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Read books on the philosophy of science and the myth of creationism.
Read books on the myth of creationism.
Read books on the fourteen-billion-year story of cosmic and human history.
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Read books on Darwin and Evolution.
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Read great books on the causes of collapse of societies.
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Kierkegaard's Writings, XVI: Works of Love

What marvellous strength love has! The most powerful word which has been said, yes, God's creative word, is: "Be". But the most powerful word any human being has ever said is, if said by a lover: I abide (p. 286).

This is my favourite love poem

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoveres to new worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally,
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

The Good Morrow by John Donne

Nausea

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact. I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the fiends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes.(...)

The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea

Kierkegaard's "Mystery Of Unrighteousness" In The Information Age

"The world's fundamental misfortune," the 19th century Søren Kierkegaard writes, "is ...the fact that with each great discovery ...the human race is enveloped ... in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody's, which belong to none and yet to all." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2650] The great discoveries to which Kierkegaard is referring are made possible by the use of technology, and part of his concern is that the use of technology often results in human beings having "destitute" relations to one another. As exemplified for Kierkegaard by the popular press, the uses of technologies not only transform face-to-face relationships, they create masks behind which people hide from one another. It is this latter point that is especially important. For Kierkegaard, what ultimately drives people toward certain technological practices is fear. "What rules the world," Kierkegaard writes, "is... the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it." [Kierkegaard (1967), #2166] The use of technology to mediate communication, claims Kierkegaard, provides people with the means to escape, or at least hide from those aspects of interpersonal relationships they most fear...more here

Fragments from a History of Ruin

For the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

For the Renaissance, the ruin was first of all a legible remnant, a repository of written knowledge. Classical ruins had preserved a certain stratum of the linguistic culture of Greece and Rome: the inscriptions on monuments, tombs, and stelae. Other mute objects—fragments of statuary, columns, bits of orphaned arch or broken pediment—composed in themselves a kind of script made of gesture, line, and ornament. In 1796, the French archaeologist Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy would ask, "What is the antique in Rome if not a great book whose pages have been destroyed or ripped out by time, it being left to modern research to fill in the blanks, to bridge the gaps?" But already, at the end of the fifteenth century, the rubble of the classical past had been figured as a sort of scattered cipher: a text that was alternately readable and utterly mysterious...more here

John Donne

The picture of John Donne "in the pose of a melancholy lover", which was recently bought by the National Portrait Gallery, has once again fixed a particular image of the poet in the public mind. He is soulful and amorous (the folded arms and sensual mouth), theatrical (the wide-brimmed black hat), dressy (the lacy collar and furred cuff), and enigmatic (the deep background shadows). And if that doesn't sound intriguing enough, there's more. An inscription bowed into a semi-circle round the top of the portrait reworks a phrase from a Latin psalm which can be translated as "O Lady lighten our darkness". Does this mean the picture was originally intended for a lover, or is it a kind of prayer to the Virgin Mary, and therefore also a reference to Donne's Catholic background? We can't be sure. Like so much else about Donne, the inscription is ambiguous - as much a fusion of "contraries" as the man himself.

Donne was born in 1572, the son of Catholic parents who understood that if they wanted to get on in the world they would have to play down or actually disguise their faith...more here

I Will Bear Witness

I Will Bear Witness. This is the single most important document from the era of National Socialism. It gives an account of every day of Hitler's 13-year dictatorship, written by a German-Jewish convert to Protestantism who had married a heroic Protestant woman, and who briefly imagined that his dual loyalty (to employ an otherwise suspect phrase) might win him some immunity. Swiftly disabused on that score, Klemperer resolved to depict his beloved Germany's collapse into barbarism.

The diary possesses three dimensions that are of great interest to us. By its portrayal of innumerable acts of decency and solidarity on the part of ordinary Germans, it seems to rebut the Daniel Jonah Goldhagen diatribe about "willing executioners." By its agonizing description of the steady and pitiless erosion of German Jewry, it puts to shame all those who doubt--whatever the argument may be over numbers or details--that Hitler's state had a coldly evolved plan of extirpation. And it forces one to reconsider the Allied policy of "area bombing."...more here

Her Melancholy

It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother, too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before. "Do, my pretty Olivia," cried she, "let us have that little melancholy air your papa was so fond of. Your sister Sophy has already obliged us. Do, child; it will please your old father." She complied in a manner so exquisitely pathetic as moved me.

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom--is to die.

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), ch. xxiv

Sonnet XXI

Go! cruel tyrant of the human breast
To other hearts, thy burning arrows bear;
Go, where fond hope, and fair illusion rest!
Ah! why should love inhabit with despair!
Like the poor maniac I linger here,
Still haunt the scene, where all my treasure lies;
Still seek for flowers, where only thorns appear,
"And drink delicious poison from her eyes!"
Tow'rds the deep gulph that opens on my flight
I hurry forward, passion's helpless salve!
And scorning reason's mild and sober light,
Pursue the path that leads me to the grave!
So round the flame the giddy insect flies,
And courts the fatal fire, by which it dies!

Charlotte Smith (1786)

The Bible, Culture and Nick Cave

Debates on the relation between culture and the Bible are locked into two restrictive models: either the Bible is a source for subsequent appropriations, or it is the goal that one must attain through the thicket of those appropriations. In order to trouble this two-way street, I explore the words and music of Nick Cave, focusing on the way he controls interpretation of his work and where that control breaks down. At this moment Cave provides an unwitting insight into another way to view the relation of the Bible and culture, one that operates in terms of “strategies of containment.”...more here