behind in the perkiest way. Looked at from the front, his white collar was wide open and discovered a tuft of grey hairs, while his trousers that corkscrewed about his legs had parted company with his vest and disclosed a margin of dingy white shirt. His appearance filled me—poor little English snob that I was—with contempt: he recalled to my memory irresistibly an old Cochin-China rooster I had seen when a boy; it stalked across the farm-yard with the same slow, stiff gait and carried a stubby tail cocked up behind. Yet a second look showed me Whitman as a fine figure of a man with something arresting in the perfect simplicity and sincerity of voice and manner. He arranged his notes in complete silence and began to speak very slowly, often pausing for a better word or to consult his papers, sometimes hesitating and repeating himself—clearly an unpracticed speaker who disdained any semblance of oratory. He told us simply that in his youth he had met and got to know very well a certain Colonel in the army who had known Thomas Paine intimately. This Colonel had assured him more than once that all the accusations against Paine’s habits and character were false—a mere outcome of Christian bigotry. Paine would drink a glass or two of wine at dinner like all well-bred men of that day; but he was very moderate and in the last ten years of his life the Colonel asserted that Paine never once drank to excess. The Colonel cleared Paine, too, of looseness of morals in much the same decisive way and finally spoke of him as invariably well-conducted, of witty speech and a vast fund of information, a most interesting and agreeable companion. And the Colonel was an unimpeachable witness, Whitman assured us, a man of the highest honor and most scrupulous veracity. Whitman spoke with such uncommon slowness that I was easily able to take down the chief sentences in longhand: he was manifestly determined to say just what he had to say, neither more nor less—which made an impression of singular sincerity and truthfulness. When he had finished, I went up on the platform to see him near at hand; and draw him out if possible. I showed him my card of the “Press” and asked him if he would kindly sign and thus authenticate the sentences on Paine he had used in his address.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  For the Kookists, however, secular Israel was beyond criticism and essential to the world’s salvation. With the establishment of Israel, Messianic redemption had already begun: “Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel constitutes another spiritual stage; literally, another stage in the process of redemption.” 67 As we have seen, ancient Israel from the very first had looked askance at state violence; now the Kookists gave it supreme sanction. Once the nation-state becomes the highest value, however, as Lord Acton had predicted, there is no limit to what it can do—literally, anything goes. By elevating the state to the divine level, Kookists had also given sacred endorsement to nationalism’s shadow side: its intolerance of minorities. Unless Jews occupied the entire Land, Israel would remain tragically incomplete, so annexing Arab territory was a supreme religious duty. 68 A few days after the Six-Day War, the Labor government proposed to return some of the occupied territories— including some of the most important biblical sites on the West Bank—to the Arabs in exchange for peace and recognition. The Kookists vehemently opposed the plan and, to their surprise, found that for the first time they had secular allies. A group of Israeli poets, philosophers, and army officers, fired by the victory, had come together to prevent any such handover and offered the Kookists moral and financial support. Secular nationalists made common cause with the hitherto despised religious Zionists, realizing that they had exactly the same objectives. Enthused by this backing, in April 1968, Moshe Levinger led a small group of families to celebrate Passover in Hebron on the West Bank. They checked into the Park Hotel and, to the embarrassment of the Labor government, refused to leave. But their chutzpah tugged at Laborite heartstrings because it recalled the audacity of the chalutzim, who in the days before the state had defied the British by squatting aggressively in Arab land. 69 Yet again, secular and religious enthusiasms merged dangerously. For the Kookists, Hebron—the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—was contaminated by the presence of the Palestinians, who also revered these prophets. They now refused to leave the Cave of the Patriarchs in time for Muslim communal prayer, noisily blocking the entrances and flying the Israeli flag at the shrine on Independence Day. 70 When a Palestinian finally threw a hand grenade, the Israeli government reluctantly established an enclave guarded by the IDF for the settlers outside Hebron; by 1972 Kiryat Arba had five thousand inhabitants. For Kookists it was an outpost pushing against the frontiers of the demonic world of the “Other Side.” Yet still Labor refused to annex the territories. After the October War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights and were repelled only with great difficulty, a group of Kookists, rabbis, and hawkish secularists formed Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But in the Nicene age it advanced to a formal invocation of the saints as our patrons (patroni) and intercessors (intercessores, mediatores) before the throne of grace, and degenerated into a form of refined polytheism and idolatry. The saints came into the place of the demigods, Penates and Lares, the patrons of the domestic hearth and of the country. As once temples and altars to the heroes, so now churches and chapels819 came to be built over the graves of the martyrs, and consecrated to their names (or more precisely to God through them). People laid in them, as they used to do in the temple of Aesculapius, the sick