Don't Exclude Others Quotes

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people. I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously. I don’t hold grudges, it’s not productive, but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time. Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed. If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister… Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable. The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty. You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you. If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Do not be sad Edward. They exclude you because they don’t understand you. Be happy you are the single one that differs from their normal community

To embrace the strategy of Jesus is to be engaged in what Dean Brackley calls "downward mobility." Our locating ourselves with those who have been endlessly excluded becomes an act of visible protest. For no amount of our screaming at the people in charge to change things can change them. The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them. The trickle-down theory doesn't really work here. The powers bent on waging war against the poor and the young and the "other" will only be moved to kinship when they observe it. Only when we can see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated will we abandon the values that seek to exclude.

Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

I’ve learned to bully doesn’t only involve attacking someone physically or verbally; it is so much more. Bullying consists of invading other people’s property, humiliation, mind games (pretending to be someone’s friend), manipulation, making threats, spreading rumors, showing aggressive behavior, and/or excluding someone from a group on purpose.

there was a sort of embarrassment about storytelling that struck home powerfully about one hundred years ago, at the beginning of modernism. We see a similar reaction in painting and in music. It's a preoccupation suddenly with the surface rather than the depth. So you get, for example, Picasso and Braque making all kinds of experiments with the actual surface of the painting. That becomes the interesting thing, much more interesting than the thing depicted, which is just an old newspaper, a glass of wine, something like that. In music, the Second Viennese School becomes very interested in what happens when the surface, the diatonic structure of the keys breaks down, and we look at the notes themselves in a sort of tone row, instead of concentrating on things like tunes, which are sort of further in, if you like. That happened, of course, in literature, too, with such great works as James Joyce's Ulysses, which is all about, really, how it's told. Not so much about what happens, which is a pretty banal event in a banal man's life. It's about how it's told. The surface suddenly became passionately interesting to artists in every field about a hundred years ago. In the field of literature, story retreated. The books we talked about just now, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Vanity Fair -- their authors were the great storytellers as well as the great artists. After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's..." So there was a great split that took place. Story retreated, as it were, into genre fiction-into crime fiction, into science fiction, into romantic fiction-whereas the high-art literary people went another way. Children's books held onto the story, because children are rarely interested in surfaces in that sort of way. They're interested in what-happened and what-happened next. I found it a great discipline, when I was writing The Golden Compass and other books, to think that there were some children in the audience. I put it like that because I don't say I write for children. I find it hard to understand how some writers can say with great confidence, "Oh, I write for fourth grade children" or "I write for boys of 12 or 13." How do they know? I don't know. I would rather consider myself in the rather romantic position of the old storyteller in the marketplace: you sit down on your little bit of carpet with your hat upturned in front of you, and you start to tell a story. Your interest really is not in excluding people and saying to some of them, "No, you can't come, because it's just for so-and-so." My interest as a storyteller is to have as big an audience as possible. That will include children, I hope, and it will include adults, I hope. If dogs and horses want to stop and listen, they're welcome as well.

At this point there's something I should explain about myself, which is that I don't talk much, probably too little, and I think this has been detrimental to my social life. It's not that I have trouble expressing myself, or no more than people generally have when they're trying to put something complex into words. I'd even say I have less trouble than most because my long involvement with literature has given me a better-than-average capacity for handling language. But I have no gift for small talk, and there's no point trying to learn or pretend; it wouldn't be convincing. My conversational style is spasmodic (someone once described it as "hollowing"). Every sentence opens up gaps, which require new beginnings. I can't maintain any continuity. In short, I speak when I have something to say. My problem, I suppose - and this may be an effect of involvement with literature - is that I attribute too much importance to the subject. For me, it's never simply a question of "talking" but always a question of "what to talk about". And the effort of weighing up potential subjects kills the spontaneity of dialogue. In other words, when everything you say has to be "worth the effort", it's too much effort to go on talking. I envy people who can launch into a conversation with gusto and energy, and keep it going. I envy them that human contact, so full of promise, a living reality from which, in my mute isolation, I feel excluded. "But what do they talk about?" I wonder, which is obviously the wrong question to ask. The crabbed awkwardness of my social interactions is a result of this failing on my part. Looking back, I can see that it was responsible for most of my missed opportunities and almost all the woes of solitude. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is a mutilation, for which my professional success cannot compensate, much less my "rich inner life." And I've never been able to resolve the conundrum that conversationalists pose for me: how do they keep coming up with things to talk about? I don't even wonder about it anymore, perhaps because I know there's no answer.

