nd Einstein: God is the "Spirit manifest in the laws of the Universe."

God is the "Spirit manifest in the laws of the Universe."
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/einstein/

"If they don't accept your Peace, then turn, and Leave." CJ

"If they don't accept your Peace, then turn, and Leave." CJ

"The Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head." CJ

"The Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head." CJ

 

Windows on SL's Skunk-works:  Start Loving blog, FB StartLoving1, YT StartLoving4, Twitter StartLoving1  <<< GOING DARK MARCH 15 2011

"Every three seconds one of my children dies from easily preventable causes of poverty; 28 million EVERY year. I've got not one second to worry about me." SL

"Every three seconds one of my children dies from easily preventable causes of poverty; 28 million EVERY year. I've got not one second to worry about me." SL

How can this be true? "The only thing to be sad about is to know that you are not all Good?" Teresa of Calcutta paraphrase.

How can this be true? "The only thing to be sad about is to know that you are not all Good?"
Teresa of Calcutta paraphrase.

"Live as though the entire world depends on what you do, and realize that what you do will probably make no difference as all." Buddhist, ancient

"Live as though the entire world depends on what you do, and

realize that what you do will probably make no difference as all." Buddhist, ancient

"A nation of sheep begets wolves." ER Murrow

"A nation of sheep begets wolves." ER Murrow

"Job of the non-Red Letter Bible is to distort, dilute, destroy Jesus Teachings." SL

"Job of the non-Red Letter  Bible is to
distort, dilute, destroy Jesus Teachings."  SL

Is There Anything the Individual Can Still Do? Franz Jagerstatter

Note: Hunger Strike / Hill Occupation Day #21. Washed off the Hill for some of the next 2 days. Resting and writing. Hunger Strike continues although some liquid nourishment will be consumed to counteract the all day marching, exposure to the elements and lack of reclined sleep. My goal in this is NOT to delay the ultimate climax by even an hour, but to remain functional longer than otherwise.

{{NOTE: A NON "DEISTIC" JESUS, JESUS THE NON-VIOLENT WARRIOR WAS GANDHI'S #1 HERO, HIS #1 MODEL, ICON, IDOL. ARE YOU WISER, BETTER THAN GANDHI? I AM NOT.

"I like your Christ.
I do NOT like your Christians.
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Gandhi}}

Bio: An Austrian peasant, Franz Jägerstätter refused to serve in the Nazi army following Germany’s invasion of Austria. His courageous and singular refusal was based in a deeply pietistic Catholicism. His story, and his reflections, are a moving testimony to the moral responsibility of the individual as opposed to the obligations of the state. The excerpt that follows is from a letter written during his imprisonment.

Quotations from this essay:

"One really has no cause to be astonished that there are those who can no longer find their way in the great confusion of our day. People we think we can trust, who ought to be leading the way and setting a good example, are running along with the crowd. No one gives enlightenment, whether in word or in writing. Or, to be more exact, it may not be given. And the thoughtless race goes on, always closer to eternity. As long as conditions are still half-good, we don’t see things quite right, or that we could or should do otherwise."

"I realize, too, that today many words would accomplish little more than make one highly eligible for prison. Yet, in spite of this, it is not good if ... leaders remain silent year after year. By “words” I mean, of course, instruction; but example gives direction. Do we no longer want to see [activists] who are able to take a stand in the darkness around us in deliberate clarity, calmness, and confidence—who, in the midst of tension, gloom, selfishness, and hate, stand fast in perfect peace and cheerfulness— who are not like the floating reed which is driven here and there by every breeze—who do not merely watch to see what their friends will do but, instead, ask themselves, “What does our faith teach us about this?” or “Can my conscience bear this so easily that I will never have to repent?”

If road signs were ever stuck so loosely in the earth that every wind could break them off or blow them about, would anyone who did not know the road be able to find his way? And how much worse it is if those to whom one turns for information refuse to give him an answer or, at most, give him the wrong direction just to be rid of him as quickly as possible!"

More like this at the single greatest repository of nonviolent essays: http://peaceandnonviolence.blogspot.com

Thomas Jefferson Quotes

• Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
  
• Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
• I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
• Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
  
• Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
  
• Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.
  
• A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.
• Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
• Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
• He who knows best knows how little he knows.
• I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
• He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
• I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.
• I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.
• Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
  
• Every generation needs a new revolution.
  
• Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing. All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
• All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
• Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
• Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
• Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.
• 
  

Howard Zinn Quotes / Quotations

THE CRITICAL THING IS NOT WHO IS SITTING IN THE WHITE HOUSE, BUT WHO IS SITTING IN.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

War itself is the enemy of the human race.

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.

Noam Chomsky Quotes / Quotations

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

"TO SIN BY SILENCE... MAKES COWARDS OF MEN." ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I sit here weeping as I scan into audio mp3 Carter's "Peace not Apartheid," not because the the scanning is so unpleasant, but because I am listening to the most wonderful Bill Moyer's program on Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. Oh my God, to be such a Life.

At minute 35 there is the most incredible quote:

"To sin by silence
when they should protest
makes cowards out of men."