that they might be healed, and hung in them, as in the temples of the gods, sacred gifts of silver and gold. Their graves were, as Chrysostom says, move splendidly adorned and more frequently visited than the palaces of kings. Banquets were held there in their honor, which recall the heathen sacrificial feasts for the welfare of the manes. Their relics were preserved with scrupulous care, and believed to possess miraculous virtue. Earlier, it was the custom to pray for the martyrs (as if they were not yet perfect) and to thank God for their fellowship and their pious example. Now such intercessions for them were considered unbecoming, and their intercession was invoked for the living.820 This invocation of the dead was accompanied with the presumption that they take the deepest interest in all the fortunes of the kingdom of God on earth, and express it in prayers and intercessions.821 This was supposed to be warranted by some passages of Scripture, like Luke xv. 10, which speaks of the angels (not the saints) rejoicing over the conversion of a sinner, and Rev. viii. 3, 4, which represents an angel as laying the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne of God. But the New Testament expressly rebukes the worship of the angels (Col. ii. 18; Rev. xix. 10; xxii. 8, 9), and furnishes not a single example of an actual invocation of dead men; and it nowhere directs us to address our prayers to any creature. Mere inferences from certain premises, however plausible, are, in such weighty matters, not enough. The intercession of the saints for us was drawn as a probable inference from the duty of all Christians to pray for others, and the invocation of the saints for their intercession was supported by the unquestioned right to apply to living saints for their prayers, of which even the apostles availed themselves in their epistles.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  70 So in their hearing David ordered his men to kill only “the blind and lame,” a ruthlessness designed to terrify the enemy. The biblical text here is fragmentary and obscure, however, and may have been edited by a redactor who was uncomfortable with this story. One later tradition even claimed that David was forbidden by Yahweh to build a temple in Jerusalem, “since you have shed so much blood on the earth in my presence.” That honor would be reserved for David’s son and successor Solomon, whose name was said to derive from the Hebrew shalom, “peace.” 71 But Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, was a Jebusite, and his name could also have derived from Shalem, the ancient deity of Jerusalem. 72 Solomon’s temple was built on the regional model and its furniture showed how thoroughly the cult of Yahweh had accommodated itself to the pagan landscape of the Near East. There was clearly no sectarian intolerance in Israelite Jerusalem. At the temple’s entrance were two Canaanite standing stones (matzevoth) and a massive bronze basin, representing Yam, the sea monster fought by Baal, supported by twelve brazen oxen, common symbols of divinity and fertility. 73 The temple rituals too seem to have been influenced by Baal’s cult in neighboring Ugarit. 74 The temple was supposed to symbolize Yahweh’s approval of Solomon’s rule. 75 There is no reference to his short-lived empire in other sources, but the biblical authors tell us that it extended from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean and was achieved and maintained by force of arms. Solomon had replaced David’s infantry with a chariot army, engaged in lucrative arms deals with neighboring kings, and restored the ancient fortresses of Hazor, Megiddo, and Arad. 76 In purely material terms, everything seemed perfect: “Judah and Israel lived in security: each man under his vine and fig tree!” 77 Yet this kind of state, maintained by war and taxes, was exactly what Yahweh had always abhorred. Unlike David, Solomon even taxed his Israelite subjects, and his building projects required massive forced labor. 78 As well as farming their own plots to produce the surplus that supported the state, peasants also had to serve in the army or the corvée for one month in every three. 79 Some biblical redactors tried to argue that Solomon’s empire failed because he had built shrines for the pagan gods of his foreign wives. 80 But it is clear that the real problem was its structural violence, which offended deep-rooted Israelite principles. After Solomon’s death a delegation begged his son Rehoboam not to replicate his father’s “harsh tyranny.” 81 When Rehoboam contemptuously refused, a mob attacked the manager of the corvée, and ten of the twelve tribes broke away from the empire to form the independent Kingdom of Israel.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To compare such a man with Jesus, is preposterous and even blasphemous. Jesus was the sinless Saviour of sinners; Mohammed was a sinner, and he knew and confessed it. He falls far below Moses, or Elijah, or any of the prophets and apostles in moral purity. But outside of the sphere of revelation, he ranks with Confucius, and Cakya Muni the Buddha, among the greatest founders of religions and lawgivers of nations. § 43. The Conquests of Islâm. "The sword," says Mohammed, "is the key of heaven and hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven, and at the day of judgment his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim." This is the secret of his success. Idolaters had to choose between Islâm, slavery, and death; Jews and Christians were allowed to purchase a limited toleration by the payment of tribute, but were otherwise kept in degrading bondage. History records no soldiers of greater bravery inspired by religion than the Moslem conquerors, except Cromwell’s Ironsides, and the Scotch Covenanters, who fought with purer motives for a nobler cause. The Califs, Mohammed’s successors, who like him united the priestly and kingly dignity, carried on his