{"quotes":[{"text":"Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":11922,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"My biggest fear is that the enlightened Arab thinkers are gong to leave the Arab world in search of fresh air: somewhere far away from the sword of the religious authorities.","author":"Raif Badawi","tags":["freespeech","islam","liberty","oppression","presecution","religion","saudi-arabia","society","theocracy"],"id":34336,"author_id":"Raif+Badawi"},{"text":"States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear.","author":"Raif Badawi","tags":["itarianism","freedom-of-expression","history","islam","liberty","logic","oppression","persecution","religion","saudi-arabia","stultification","theocracy","totalitarianism"],"id":54156,"author_id":"Raif+Badawi"},{"text":"Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.","author":"Albert Camus","tags":["forgiveness","ideology","puritanism","religion","theocracy","virtue"],"id":69020,"author_id":"Albert+Camus"},{"text":"Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. Your life?","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":95133,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["2011","abu-musab-al-zarqawi","al-qaeda","al-qaeda-in-iraq","arab-spring","death","death-of-osama-bin-laden","exorcism","feminism","iraq","islamism","life","literature","music","osama-bin-laden","pakistan","secularism","september-11-attacks","sunni-islam","terrorism","theocracy"],"id":101704,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.","author":"Gore Vidal","tags":["atheism","god","liberalism","politics","religion","theocracy","totalitarianism"],"id":106246,"author_id":"Gore+Vidal"},{"text":"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?","author":"Sandra Day O'Connor","tags":["church","religion","secularism","separation-of-church-and-state","state","theocracy"],"id":135049,"author_id":"Sandra+Day+O%27Connor"},{"text":"My politics is my religion, my religion is my politics.","author":"Mahatma Gandhi","tags":["church","faith","government","poilitics","reason","religion","state","theocracy"],"id":141226,"author_id":"Mahatma+Gandhi"},{"text":"Civic duty? Perhaps it would be a little naive to try to coerce me into voting. I assure you my basic standards of healthy living are very different from yours, which is the reason I do not vote. You should note that, as nonsensical a scenario, if forced to choose I would most definitely rather live in a failing, Christ-honoring, God-fearing nation than a flourishing one that mocks said Creator. Beware of my personal ambitions.","author":"Criss Jami","tags":["ambition","civic-duty","country","democracy","democracy-voting","elections","god","healthy","mock","political","theocracy","voting"],"id":143215,"author_id":"Criss+Jami"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}