Faith versus Atheism

I observe that people who have powerful faith do better at survival and they have more useful responses to a cruel world.
They may be delusional but that is trumped by successful living.
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A compass point

“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”
― Wendell Berry

The tragedy of our decline continues to unfold.

"There are no longer protagonists;  there is only the chorus."

-Ortega y Gassett

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On American culture

"To really learn much about another culture is a very long and slow process and you're not liable to receive anything in a spiritual sense unless it's already in yourself waiting to be discovered.  In the past two decades there's been a great deal of spiritual shopping which, though understandable, carries with it and is disastrously married to our culture's collapsed sense of time, where speed is, finally, of the essence.  There is a fatal impatience to quickly count spiritual "coup" and get on with it.  This includes a great deal of the eco- and ethno-travel "opportunities," and the comic aspects of faux shamans selling three-hour "power visions" for a few hundred bucks.  That's just us, whether it's the Zen of tennis, or fishing, or shooting,  the Zen to make you a better businessman or help you write "spontaneously," or the "Apache" or "Redskin" football teams that abound, the warriors, the mightily white Mohawks, the secrets of Black Elk learned in an afternoon seminar after which Indian fry bread is served and then a buffalo ghost is ridden back to the suburbs.  Of course there is no kind of  absurdity we'll refuse to perform if the economics are tangible.  If anyone is truly sick of "the fucking American culture," as I frequently hear, they better get ready for a long haul.  An hour staring at a fifty-ton Olmec head will offer you a preposterous emptiness that all the sugar in the world can't sweeten."
Jim Harrison
"Off To The Side" (2002)