I read the news today

Just another day sunk 'neath the maritime layer

Can’t go forward, can’t sit still, even if reading the writings for 3 years on Covid, on consequences and on current moment as a kind of poison antidote, ingesting the poison to prevent long term brain damage visible in my neighbors. As I mentioned to Ray Horvath on news, but going a bit deeper, I metaphorically hear hundreds speaking out, sharing names, sharing information and Biden and Democrats are the power in this land to this day of sunlight on funny money. Nothing changes among men who fear freedom. God knows I am a information junkie, but now it doth appear to me a waste of life. Does a reporter belching their narrative move mountains and if not what use is the news? Senator So and So took bribes. President Cloud has ten body doubles more cognitively impaired than he. The injections shall continue and sheep shall inject. War for this cause may need more H Bombs.

Enough. A Bas with it all.

Rama P. Coomaraswamy

Now the idea that it is a good thing to think for oneself is another modern superstition. To put the matter into clearer focus, I would ask you to imagine a class- room of mathematical students telling the teacher that they dis- agreed with his answers because they were doing mathematics “for themselves.” No, thinking for oneself is not a healthy thing to do. What we must do is learn, not to think for ourselves, but to think correctly. It is the function of the Ancient Teachings to help us do just that, but it takes both work and discipline. We do of course have the freedom to think for ourselves—we can think any way we want. But we do not have a right to do so, for error never has rights. Like murder: we are free to murder anyone we want, but we certainly do not have a right to do so.

Ancient Beliefs or Modern Superstitions: The Search for Authenticity

Excerpt From

Perspectives on Our Age

Jacques Ellul

“If technique is total, if it is all-encompassing (that is, if the system of technique integrates into itself every phenomenon that arises), if it is “assimilative” (in the sense that all revolutionary movements are ultimately assimilated), then what can escape the system of technique? From a human outlook, we see nothing that does. We therefore need a transcendence in order to escape it. Only something that belongs to neither our history nor our world can do this. I mean, of course, something that does not “essentially” belong to them, because even the most distant planets are increasingly becoming part of our system.

We need a transcendence. When I say this, I am not being apologetic, I am not seeking to defend Christianity; that doesn’t matter to me in the least. Nor does this need prove the existence of God. I simply mean to say that only one of two things is possible.

One possibility is that technique becomes our destiny, a kind of growing fate that grows and takes over all human realities. No culture will escape, as we have seen in the Third World. And, parenthetically, when I said that technique could trigger crises, I meant that[…]”

“Christians should be the bearers of Hope (esperance) in a society like ours—hope for people plunged in anguish and plagued by neurosis, which we have talked about; and hope for our history, for the future. But we must be on our guard. Christian Hope does not, as is too often said, consist in believing in humanity. It is precisely the contrary. Christian Hope means being convinced that we will not go along completely on our own. It is an affirmation of the love of God. In addition—a crucial element—Christian Hope, the Hope so fundamental to the Biblical texts, has a reason for being, a place, only where there is no more human hope. Human hope (espoir) is the feeling that tomorrow will be better. One may be in the throes of an economic crisis today, but one may have grounds for hoping that the crisis will be over in one or two years. So long as human hope of this sort exists, there is no reason for Hope (espérance). Human hopes will do. Hope, precisely, has no raison d’être unless there is no more reason for human hope. This is Hope against hope.

xxcc

Thomas Merton

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will “brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the past….

No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can be considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too[…]”

Excerpt From

Raids on the Unspeakable

Thomas Merton

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity