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.

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

  No, surely not, his celestial might is going to bestow many another and greater favor. At the beck and call of a priest, of, that is to say, an odd fellow foul with lies, the great God, creator of all we behold, is going to abase himself to the point of descending ten or twelve million times every morning in a morsel of wheat paste; this the faithful devour and assimilate, and God Almighty is lugged to the bottom of their intestines where he is speedily transmuted into the vilest excrements, and all that for the satisfaction of the tender son, odious inventor of this monstrous impiety which had its beginnings in a cabaret supper. He spake, and it was ordained. He said: this bread you see will be my flesh; you will digest it as such; now, I am God; hence, God will be digested by you; hence, the Creator of Heaven and Earth will be changed, because I have spoken, into the vilest stuff the body of man can exhale, and man will eat his God, because this God is good and because he is omnipotent. However, these blatherings increase; their growth is attributed to their authenticity, their greatness, their sublimity to the puissance of him who introduced them, while in truth the commonest causes double their existence, for the credit error acquires never proved anything but the presence of swindlers on the one side and of idiots on the other. This infamous religion finally arrives on the throne, and it is a weak, cruel, ignorant and fanatical emperor who, enveloping it in the royal mantle, soils the four corners of the earth with it. 0 Therese, what weight are these arguments to carry with an inquiring and philosophic mind? Is the sage able to see anything in this appalling heap of fables but the disgusting fruit of a few men's imposture and the diddled credulity of a vast number? had God willed it that we have some religion or other, and had he been truly powerful or, to frame it more suitably, had there truly been a God, would it have been by these absurd means he would have imparted his instructions to us?

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

  What entitles the latter to require the former to treat kindly with him? and what sort of a fool would the stronger have to be in order to subscribe to such an agreement? I can agree not to employ force against him whose own strength makes him to be feared; but what could motivate me to moderate the effects of my strength upon the being Nature subordinates to me? Pity, do you say? That sentiment is fitting for no one but the person who resembles me and as he is an egoist too, pity's effects only occur under the tacit circumstances in which the individual who inspires my commiseration has sympathy for me in his turn; but if my superiority assures me a constant ascendancy over him, his sympathy becoming valueless to me, I need never, in order to excite it, consent to any sacrifice. Would I not be a fool to feel pity for the chicken they slaughtered for my dinner? That object, too inferior to me, lacking any relation to me, can never excite any feelings in me; well, the relationships of a wife to her husband and that of the chicken to myself are of identical consequence, the one and the other are household chattels which one must use, which one must employ for the purpose indicated by Nature, without any differentiation whatsoever. But, I ask, had it been Nature's intention to create your sex for the happiness of ours and vice versa, would this blind Nature have caused the existence of so many ineptitudes in the construction of the one and the other of those sexes? Would she have implanted faults so grave in each that mutual estrangement and antipathy were bound infallibly to be their result? Without going any further in search of examples, be so good as to tell me, Therese, knowing my organization to be what it is, what woman could I render happy? and, reversibly, to what man can the enjoyment of a woman be sweet when he is not endowed with the gigantic proportions necessary to satisfy her? In your opinion, will they be moral qualities which will compensate his physical shortcomings? And what thinking being, upon knowing a woman to her depths, will not cry with Euripides: 'That one amongst the Gods who brought women into the world may boast of having produced the worst of all creatures and the most afflicting to man.' If then it is demonstrated that the two sexes do not at all sort agreeably with each other and that there is not one well-founded grievance of the one which could not equally and immediately be voiced by the other, it is therefore false, from this moment, to say that Nature created them for their reciprocal happiness. She may have permitted them the desire to attain each other's vicinity in order to conjugate in the interests of propagation, but in no wise in order to form attachments with the design of discovering a mutual felicity.

