41
" The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it—they are powerless to deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideas themselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (“Clearly . . .”), threat (“It would be unscientific to . . .”), authority (“As Popper showed . . .”), insult (“This work lacks the necessary rigor for . . .”), and belittling (“Few people today seriously believe that . . .”). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that “college football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students. "
― Steven Pinker , How the Mind Works
45
" There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. "
― Kay Redfield Jamison , An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
46
" Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud’s and Jung’s. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to. "
55
" Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder—a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames. "
― Robert G. Ingersoll , Some Mistakes of Moses
56
" THE GAME
In a field just like bubble we were. I could not count the number of us. And the field was infinite, like a universe and also like emptiness. We all knew each other but we had no names for one another but meaning was all we had, feelings were all we used. It was not strange, not unusual. We had no sense of time or existence but we were very much alive. In this place we had no need of eating, drinking or sleeping. There was no work and no assignments. No one was above another, we were all equals. No language or race, it is amazing how life could be, existence in emptiness. I was part of all and all was part of me.
Until time came when few among us were chosen. Chosen by our own choices, to take upon them a challenge in another realm. We all use to call this “THE GAME”. Once they had decided, each one of them would choose a role thereafter. And few time after they had chosen their roles, like electricity they would be taken from among us and go to a place we didn't know. Until a certain time they would return to us not knowing any more where they had been. Hmmm... It was kind of curious to many of us. The idea of conceiving something; taking up a role. A role? What was that? For what purpose? We didn't even know what a role was. It took too much effort to try even imagining what could be a role. There was then an elder among us. Well elder is too much to say. Someone among us who use to give us the rulers of the game and give us definition of the role.
What was the game we asked him. He said to us, the game is call life? What is life? We asked; life is the game but it is also the game of death? What is death we asked, well death is the game of life and in between there's a space which is called existence. In this game you will have the chance to choose your role, be a character in the story, make choices, fail and win sometimes. Have a family, learn, grow and then exit through the door of death, and return right here. Is death a door or a game? We asked him, well it is kind of both so is life. He said to us. How many times can we play this game? We enquired from him further, as much as you like, it all depend on how much you enjoy it. It was then at that time that I started thinking about this game, that time when I noticed, I was becoming different from all of us. The time I started making the choice already only through the ideas of conceiving what other possibilities could be out there... To be continued. "
― Marcus L. Lukusa