.
You are an irony… 
Roberto Bolaño
Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.
I wouldn’t go much further than “most of it” myself.
I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.
Who wouldn’t?
That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular.
Not unlike the fabric of dasein?
Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.
Click, of course.
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.
It ever fall on yours?
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
He means more or less of course.
God
“The world looks like something God had just imaged for his own pleasure, doesn’t it?” L.M. Montgomery
God…the Sadist?
“I feel like, God expects me to be human. I feel like, God likes me just the way I am: broken and empty and bruised. I feel like, God doesn’t look at me and wish that I were something else, because He likes me just this way. I feel like, God doesn’t want me to close my eyes and pray for Him to make me holy or for Him to make me pure; because He made me human. I feel like, God already knows I’m human…it is I who needs to learn that.” C. JoyBell C.
A whole new spin?
“He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. “Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from,” he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.” Joe Hill
You tell me: Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. - Google Search
“Then Hwin, though shaking all over, gave a strange little neigh and trotted across to the Lion.
“Please,” she said, "you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.” C.S. Lewis
In other words, if you’re going to Hell, best to be sent there by the Christian God?
“It is hard to see how a great man can be an atheist. Without the sustaining influence of faith in a divine power we could have little faith in ourselves. We need to feel that behind us is intelligence and love. Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create. Faith is the great motive power, and no man realizes his full possibilities unless he has the deep conviction that life is eternally important, and that his work, well done, is a part of an unending plan.” Calvin Coolidge
Yeah, that part is still going around.
“Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God.” Cormac McCarthy
Next up: God and Gaza?
Werner Herzog
I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.
Lock Him up! Lock Him up!
In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.
I was once that optimistic myself.
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
I was once that optimistic myself.
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
Next up: you truly love philosophy.
People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other’s murder.
Pick one:
1] God
2] Kinski
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
Not a whole lot that can’t be though.
Death
“But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.” Jacqueline Woodson
And if you toss the paper into a fire?
“Until death it is all life.” Miguel de Cervantes
Theoretically?
“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.” Thomas Bernhard
Theoretically?
“Dying should come easy:
like a freight train you
don’t hear when
your back is
turned.” Charles Bukowski
Next up: turning your back on it here.
“Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.” Madeleine L’Engle
Praise the Lord?
“Is today a good day to die?” Jennifer Niven
Or, perhaps, see what tomorrow brings?
Philosophy
“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?” Gilles Deleuze
Let’s run that by the women here.
“If your life is worth thinking about,it is worth writing about.” Robin Sharma
If only up in the philosophical clouds?
“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”
Guy Debord
Let’s run this by, among others, the ruling class here.
“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Next up: the decadent objectivists here.
“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.” H. L. Mencken
Try to get used to mine?
“All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.” Nicole Krauss
And it never seems to skip a generation.
Gautama Buddha
However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?
On the other hand, down through the ages, how scary it has been when some do exactly that.
And this time you’re the infidel.
There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.
In other words, cue the objectivists.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a man speak or act with an evil thought, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the beast that draws the wagon… If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.
Next up: translating this into the reality of the world we actually live in.
Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.
And millions follow this guy! 8)
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But you can believe him of course.
…after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
Enough said?
I am above the will to be live, I was meant to exist in spite of doubt.
Therefore
I think
Unknown source
God
“When Lincoln was asked if God was on the Union’s side, Lincoln’s unvarying response was that what was really important was whether they were on God’s side.” Joe Wheeler
Here, pick one: List of religions and spiritual traditions - Wikipedia
“God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods…” Socrates
Uh, so much for the examined life?
“I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God." Robert Charles Wilson
Hint, hint,
“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.” Martin Amis
Uh, let alone Catholicism?
“He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men’s claims to know God’s mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all.” Cormac McCarthy
Forgive what though?
“Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!” Allen Ginsberg
He wasn’t, was he?
Werner Herzog
I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.
And in that exact order.
In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.
Who doesn’t?
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
Next up: you truly love philosophy.
May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
Read what? As for television, not counting the “good stuff” of course.
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
Yo, Hollywood! You’re up!
Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
Trust me: others beg to differ.
Death
“God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.” ― Charlotte Brontë
Uh, whatever?
“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.” Ray Bradbury
I figure that too.
There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives.
And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?"
"That’s like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can’t protect by killing.” Brandon Sanderson
Tell that to, among others, the Jews?
“We took such care of tomorrow, but died on the way there.” Warsan Shire
That ever happen to you?
“What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.” David Levithan
And in a free will world of your own volition.
“Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!” Fyodor Dostoevsky
How long would you last?
Philosophy
“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
On the other hand: click?