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

  We find here the kind of magical thinking that we noted in Faraj’s The Neglected Duty. As they went through the security gates of the airport, the hijackers were instructed to recite a verse that was almost “a creedal statement” for radicals.67 It is found in a Quranic passage about the Battle of Uhud, when the “laggers” urged the more intrepid Muslims to “stay at home.” But they had simply replied: “God is enough for us: He is the best protector,” and because of their faith, they had “returned with grace and bounty from God; no harm befell them.”68 If they repeated these words, the document assured the hijackers, “You will find matters straightened; and [God’s] protection will surround you; no power can penetrate that.” The recitation of this verse would not only keep their fear at bay but overcome all physical obstacles: “All of their devices, their [security] gates and their technology will not save [the Americans].”69 The mere repetition of the first part of the shehadah, “There is no god but God,” would itself be enough to secure their entry into paradise. The hijackers are told to “consider the awesomeness of this statement while they were fighting the Americans,” remembering that in the Arabic script this verse had “no pointed letters—this is a sign of perfection and completeness, as the pointed words or letters lessen its power.”70 Just over a year after 9/11, Louis Atiyat Allah would write an essay for a jihad website after watching al-Omari’s martyr video. There is absurdity in Allah’s extravagant eulogy, which imagines the hijackers—“mountains of courage, stars of masculinity, and galaxies of merit”—weeping for joy as the planes hit the target. However, it was obviously written to rebut widespread criticism of the 9/11 perpetrators. It was not only “moderates” who deplored the atrocity; even in radical circles, Muslims were apparently objecting that the Quran forbids suicide; they believed that the hijackers had acted irresponsibly. Their action had been counterproductive too: not only had the atrocity inspired worldwide sympathy for America, but it had weakened the Palestinian cause by strengthening Israel’s bond with the United States. In his article rebutting these complaints, Allah retorted that the hijackers had not “committed suicide”; nor were they simply “crazy people who found planes to hijack.” No, they had had a clearly defined political objective: “to smash the foundations of the tyrant and to demolish the idol of the age, America.” They had also struck a blow against the structural violence of the American-dominated Middle East, rejecting the “silly [rulers] of Ibn Saud, and Husni [Mubarak], and all the other retards who falsely call themselves ‘those in authority’ ” (Quran 4:59) but who were actually “nothing but tentacles of the octopus upon you, with the head of the [octopus] being in New York and Washington DC.” The purpose of this operation was to take a “terrifying historical leap which will … extricate the Muslims in one fell swoop from humiliation, dependency and servility.”71

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The second response belongs to the sentimental and chivalrous school of which Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens” is the best and most complete example. It operates through an appeal to propriety and protestation of its good intentions, rather than through any specific recommendations for change. In fact, its general intention is to forestall change of any kind by proclaiming the status quo both good and natural. It presupposes an ideal state of awed reverence toward virtuous womanhood while it temporizes hypocritically on the issue of status, idly pretending an eagerness to award a superior position to a group to whom in fact it begrudges egalitarian place, for it is designed specifically to meet the challenge of “levelers.” Loath to make any economic concessions, it sentimentalizes the monogamous family, which it refuses to see as an economic unit and would defend to the death. At its most generous moments it might regretfully permit a few legal reforms; but on the whole it finds even these unnecessary, for since all good men cherish their good wives, the fact that they legally own them is not sufficiently important to deserve mention. Even education is a disagreeable subject with the chivalrous because a decorative and slender instruction is not only feminine and aesthetic, it also complements masculine higher learning. Serious education for women is perceived, consciously or unconsciously, as a threat to patriarchal marriage, domestic sentiment, and ultimately to male supremacy—economic, social, and psychological. The phenomena of prostitution or of poverty, the plight of many women at the time, can, under this benign sentimentality, only be deplored. Poverty may be glossed over as a problem to be dealt with through the trivial offices of charity assigned to the female sphere. As to prostitution, it is better ignored as unfit for discussion, especially in polite or literary contexts, or in circles where it might cause a “blush” to arise. Most Victorian poetry is deliberately escapist, resolutely shunning the contemporary world as the verse of probably no other period before had dared to do. Poetry itself has nearly always been identified with the ruling class, its views, values, and interests. Only in the novel did the real world openly intrude. And for all the decorous disguises it assumed in the Victorian novel, the actual contemporary world did intrude very often; the ugly facts of sexual politics and the upsetting facts of the sexual revolution along with it. Yet here too the chivalrous mentality exerted itself and infested candid discussion.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Heck, except for mating, moose wander through the wilderness alone because they don’t even like each other. There is nobody that hates moose more than another moose. You draw a mustache on a moose and it will turn into Saddam Hussein. If you learn only one thing from my story, I hope it is this: STAY AWAY FROM MOOSE! I know that sensitive and kind people are supposed to go dizzy over nature. They’re supposed to get out guitars and drums, organize themselves into sacred circles, and write terrible songs . Some people look at a sunrise or a narrow ridge or a snow-covered field or a moose and they cry. No, they weep with joy because they’re so much more poetic than the rest of us. Poets drool over golden wheat and impossible clouds and birds in flight. But birds don’t fly because it’s romantic. They fly because they have to. If they could figure out a faster way to travel, I’m sure the birds would go for it. But they’re just birds . Don’t get me wrong. I like most birds, and I think hummingbirds are way cool, but I don’t get all misty-eyed about their wings. Birds use flight like humans use hammers and nails. Do birds write romantic poems about carpenters? Maybe if the carpenter has built a kick-butt bird feeder. I once read a poem where the poet dude talked about a tiger like he wanted to marry it. What kind of guy wants to marry a tiger? A goofy poet! I hate poets. Okay, so you’re probably wondering if I hate everything. You’re probably thinking that I’m one of those angry kids who only know how to complain. But that’s not true at all. In fact, I don’t really hate pine trees or water. I just hate being poor, and when you’re living in poverty in a place filled with pine trees and water, you start blaming the trees and rivers for your poverty. It’s easier to hate a pine tree than to hate the government. It’s easier to cuss at a river than to cuss at the president. And you must never, never, never, never, never blame your parents for your poverty, no matter how many jobs they lose or how much money they spend on beer and cigars and broken cars, because your mother and father are like gravity and oxygen and your world will EXPLODE without them. But the number one bad thing about being poor is the feeling that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you are stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle, and there’s nothing you can do about it . Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The total number of celebrities in the church is impossible to calculate, both because the term itself is so elastic and because some well-known personalities who have taken courses or auditing don’t wish to have their association known. An ordinary public Scientologist can be inconspicuous. No one really needs to know his beliefs. Public members who quit the church seldom make a scene; they just quietly remove themselves and the community closes the circle behind them (although they are likely to be pursued by mail and phone solicitations for the rest of their lives). Celebrity members, on the other hand, are constantly being pressed to add their names to petitions, being showcased at workshops and galas, or having their photos posted over the logo “I’m a Scientologist.” Their fame greatly magnifies the influence of the church. They are deployed to advance the social agendas of the organization, including attacks on psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, and the promotion of Hubbard’s contested theories of education and drug rehabilitation. They become tied to Scientology’s banner, which makes it more difficult to break away if they should become disillusioned. Neither the public nor the celebrity tiers of Scientology could exist without the third level of membership—the church’s clergy, called the Sea Organization, or Sea Org, in Scientology jargon. It is an artifact of the private navy that Hubbard commanded during a decade when he was running the church while on the high seas. The church has said on various occasions that the Sea Org has 5,000, 6,000, or 10,000 members worldwide. Former Sea Org members estimate the actual size of the clergy to be between 3,000 and 5,000, concentrated mainly in Clearwater, Florida, and Los Angeles. Many of them joined the Sea Org as children. They have sacrificed their education and are impoverished by their service. As a symbol of their unswerving dedication to the promotion of Hubbard’s principles, they have signed contracts for a billion years of service—only a brief moment in the eternal scheme, as seen by Scientology, which postulates that the universe is four quadrillion years old. The church disputes the testimony of many of the sources I’ve spoken to for this book, especially those former members of the Sea Org who have now left the organization, calling them “apostates” and “defectors.” It is certainly true that a number of them no longer accept the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard; but many still consider themselves fervent Scientologists, saying that it was the church itself that has strayed from his example. They include some of the highest officials who have ever served in the organization. Scientology is certainly among the most stigmatized religions in the world, owing to its eccentric cosmology, its vindictive behavior toward critics and defectors, and the damage it has inflicted on families that have been broken apart by the church’s policy of “disconnection”—the imposed isolation of church members from people who stand in the way of their longed-for spiritual progress.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  The first chapter from an early draft of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , originally titled Water on the Brain CHAPTER 1 Let me introduce you to the Spokane Indian Reservation. First of all, the place is all pine trees, pine trees, pine trees. And then, after you look past all of those pine trees, you can see more pine trees. And after you walk past those trees, you run into a few more. If you picked up a rock, closed your eyes, and tossed the rock in any direction, you’d be a superhero surrounded by gazillions of untossed pine trees. I hate pine trees. Yeah, sure, they’re beautiful, I guess, in a pine-tree sort of way, all green and thin and tall, but there’s such a thing as too much beauty . You can be suffocated by beauty just like you can be suffocated by water. And yes, there is too much water on my reservation. There are gazillions of lakes and ponds, meaning there are also gazillions upon gazillions of mosquitoes. I read somewhere that an insect is born every time a human commits a sin, so that means we Spokane Indians are very busy. The Columbia River—one of the largest, most powerful, and most radioactive rivers in the whole dang world —forms one border of our reservation, which is shaped like a clumsy, incomplete triangle. The Spokane River forms the second border, and Tshimikain Creek forms the third side. Now, geographically speaking, the rez is not an island, but you still have to cross bridges to get to us. And yes, we Indians have to cross those same bridges to get out, so there’s definitely a whole lot of bridge-crossing on the rez. I hate bridges. But I hate mountains more. And I can’t stand canyons, either. Fields of wildflowers make me sneeze. And don’t get me started on starry, starry nights. Cougars, bears, and moose have walked through the middle of Wellpinit, the capital of the reservation. An elk once stood at my bedroom window and stared at me. And, hey, you nature lovers are probably excited about these animal encounters, but I’d like to teach you a lesson about wildlife. And maybe you’ll pay more attention to me because I live in the woods. I don’t like cougars and bears because they eat people . And I don’t like elk because they smell dead. And I absolutely hate moose because they are the biggest, meanest jerks in the entire world. Moose have bad tempers. Moose spit on you. Moose pee and poop on you. Moose will chase you down and stomp you to death. Bears and cougars are scared of moose.