Abraham Lincoln

MEANING. VIKTOR FRANKL QUOTES

• A human being is a deciding being.
• Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
• Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
• Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
• Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
• Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
• Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
• Fear may come true that which one is afraid of.
• For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
• I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.
• Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
• Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
• Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.
• The last of human freedoms - the ability to chose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances.
• Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
• What is to give light must endure burning.
• When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.
  

}}}}}}} WORLD'S GREAT PEACEMAKING ESSAY {{{{{{{

Anyone that can't stand the suffering in this world any longer must read everything at the site Peace and Nonviolence (Quotations from), NOW.

But at that site this is the single greatest, most important, most enlightening piece on ERADICATING EMPIRE (IN OURSELVES AND IN THE WORLD) THAT EVER I HAVE READ [SORRY JESUS :-) ]:

LOVE IN ACTION,
Buddhist
Thich Nhat Hanh

And although this second one is much, much, much trickier to understand when all of the Life Giving Truth from the Spiritual greats has been corrupted and distorted completely by Empire (since Constantine), this essay to is a must read:

THE MEANING OF THIS HOUR,
RABBI ABRAHAM J. HESCHEL

"...cannot see our brother in need without stripping ourselves..."

As Peter Maurin says (quoted by Dorothy, p. 86, "Loaves and Fishes"):

"We cannot see
our brother [or sister] in need
without stripping ourselves.
It is the only [genuine]
way we have
of showing our love."

"STATE IS A PUBLIC... REBELLION AGAINST GOD." PHIL BERRIGAN

MUST READ: FOREWORD AS IS EVERYTHING AT THE JONAH HOUSE SITE by Philip Berrigan.

Some quotations from Phil Berrigan on Law:

• the Bible gave human law ample treatment. 1st Samuel 8th chapter, for example, exposes the State as a public, bureaucratic rebellion against God.
• the law, like the State is inherently flawed and violent -- its function to legalize a rebellious State.
• Paul's Letter to the Galatians -- his most sustained indictment of human law.
• The genesis of the State then, ancient or modern, is rejection of God, rebellion against God. "They have not rejected you [Samuel], they have rejected me as their King." (1 Sam. 8:7)
• As the ruling hierarchy told Pilate: "We have no King but Caesar." (John 19:15)
• Paul equates the law with sin and death -- sin because law has nothing to say to sins of omission, and death because most will draw their morality from the law.
• The morality of most Americans is legalized. To become "law abiding" is to fear the penalties of the law, to become house-broken, domesticated.
• Morality limited by the boundaries of the law is spiritual death.

Phil Berrigan Quotes

1. Nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.
2. "Peacemaking is not only a central characteristic of the Gospel, peacemaking is the greatest need of the world today. We are the daughters and sons of God, and that means we are called to be peacemakers."
3. "There is no freedom without love."
4. "You are the answer."
5. "Don't get tired."
6. "War on terrorism by the U.S. is impossible. We are the number one terrorist."
7. “We're not made by God to mass kill one another, and that's backed up by the Gospels. Lying and war are always associated. Pay attention to war-makers when they try to defend their current war: if they’re moving their lips they're lying.”
8. Herein lies a riddle. How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic?
9. "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Cantonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself."
10. "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Cantonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself."
11. "War can't end terrorism. War is terrorism."

Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

1.A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
2.You must do the things you think you cannot do.
3.You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
4.You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'
5.You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn't mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.
6.You can never really live anyone else's life, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you've become yourself.
7.Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we are in hot water!
8.With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
9.When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
10.When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
11.When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.
12.When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.
13.What you don't do can be a destructive force.
14.What one has to do usually can be done.
15.What is to give light must endure the burning.
16.We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.
17.We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.
18.We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
19.Understanding is a two-way street.
20.Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.
21.There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.
22.The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.
23.The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.
24.The giving of love is an education in itself.
25.The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. 26.The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours - and I think probably gave me many nightmares.
27.The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.
28.Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.
29.Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
30.Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.
31.Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.
32.Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.
33.People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
34.Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.
35.One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
36.Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.
37.No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
38.Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.
39.My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.
40.Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
41.Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
42.It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
43.It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner.
44.It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
45.It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
46.It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation.
47.It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself.
48.It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
49.It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.
50.It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
51.In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
52.In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.
53.If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
54.I'm so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!
55.I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me 'understand' something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.
56.I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
57.I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
58.I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
59.I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.
60.I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
61.I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.
62.Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.
63.Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.
64.Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
65.Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
66.Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.
67.Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
68.Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
69.For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
70.Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
71.Campaign behavior for wives: Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president.
72.Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.
73.As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
74.Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
75.Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
76.Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.
77.Actors are one family over the entire world.
78.Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Desmond Tutu Quotes

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.


Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.


Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.


Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.


Do your little bit of good where you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.


For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.


I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.


I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.


If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.


In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute - a white skin.


My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.


Niger is not an isolated island of desperation. It lies within a sea of problems across Africa - particularly the 'forgotten emergencies' in poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal.


Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.


We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.


We would like to see you departing peacefully.


What is black empowerment when it seems to benefit not the vast majority but an elite that tends to be recycled?


When a pile of cups is tottering on the edge of the table and you warn that they will crash to the ground, in South Africa you are blamed when that happens.


When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.


Without forgiveness, there's no future.


You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.


You must show the world that you abhor fighting.