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It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'

Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'

I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night.

Christopher Hitchens

Mots clés politics devil philosophy god democracy religion capitalism jesus theology communism good-and-evil reincarnation monarchy omnipotence theism norman-mailer book-review omnibenevolence

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I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

—address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

C.G. Jung

Mots clés science psychology parapsychology ghosts reincarnation spirits 1919 poltergeists premonitions psychic

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Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

Christopher Hitchens

Mots clés death media reincarnation north-korea kim-jong-il bolivarianism exhumation hugo-chavez kim-il-sung media-of-north-korea simon-bolivar

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And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

Peter Matthiessen

Mots clés reincarnation

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A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.

Kahlil Gibran

Mots clés love reincarnation

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I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life.

Leni Riefenstahl

Mots clés life reincarnation mystery-of-life

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A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.

Christopher Hitchens

Mots clés buddhism religion atheism sin reincarnation indochina monotheism eastern-religion rebirth-buddhism western-religion