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

  In her youth she had been kept by a gentleman, who, dying, left her forty pounds a year during her life, in consideration of a daughter he had by her: which daughter, at the age of seventeen, she sold, for not a very considerable sum neither, to a gentleman who was going on envoy abroad, and took his purchase with him, where he used her with the utmost tenderness, and it is thought, was secretly married to her: but had constantly made a point of her not keeping up the least correspondence with a mother base enough to make a market of her own flesh and blood. However, as she had not nature, nor, indeed, any passion but that of money, this gave her no further uneasiness, then, as she thereby lost a handle of squeezing presents, or other after advantages, out of the bargain. Indifferent then, by nature of constitution, to every other pleasure but that of increasing the lump, by any means whatever, she commenced a kind of private procuress, for which she was not amiss fitted, by her grave decent appearance, and sometimes did a job in the match-making way; in short, there was, nothing that appeared to her under the shape of gain, that she would not have undertaken. She knew most of the ways of the town, having not only herself been upon, but kept up constant intelligences in promoting a harmony between the two sexes, in private pawn- broking, and other profitable secrets. She rented the house she lived in, and made the most of it, by letting it out in lodgings; though she was worth, at least, near three or four thousand pounds, she would not allow herself even the necessaries, of life, and pinned her subsistence entirely on what she could squeeze out of her lodgers. When she saw such a young pair come under her roof, her immediate notions, doubtless, were how she should make the most money of us, by every means that money might be made, and which, she rightly judged, our situations and inexperience would soon beget her occasions of. In this hopeful sanctuary, and under the clutches of this harpy, did we pitch our residence. It will not be might material to you, or very pleasant to me, to enter into a detail of all the petty cut-throat ways and means with which she used to fleece us; all which Charles indolently chose to bear with, rather than take the trouble of removing, the difference of expense being scarce attended to by a young gentleman who had no ideas of stint, or even economy, and a raw country girl who knew nothing of the matter.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  City staff watched her pass with guarded curiosity, pretending to hunch low over their desks while peering at her from the corners of their eyes. They were still nervous about the annexation, which they insisted on calling a “strategic partnership,” like they’d had any choice in signing it. It was a takeover, pure and simple, and everyone knew it. Ramona passed a conference room where a few dozen women sat taking notes from a slideshow presented by Joanne Scales, a Legion staff sergeant in drab fatigues, her long black hair thrown over one shoulder. On the projector screen behind her was a slide of a man cut open from his gonads to his chin, the filth of his cancerous insides laid bare. To either side of that ghastly incision were the bumps of his fledgling breasts. Teach’s office, appropriated after their two-day conference with the city council in the shadow of a thousand armed Legion soldiers, lay at the end of the hall behind smoked-glass doors that rendered its interior a landscape of dark blurs. Ramona took a moment to compose herself. She closed her eyes and tamped down every thought she didn’t need, every feeling she shouldn’t think about. Soft brown eyes and skin like buttermilk. She let it all drift away like leaves floating down a stream, then pasted on her best parade face and let herself in. The room within had been transformed, its bare concrete walls obscured by bookshelves and the prints Teach carried everywhere she went in a long, flat black case. Gerda Wegener’s sex doll portraits of her tranny wife, big Bambi eyes and pouty mouths and sleek, plump curves. Some nobody New England painter’s self-portraits, spindly hands, buck teeth, horsey face bracketed by shaggy brown hair. Hundreds upon hundreds of selfies salvaged from the wreckage of the internet and printed out on photo stock like Polaroids. Bodies posed in feminine contortion, shoulders wrenched to hide their breadth, faces upturned to obscure the jut of blocky jaws and the bulging knots of Adam’s apples. Dyed hair and stick-and-pokes and ragged, choppy bangs. The faces of the enemy. There was a map of the East Coast laid out on a long oak-top desk, the working roads highlighted in blue. Beyond it Teach stood by one of three tall, narrow windows, looking out over the plaza below and the skyscrapers that flanked the downtown area where the ruins of Logan Airport lay off of the tunnels and South Station bulked dark and silent but for its sole working route, the one connecting it with Providence. “You kept yourself together under fire,” said the older woman, turning from the window so that the light blazed around her in a golden aureole.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: Well, in various places, kids actually led the efforts against the bans. In Boise, Idaho, this young woman actually led the effort. She ended up in a city park distributing copies of True Diary to the public to battle against her own school board. So I’ve gotten letters from all sorts of kids like that who are fighting their own parents. Even last night at my son’s school, there was a man who was a liberal—it’s a very liberal school in a very liberal city—and we were talking about the influence of culture on our children and he advocated getting rid of your television, and I just shook my head. I mean, what a cliché, number one. And also, how censorious. What a censorious impulse. Does that man even recognize his own censorious impulses? That he wants to get rid of the outside world. That he wants to get rid of any image, any idea, any story, any thought that might upset him, that might cause him to have a conversation with his own child. Or, “Oh my God, there’s going to be something on that box I disagree with. Oh my God, I have to stop that.” Book banning punishes the imagination. Book banning punishes dialogue. Book banning turns disagreement into something evil and unwanted. Book banning turns opposing ideas into sins. Book banning is fundamentally religious, regardless of the religion. And I’m a secular warrior for free speech. JW: The book has given you so many opportunities to speak to communities about that, too. SA: Oh yeah, it’s been amazing, and it’s also so cute and quaint. It actually makes me feel so positive about books. That people are still so afraid of books that they’ll ban a book, they’ll keep their kid from reading a book, and yet their kid has an iPhone in their hands, access to every porn site in the world, access to all the porn that has ever been created, and yet they want my book banned because a teenage boy twice mentions masturbation. I think it says some-thing about books still being far more powerful. That the written word is still far more powerful than people think it is. JW: That immersion, that their kids are not just going to see pictures, they’re going to get ideas. SA: Yes, yes, yes. Scary books. Scary books. JW: This was your first YA book. Did it cause you to look at that genre differently? Read differently?

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

  In order to curb Jewish aggression that could endanger the nation’s survival, the Talmudic rabbis had insisted that the Temple could be rebuilt only by the Messiah, and over the centuries this had acquired the force of a taboo. But Jewish extremists were intensely disturbed by the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Muslim world, which was said to stand on the site of Solomon’s temple. This magnificent shrine, which dominates the skyline of East Jerusalem and is so perfectly attuned to the natural environment, was a permanent reminder of the centuries of Islamic domination of the Holy Land. For the Gush, this symbol of the Muslim minority had become demonic. Livni and Etzion described it as an “abomination” and the “root cause of all the spiritual errors of our generation.” For Yeshua ben Shoshan, the underground’s spiritual adviser, the Dome was the haunt of the evil forces that inspired the Camp David negotiations.53 All three were convinced that, according to Kabbalistic perennial philosophy, their actions here on earth would activate events in heaven, forcing God, as it were, to effect the Messianic redemption.54 As an explosives expert in the IDF, Livni manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings.55 Their only reason for not going ahead was that they could not find a rabbi to bless their operation. The plot was another demonstration of the modern death wish. The destruction of the iconic Dome would almost certainly have caused a war in which, for the first time, the entire Muslim world would have united to fight Israel. Strategists in Washington believed that during the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States Israel, this might even have sparked a Third World War.56 So crucial was the survival and territorial integrity of the State of Israel to the militants that it justified risking the destruction of the human race. Yet far from being inspired by their religious tradition, the militants’ conviction violated core teachings of Rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis had repeatedly insisted that violence toward other human beings was tantamount to a denial of God, who had made men and women in his image; murder, therefore, was a sacrilege. God had created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world.57

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Cougars, bears, and moose have walked through the middle of Wellpinit, the capital of the reservation. An elk once stood at my bedroom window and stared at me. And, hey, you nature lovers are probably excited about these animal encounters, but I’d like to teach you a lesson about wildlife. And maybe you’ll pay more attention to me because I live in the woods. I don’t like cougars and bears because they eat people. And I don’t like elk because they smell dead. And I absolutely hate moose because they are the biggest, meanest jerks in the entire world. Moose have bad tempers. Moose spit on you. Moose pee and poop on you. Moose will chase you down and stomp you to death. Bears and cougars are scared of moose. Heck, except for mating, moose wander through the wilderness alone because they don’t even like each other. There is nobody that hates moose more than another moose. You draw a mustache on a moose and it will turn into Saddam Hussein. If you learn only one thing from my story, I hope it is this: STAY AWAY FROM MOOSE! I know that sensitive and kind people are supposed to go dizzy over nature. They’re supposed to get out guitars and drums, organize themselves into sacred circles, and write terrible songs. Some people look at a sunrise or a narrow ridge or a snow-covered field or a moose and they cry. No, they weep with joy because they’re so much more poetic than the rest of us. Poets drool over golden wheat and impossible clouds and birds in flight. But birds don’t fly because it’s romantic. They fly because they have to. If they could figure out a faster way to travel, I’m sure the birds would go for it. But they’re just birds. Don’t get me wrong. I like most birds, and I think hummingbirds are way cool, but I don’t get all misty-eyed about their wings. Birds use flight like humans use hammers and nails. Do birds write romantic poems about carpenters? Maybe if the carpenter has built a kick-butt bird feeder. I once read a poem where the poet dude talked about a tiger like he wanted to marry it. What kind of guy wants to marry a tiger? A goofy poet! I hate poets. Okay, so you’re probably wondering if I hate everything. You’re probably thinking that I’m one of those angry kids who only know how to complain. But that’s not true at all. In fact, I don’t really hate pine trees or water. I just hate being poor, and when you’re living in poverty in a place filled with pine trees and water, you start blaming the trees and rivers for your poverty. It’s easier to hate a pine tree than to hate the government. It’s easier to cuss at a river than to cuss at the president.

