I can’t find the video where he said “how dare you have the disgusting effrontery to exist” from the christian perspective, but this one is pretty good too:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNeaZeFbhH0[/youtube]
I was in Mexico last August
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studying this, because I wanted to go down there and find out
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why their form of Catholicism is so agonizing.
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And…
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I meditated a long time on this,
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in the cathedral of Wahaga.
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And
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Here was the main altar
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– no, not the main altar. The chapel where the sacrament is reserved
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The central figure behind the altar is a huge crucifix
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of Christ covered in blood and wounds.
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The sores are all modeled, you know?
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And then on either side of the walls facing this,
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there are great paintings.
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One of Christ carrying the cross and being mocked and scourged,
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and the other, of the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,
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and all around in the stores,
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where they sell bondieuserie in the neighborhood of the cathedral,
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you can buy these agonized faces of Christ
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with a crown of thorns.
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And every thorn individually sticking in,
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and little dribbles of blood,
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the face is kind of green and ghastly.
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And the people dig this!
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They love it!
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They’ll go walking into the Shrine of our Lady of Guadalupe,
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go for a whole mile on their knees!
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You see young girls doing this!
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What is this about?
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Well, you see, some people
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don’t really feel they exist until they are sitting on the point of a thorn.
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Let me put it that way.
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Like reality is a measure of pain.
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See, pain, in this way of looking at things,
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is the most real thing that there is.
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Pleasure, the pleasures of this world
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escape and disappear and pass away,
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there’s nothing to cling to, so don’t go after pleasure, my dear friends!
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That’s awful, that’s a deceit, because the real thing in life is pain.
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And so, what you do is you train yourself from childhood
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to deal with pain.
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We were brought up in a school system
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where it was simply axiomatic that suffering builds character.
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So therefore, anytime you inflicted pain on anybody,
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you were perfectly justified in your own conscience
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because you were doing him a favor.
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You were building his character for him.
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Do him good!
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Hit him hard on the head! (laughs) You know, that sort of attitude. (laughter)
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And, uh…
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(chuckles)
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And so this is based on this philosophy of
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“pain is reality.”
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Is the ultimate
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penitential philosophy.
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Going down, down, down into the most awful.
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“I am wrong.”
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See? “I am a mistake.”
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“I am responsible for this mistake.”
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“Therefore, I ought to suffer.
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and I go right into that state of mind.”
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“And if I’ve got guts and courage, I’ll go as far into it as possible.”
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“And what will I find out at the end?”
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Now, if you go far enough…
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the trouble is, a lot of people don’t.
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And they stay around, mimble-mambling about
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their sins and all that, which is sort of disgusting.
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And they never really get down to it.
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They never find out
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what I’ll call “the moment,” the hidden motivation behind all this.
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Behind self-renunciation.
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Behind wallowing in
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the reality of pain.
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They don’t see that it’s phony.
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Because
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nothing can be more egotistical
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than true repentance.
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As I pointed out, you’re safe
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when you’re repentant enough.
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Therefore, you…
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conceal from yourself, temporarily, what an egotist you are.
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But if you really get down to the bottom of this thing
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as some of the Christian saints have done,
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and find out what that repentance is all about,
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and you suddenly see
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why it’s your old sin all over again.
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What I thought was good, was, as a matter of fact, evil.
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It was the same self-seeking and self-righteousness
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and ineradicable pride and irreducible rascality,
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which the Hebrews call,
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the yetzer hara.
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Which means, ‘the evil inclination.’
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But they say that the evil inclination was created by the Lord God.
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And probably the Lord God has a yetzer hara himself.
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That the Lord
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has his own element of irreducible rascality.
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And that is, of course, what you might call the dark side,
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the left hand of God.
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The left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand doeth.
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'Cause that mustn’t be let out; that’s the secret.
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You see?
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If the game of the cosmos is of the fundamental pattern of hide and seek,
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Then when ‘hide’ turns up, and it’s the time for ‘hide’ to happen
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Then
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darkness has its day.
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Hide in the dark.
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But when it’s time for ‘seek,’
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then light has its day,
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and we find out what was hidden in the dark,
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and then the right hand suddenly discovers what the left hand was doing.
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(chuckles)
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At first, it’s shocked!
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(chuckles)
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What, that?!
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(laughs)
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What is that, by the way?
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What is the fundamental taboo?