“Philosophy can make people sick.” Aristotle
Imagine then his reaction to mine.
“This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.” Rene Daumal
Especially after a night of heavy drinking?
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” Flannery O’Connor
See, I told you. No God? Uh-oh.
“It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.” Diogenes of Sinope
On the other hand, how little is enough?
“Some want to live within the sound
Of church or chapel bell;
I want to run a rescue shop,
Within a yard of hell." C.T. Studd
Next up: some here.
What do you mean by “click”? Do you mean the clicker that some behaviorists use in operant conditioning? Do you mean that sound that one character hears when he drinks (@Meno4 references the movie)? Or do you mean someone has pulled back the hammer on a pistol, or released the safety? Or are you referring to a distance? Or is it the silent sound two or more connecting dots make?
Logic
“Logic only tells us what’s there; it can’t really address what isn’t. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable." Megan Chance
Well, not counting those here – AGORA – who know everything. 
“Even the logician’s tools may break if you lean too hard on them.” Wilfrid Hodges
Break? In any number of contexts they are practically useless.
The laws of nature stand in direct opposition to the notion that all is born of chance.” J.D. Atkinson.
Still, what are the odds of that?
"We choose logic over heart…” Berlyn Hayes
On the other hand: https://youtu.be/IbweW1Amb2I?si=sZ-Shu852bI-8Fmz
‘I can think offhand of two examples. Which one would you like me to give you first?"
“How could I know?” asked Alice. “Since I have no idea what examples you have in mind, how could I possibly tell you which one to give me?”
“Right again,” replied Humpty.’ Raymond M. Smullyan
Alice in puzzleland again.
“Logic cannot deny absolute truth without denying itself”. Seraphim Rose
Uh, a context?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Understand or die.”
Not here, of course.
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.
Here especially.
When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.
And, no, not just theoretically.
What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.
And not just up in the clouds, of course.
There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
I wouldn’t go that far myself.
Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
How roughly?
Science
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” Richard P. Feynman
Philosophy is a culture of…clouds?
“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” G.K. Chesterton
New thread?
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry…” Thomas Jefferson
Next up: the science of slavery.
“‘Tell me, tutor,’ I said. ‘Is revenge a science, or an art?’” Mark Lawrence
Obviously: Yes.
“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.” Isaac Asimov
Pick one:
1] he goes too far
2] he doesn’t go far enough
“I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” Albert Einstein
See, I told you.
Roberto Bolaño
I didn’t hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing, said Luscious Skin.
That’s very Maria, said Pancho. She takes her reading seriously.
Don’t we all?
No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
Ask me about them.
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
So, where would you draw the line?
I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.
Bummer.
I get the idea perfectly, Mickey, said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.
We’d never fall for that, of course.
Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one’s village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one’s eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.
Unless, of course, he’s wrong.
God
“Don’t worry when you meet opposition for obeying God. Worry when you don’t have opposition, because you’re probably not obeying God.” Craig Groeschel
You know, if there is one. And you can prove it.
“I couldn’t care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.” Elizabeth Gilbert
Like magic!
“Anybody who says “I know how to get to God and you don’t, do this and do that and go here and go there” is going to become 1. very powerful and 2. very rich. The simple truth is, if I am with God, no less can you be with God at the same time as I am.” C. JoyBell C.
Next up: the actual far more complex truth.
“I think the Marine Corps has forgotten where Pavuvu is," one man said.
“I think God has forgotten where Pavuvu is,” came a reply.
“God couldn’t forget because he made everything.”
"Then I bet he wishes he could forget he made Pavuvu.” Eugene B. Sledge
On the other hand, "after the war, the natives returned to the island and resumed the coconut plantation.
“I should not be surprised," said Mr. Graham, "that the day should come when men will refuse to believe in God simply on the ground of the apparent injustice of things. They would argue that there might be either an omnipotent being who did not care, or a good being who could not help, but that there could not be a being both all good and omnipotent or else he would never have suffered things to be as they are.” George MacDonald
Let’s just say we’re still working on that.
“It is a lie - any talk of God that does not comfort you.” Meister Eckhart
Convince me that there is one and I’ll comfort you.
Isn’t it funny how we require proof for such things as if the only way we’re even going to fathom the entire possibility is if there’s actual concrete 100% undefeatable proof. It’s like we’re directly opposed to even considering the mere idea of it until then. But if there’s proof — then we’ll think about it. Is it because we know that it would change everything? Like it’s the most serious thing ever.
We all just assume we have mothers. We don’t even need proof for that. But how the whole shebang got there is not something we’re willing to think about.
For someone who is supposedly like that, you sure talk about God a lot.
Fine, don’t answer me. hangs up