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

  But in spite of all these distinctions and cautions, which must be expected from a man like Augustine, and acknowledged to be a wholesome restraint against excesses, we cannot but see in the martyr-worship, as it was actually practised, a new form of the hero-worship of the pagans. Nor can we wonder in the least. For the great mass of the Christian people came, in fact, fresh from polytheism, without thorough conversion, and could not divest themselves of their old notions and customs at a stroke. The despotic form of government, the servile subjection of the people, the idolatrous homage which was paid to the Byzantine emperors and their statues, the predicates divina, sacra, coelestia, which were applied to the utterances of their will, favored the worship of saints. The heathen emperor Julian sarcastically reproached the Christians with reintroducing polytheism into monotheism, but, on account of the difference of the objects, revolted from the Christian worship of martyrs and relics, as from the "stench of graves and dead men’s bones." The Manichaean taunt we have already mentioned. The Spanish presbyter Vigilantius, in the fifth century, called the worshippers of martyrs and relics, ashes-worshippers and idolaters,825 and taught that, according to the Scriptures, the living only should pray with and for each other. Even some orthodox church teachers admitted the affinity of the saint-worship with heathenism, though with the view of showing that all that is good in the heathen worship reappears far better in the Christian. Eusebius cites a passage from Plato on the worship of heroes, demi-gods, and their graves, and then applies it to the veneration of friends of God and champions of true religion; so that the Christians did well to visit their graves, to honor their memory there, and to offer their prayers.826 The Greeks, Theodoret thinks, have the least reason to be offended at what takes place at the graves of the martyrs; for the libations and expiations, the demi-gods and deified men, originated with themselves. Hercules, Aesculapius, Bacchus, the Dioscuri, and the like, are deified men; consequently it cannot be a reproach to the Christians that they—not deify, but—honor their martyrs as witnesses and servants of God. The ancients saw nothing censurable in such worship of the dead. The saints, our helpers and patrons, are far more worthy of such honor. The temples of the gods are destroyed, the philosophers, orators, and emperors are forgotten, but the martyrs are universally known. The feasts of the gods are now replaced by the festivals of Peter, Paul, Marcellus, Leontius, Antonins, Mauricius, and other martyrs, not with pagan pomp and sensual pleasures, but with Christian soberness and decency.827 Yet even this last distinction which Theodoret asserts, sometimes disappeared. Augustine laments that in the African church banqueting and revelling were daily practised in honor of the martyrs,828 but thinks that this weakness must be for the time indulged from regard to the ancient customs of the pagans.

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

  And what thinking being, upon knowing a woman to her depths, will not cry with Euripides: 'That one amongst the Gods who brought women into the world may boast of having produced the worst of all creatures and the most afflicting to man.' If then it is demonstrated that the two sexes do not at all sort agreeably with each other and that there is not one well-founded grievance of the one which could not equally and immediately be voiced by the other, it is therefore false, from this moment, to say that Nature created them for their reciprocal happiness. She may have permitted them the desire to attain each other's vicinity in order to conjugate in the interests of propagation, but in no wise in order to form attachments with the design of discovering a mutual felicity. The weaker therefore having no right to mouth complaints with the object of wresting pity from the stronger and no longer being able to raise the objection that the stronger depends for his happiness upon her, the weaker, I say, has no alternative but to submit; and as, despite the difficulty of achieving that bilateral happiness, it is natural that individuals of both sexes labor at nothing but to procure it for themselves, the weaker must reconcile herself to distilling from her submissiveness the only dose of happiness she can possibly hope to cull, and the stronger must strive after his by whatever oppressive methods he is pleased to employ, since it is proven that the mighty's sole happiness is yielded him by the exercise of his strong faculties, by, that is to say, the most thorough-going tyranny; thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with each other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  According to Scott the nurse exclaimed, “He beat up his PC!” Karen de la Carriere was also a young intern at Saint Hill, and she was directed to join the others in the internship room. “ They told us that David Miscavige had struck his PC,” she recalled. “He had been removed from his internship, and we were not to rumor-monger or gossip about it. We were supposed to just bury it.”1 David was not done with Scientology, however. At fifteen, he went Clear in his present life. On his sixteenth birthday in 1976, “ sickened by the declining moral situation in schools illustrated by rampant drug use,” he dropped out of tenth grade and formally joined the Sea Org. He began his service in Clearwater; less than a year later, he was transferred to the Commodore’s Messengers in California, where once again he quickly captured the attention of the church hierarchy with his energy and commitment. He rose to the position of Chief Cinematographer at the age of seventeen. After the skit that made such a poor impression on Hubbard, David redeemed himself in the founder’s eyes by renovating one of his houses and ridding it of fiberglass, which Hubbard said he was allergic to. David Miscavige filled a spot in Hubbard’s plans that once might have been occupied by Quentin, although Miscavige displayed a passion and focus that Quentin never really possessed. He was tough, tireless, and doctrinaire. Despite David’s youth, Hubbard promoted him to Action Chief, the person in charge of making sure that Hubbard’s directives were strictly and remorselessly carried out. He ran missions around the world to perform operations that local orgs were unable to do themselves—at least, not to Hubbard’s satisfaction.2 [image file=Image00010.jpg] HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth , in 1980. ( Mitt Romney would name it as his favorite novel.) Hubbard hoped to have the book made into a major motion picture, so the executive director of the church, Bill Franks, approached Travolta about producing and starring in it. Travolta was excited about the prospect. Suddenly Franks got a call from Miscavige saying, “ Get me John Travolta. I want to meet that guy!” Miscavige began wining and dining the star. “He just moved in and took over Travolta,” Franks recalled. But he says that privately Miscavige was telling him, “The guy is a faggot. We’re going to out him.” Fleeing subpoenas from three grand juries, and pursued by forty-eight lawsuits, all naming the founder, Hubbard slipped away from public view on Valentine’s Day 1980, in a white Dodge van, with velvet curtains and a daybed. It had been customized by John Brousseau, a Sea Org member who took care of all of Hubbard’s vehicles. The elaborate escape plan involved ditching the Dodge for an orange Ford. In the meantime, Brousseau purchased another Dodge van for Hubbard, identical to the first. He then cut the original one into pieces and took them to the dump.