conquests with the battle-cry: "Before you is paradise, behind you are death and hell." Inspired by an intense fanaticism, and aided by the weakness of the Byzantine empire and the internal distractions of the Greek Church, the wild sons of the desert, who were content with the plainest food, and disciplined in the school of war, hardship and recklessness of life, subdued Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, embracing the classical soil of primitive Christianity. Thousands of Christian churches in the patriarchal dioceses of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, were ruthlessly destroyed, or converted into mosques. Twenty-one years after the death of Mohammed the Crescent ruled over a realm as large as the Roman Empire. Even Constantinople was besieged twice (668 and 717), although in vain. The terrible efficacy of the newly invented "Greek fire," and the unusual severity of a long winter defeated the enemy, and saved Eastern and Northern Europe from the blight of the Koran. A large number of nominal Christians who had so fiercely quarreled with each other about unfruitful subtleties of their creeds, surrendered their faith to the conqueror. In 707 the North African provinces, where once St. Augustin had directed the attention of the church to the highest problems of theology and religion, fell into the hands of the Arabs.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  As I walk around the house, she is standing in the gallery, leaning over the railing. Her face is full in the light of the sun, and her green eyes sparkle. “Still alive?” she asked, without moving. I stood silent, with bowed head. “Give me back my poinard,” she continued. “It is of no use to you. You haven’t even the courage to take your own life.” “I have lost it,” I replied, trembling, shaken by chills. She looked me over with a proud, scornful glance. “I suppose you lost it in the Arno?” She shrugged her shoulders. “No matter. Well, and why didn’t you leave?” I mumbled something which neither she nor I myself could understand. “Oh! you haven’t any money,” she cried. “Here!” With an indescribably disdainful gesture she tossed me her purse. I did not pick it up. Both of us were silent for some time. “You don’t want to leave then?” “I can’t.” * * * * * Wanda drives in the Cascine without me, and goes to the theater without me; she receives company, and the negress serves her. No one asks after me. I stray about the garden, irresolutely, like an animal that has lost its master. Lying among the bushes, I watch a couple of sparrows, fighting over a seed. Suddenly I hear the swish of a woman’s dress. Wanda approaches in a gown of dark silk, modestly closed up to the neck; the Greek is with her. They are in an eager discussion, but I cannot as yet understand a word of what they are saying. He stamps his foot so that the gravel scatters about in all directions, and he lashes the air with his riding whip. Wanda startles. Is she afraid that he will strike her? Have they gone that far? He has left her, she calls him; he does not hear her, does not want to hear her. Wanda sadly lowers her head, and then sits down on the nearest stone-bench. She sits for a long time, lost in thought. I watch her with a sort of malevolent pleasure, finally I pull myself together by sheer force of will, and ironically step before her. She startles, and trembles all over. “I come to wish you happiness,” I said, bowing, “I see, my dear lady, too, has found a master.” “Yes, thank God!” she exclaimed, “not a new slave, I have had enough of them. A master! Woman needs a master, and she adores him.” “You adore him, Wanda?” I cried, “this brutal person—” “Yes, I love him, as I have never loved any one else.” “Wanda!” I clenched my fists, but tears already filled my eyes, and I was seized by the delirium of passion, as by a sweet madness. “Very well, take him as your husband, let him be your master, but I want to remain your slave, as long as I live.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Chapter 20As for Clement, he has been drawn for you already. To the superficies I have delineated, join ferocity, a disposition to sarcasm, the most dangerous roguishness, intemperance in every point, a mordant, satirical mind, a corrupt heart, the cruel tastes Rodin displayed with his young charges, no feelings, no delicacy, no religion, the temperament of one who for five years had not been in a state to procure himself other joys than those for which savagery gave him an appetite Ä and you have there the most complete characterization of this horrid man. Antonin, the third protagonist in these detestable orgies, was forty; small, slight of frame but very vigorous, as formidably organized as Severino and almost as wicked as Clement; an enthusiast of that colleague's pleasures, but giving himself over to them with a somewhat less malignant intention; for while Clement, when exercising this curious mania, had no objective but to vex, to tyrannize a woman, and could not enjoy her in any other way, Antonin using it with delight in all its natural purity, had recourse to the flagellative aspect only in order to give additional fire and further energy to her whom he was honoring with his favors. In a word, one was brutal by taste, the other by refinement. Jerome, the eldest of the four recluses, was also the most debauched; every taste, every passion, every one of the most bestial irregularities were combined in this monk's soul; to the caprices rampant in the others, he joined that of loving to receive what his comrades distributed amongst the girls, and if he gave (which frequently happened), it was always upon condition of being treated likewise in his turn: all the temples of Venus were, what was more, as one to him, but his powers were beginning to decline and for several years he had preferred that which, requiring no effort of the agent, left to the patient the task of arousing the sensations and of producing the ecstasy.