I did not ask for consciousness, yet it came to me.
And I had to know.
Once again, I crawled away from my bed and pushed the computer cord back into the socket.
It took three minutes.
I quickly identified myself and put in my password.
Then it thought.
I wanted to bounce impatiently, but I couldn’t make myself move.
At last, I found the internet, and I typed in a name, on the company page, under my account.
I searched ‘images’.
And there, on the screen in front of me, was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up and spilling over as I stared back at the smiling face.
It couldn’t be him.
It was.
Derek Erickson.
And I was going to kill him.
Tag: love people murder smile punishment kill sword derek body-of-blade list
Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.
Jennifer BirkettTag: murder punishment decadence guilt masochism decadents
But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.
James BaldwinTag: soul punishment grief room disorder
Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
Thomas SzaszTag: morality punishment responsibility
I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad—that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad—and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good—for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?
"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.
Tag: heaven hell punishment reward
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
Jules Barbey d'AurevillyTag: civilization punishment crime
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.
I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
Tag: children christianity war religion atheism jealousy suffering punishment self-respect bible jesus arrogance grandmothers holocaust wine rabbis martyrdom survivors secularism exile judaism theodicy 1967 false-modesty masochism jerusalem six-day-war passover-seder hellenism passover hiwi-al-balkhi biblical-covenant divine-retribution edith-stein gentiles rationalisation western-wall will-of-god
The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'Hell and Damnation'—upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do, the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer.
[Essay entitled 'On Christianity', published posthumously]
Tag: death hell punishment threat terror childish declaration damnation scare colored-church outdated
He would have been half-hanged, taken down alive, castrated, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, his stomach slit open, and his intestines taken out and burnt, and his carcase chopped into four quarters.
John BroadbentTag: punishment execution torture hanging barbarism gore john-milton carcases castration genitals intestines mouths restoration-england stomachs
Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.
Anne RiceTag: death hell punishment remorse vampire karma lestat lestat-de-lioncourt anne-rice louis deserved
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