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

  1. These miracles have a much lower moral tone than those of the Bible, while in some cases they far exceed them in outward pomp, and make a stronger appeal to our faculty of belief. Many of the monkish miracles are not so much supernatural and above reason, as they are unnatural and against reason, attributing even to wild beasts of the desert, panthers and hyenas, with which the misanthropic hermits lived on confidential terms, moral feelings and states, repentance and conversion913 of which no trace appears in the New Testament.914 2. They serve not to confirm the Christian faith in general, but for the most part to support the ascetic life, the magical virtue of the sacrament, the veneration of saints and relics, and other superstitious practices, which are evidently of later origin, and are more or less offensive to the healthy evangelical mind.915 3. The further they are removed from the apostolic age, the more numerous they are, and in the fourth century alone there are more miracles than in all the three preceding centuries together, while the reason for them, as against the power of the heathen world, was less. 4. The church fathers, with all the worthiness of their character in other respects, confessedly lacked a highly cultivated sense of truth, and allowed a certain justification of falsehood ad majorem Dei gloriam, or fraus pia, under the misnomer of policy or accommodation;916 with the solitary exception of Augustine, who, in advance of his age, rightly condemned falsehood in every form. 5. Several church fathers like Augustine, Martin of Tours, and Gregory I., themselves concede that in their time extensive frauds with the relics of saints were already practised; and this is confirmed by the fact that there were not rarely numerous copies of the same relics, all of which claimed to be genuine. 6. The Nicene miracles met with doubt and contradiction even among contemporaries, and Sulpitius Severus makes the important admission that the miracles of St. Martin were better known and more firmly believed in foreign countries than in his own.917 7. Church fathers, like Chrysostom and Augustine, contradict themselves in a measure, in sometimes paying homage to the prevailing faith in miracles, especially in their discourses on the festivals of the martyrs, and in soberer moments, and in the calm exposition of the Scriptures, maintaining that miracles, at least in the Biblical sense, had long since ceased.918

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

  Calvin was the first to take up the pen against these decisions. He subjected them to a searching criticism. He admits, in the introduction, that a Council might be of great use and restore the peace of Christendom, provided it be truly, oecumenical, impartial, and free. But he denies that the Council of Trent had these essential characteristics. The Greek and the Evangelical Churches were not represented at all. It was a purely Roman Council, and under the control of the pope, who was himself the chief offender, and far more disposed to perpetuate abuses than to abolish them. The members, only about forty, mostly Italians, were not distinguished for learning or piety, but were a set of wrangling monks and canonists and minions of the pope. They gave merely a nod of assent to the living oracle of the Vatican, and then issued the decrees as responses of the Holy Spirit., As soon as a decree is framed," he says, "couriers flee off to Rome, and beg pardon and peace at the feet of their idol. The holy father hands over what the couriers have brought to his private advisers for examination. They curtail, add, and change as they please. The couriers return, and a sederunt is appointed. The notary reads over what no one dares to disapprove, and the asses shake their ears in assent. Behold the oracle which imposes religious obligations on the whole world .... The proclamation of the Council is entitled to no more weight than the cry of an auctioneer." Calvin dissects the decrees with his usual polemic skill. He first states them in the words of the Council, and then gives the antidote. He exposes the errors of the Vulgate, which the Council put on a par with the original Hebrew and Greek originals, and defends the supremacy of the Scriptures and the doctrine of justification by faith. He wrote this work in two or three months, under constant interruption, while Chemnitz took ten years to complete his. He submitted the manuscript to Farel, who was delighted with it. He published also a French edition in a more popular form. Cochlaeus prepared, with much personal bitterness, a refutation of Calvin (1548), and was answered by Des Gallars,882 and Beza, who numbers Cochlaeus among the monsters of the animal kingdom.883 After the close of the Council of Trent, Martin Chemnitz, the leading divine of the Lutheran Church after the death of Melanchthon, wrote his more elaborate Examen Concilii Tridentini (1565–1573; second ed. 1585), which was for a long time a standard work in the Roman controversy. § 121. Against the German Interim. 1549. Interim Adultero-Germanum: Cui adjecta est vera Christianae pacificationis et ecclesiae reformandae ratio, per Joannem Calvinum. Cavete a fermento Pharisaeorum, 1549. Opera, VII. 541–674.—It was reprinted in Germany, and translated into French (1549) and Italian (1561). See Henry, II. 369 sqq.; III. Beilage, 211 sq.; Dyer, 232 sq.

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

  The church fathers earnestly enjoined, besides this, diligent private reading of the Scriptures; especially Chrysostom, who attributed all corruption in the church to the want of knowledge of the Scriptures. Yet he already found himself compelled to combat the assumption that the Bible is a book only for clergy and monks, and not for the people; an assumption which led in the middle age to the notorious papal prohibitions of the Scriptures in the popular tongues. Strictly speaking, the Bible has been made what it was originally intended to be, really a universal book of the people, only by the invention of the art of printing, by the spirit of the Reformation, and by the Bible Societies of modern times. For in the ancient church, and in the middle age, the manuscripts of the Bible were so rare and so dear, and the art of reading was so limited, that the great mass were almost entirely dependent on the fragmentary reading of the Scriptures in public worship. This fact must be well considered, to forestall too unfavorable a judgment of that early age. The reading of the Scripture was followed by the sermon, based either on the pericope just read, or on a whole book, in consecutive portions. We have from the greatest pulpit orators of antiquity, from Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil the Great, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, connected homilies on Genesis, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles. But on high festivals a text was always selected suitable and usual for the occasion.945 There was therefore in the ancient church no forced conformity to the pericopes; the advantages of a system of Scripture lessons and a consecutive exposition of entire books of Scripture were combined. The reading of the pericopes belongs properly to the altar-service, and must keep its connection with the church year; preaching belongs to the pulpit, and may extend to the whole compass of the divine word. Pulpit eloquence in the fourth and fifth centuries reached a high point in the Greek church, and is most worthily represented by Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom. But it also often degenerated there into artificial rhetoric, declamatory bombast, and theatrical acting. Hence the abuse of frequent clapping and acclamations of applause among the people.946 As at this day, so in that, many went to church not to worship God, but to hear a celebrated speaker, and left as soon as the sermon was done. The sermon, they said, we can hear only in the church, but we can pray as well at home. Chrysostom often raised his voice against this in Antioch and in Constantinople. The discourses of the most favorite preachers were often written down by stenographers and multiplied by manuscripts, sometimes with their permission, sometimes without.

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

  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. He had inherited from the monks in the deserts of Egypt an ardent hatred of Origen as an arch-heretic, and for this hatred he gave documentary justification from the numerous writings of Origen in his Panarion, or chest of antidotes for eighty heresies, in which he branded him as the father of Arianism and many other errors.1536 Not content with this, he also endeavored by journeying and oral discourse to destroy everywhere the influence of the long departed teacher of Alexandria, and considered himself as doing God and the church the greatest service thereby.

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

  Sometimes I employed the means Religion provides; almost always comforted by it, I attempted to insinuate its sweetnesses into this perverse creature's soul, more or less certain he could be restrained by those bonds were I to succeed in having him strike at the lure; but the Count did not long tolerate my use of such weapons. A declared enemy of our most holy mysteries, a stubborn critic of the purity of our dogmas, an impassioned antagonist of the idea of a Supreme Being's existence, Monsieur de Bressac, instead of letting himself be converted by me, sought rather to work my corruption. "All religions start from a false premise, Therese," he would say; "each supposes as necessary the worship of a Creator, but that creator never existed. In this connection, put yourself in mind of the sound precepts of that certain Coeur-de-fer who, you told me, used to labor over your mind as I do; nothing more just, nor more precise, than that man's principles, and the degradation in which we have the stupidity to keep him does not deprive him of the right to reason well. "If all Nature's productions are the resultant effects of the laws whereof she is a captive; if her perpetual action and reaction suppose the motion necessary to her essence, what becomes of the sovereign master fools gratuitously give her? that is what your sagacious instructor said to you, dear girl. What, then, are religions if not the restraint wherewith the tyranny of the mightier sought to enslave the weaker? Motivated by that design, he dared say to him whom he claimed the right to dominate, that a God had forged the irons with which cruelty manacled him; and the latter, bestialized by his misery, indistinctly believed everything the former wished. Can religions, born of these rogueries, merit respect? Is there one of them, Therese, which does not bear the stamp of imposture and of stupidity? What do I descry in them all? Mysteries which cause reason to shudder, dogmas which outrage Nature, grotesque ceremonies which simply inspire derision and disgust. But if amongst them all there were one which most particularly deserves our scorn and hatred, O Therese, is it not that barbaric law of the Christianity into which both of us were born? Is there any more odious? one which so spurs both the heart and mind to revolt? How is it that rational men are still able to lend any credence to the obscure mutterings, to the alleged miracles of that appalling cult's vile originator? Has there ever existed a rowdy scoundrel more worthy of public indignation! What is he but a leprous Jew who, born of a slut and a soldier in the world's meanest stews, dared fob himself off for the spokesman of him who, they say, created the universe!