I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.

Our point is, if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, first and foremost, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.

I don’t understand the whole ‘real women have curves’ statement. I think it’s fucking stupid. You are technically objectifying women right down to their body type and excluding other people who identify as women. Whatever happened to all the other aspects that make women who they are? Aren’t we all ‘real’ human beings? There are so many things that are wrong with that statement.

Xinxin Ming or Trust in the Heart The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and heaven and earth are set apart. If you want the truth [of nonduality] to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease. When the Way is not understood, the mind chatters endlessly to no avail. The Perfect Way is vastness without holiness. Like infinite space it contains all and lacks nothing. Because you pick and choose, cling and reject, you can't see its Suchness. Neither be entangled in the world, nor in inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things, And dualism vanishes of its own accord. Craving the passivity of Oneness you are filled with activity. As long as you tarry in dualism, You will never know Oneness. If you don't trust in the Heart, you fall into assertion or denial. In this world of Suchness there is neither self nor other-than-self. To be in accord with the Way, let go of all self-centered striving. Denying the world [of duality] is the asserting of it; Asserting emptiness [oneness] is the denying of it. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you go. To return to the root [the One] is to find the meaning, But to pursue appearances [the many] is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond the one and the many. The mind clings to its image of the world; We call it real only because of our ignorance. Do not seek after the truth, merely cease to cherish your opinions. For the mind in harmony with the One, all selfishness disappears. With not even a trace of fear, you can trust the universe completely. All at once you are free, with nothing left to hold on to. All is empty, brilliant, perfect in its own being. In the world of things as they are, there is neither observer nor observed. If you want to describe its essence, the best you can say is "Not-two." Even to have the idea of enlightenment is to go astray. Thoughts that are fettered turn from truth, sink into the unwise habit of "not liking." "Not liking" brings weariness of spirit; estrangements serve no purpose. In this "Not-two" nothing is separate, And nothing in the world is excluded. The enlightened of all times and places have entered into this truth. The One is none other than the All, the All none other than the One. Take your stand on this, and the rest will follow of its accord; To trust in the Heart is the "Not-two," the "Not-two" is to trust in the Heart. There is one reality, not many; Distinctions arise from the clinging needs of the ignorant. To seek Mind with the mind is the greatest of all mistakes. I have spoken, but in vain; For what can words say— Of things that have no yesterday, tomorrow, or today. Jianzhi Sengcan (aka Seng-Ts'an, 僧璨, ?-606)

Questioner: Why do we love our mothers so much? KRISHNAMURTI: Do you love your mother if you hate your father? Listen carefully. When you love somebody very much, do you exclude others from that love? If you really love your mother, don’t you also love your father, your aunt, your neighbour, your servant? Don’t you have the feeling of love first, and then the love of someone in particular? When you say, “I love my mother very much,” are you not being considerate of her? Can you then give her a lot of meaningless trouble? And if you are considerate of your mother, are you not also considerate of your brother, your sister, your neighbour? Otherwise you don’t really love your mother; it is just a word, a convenience.

Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

But the excluded don't need sympathy and compassion from the privileged, they don't want others to speak for them, they themselves should speak and articulate their plight. So in speaking for them, you betrayed them even more than your uncle - you deprived them of their voice.

Don’t look down on others, lest you take your eyes off the ball and lose your bearing. For every ‘little man’ is put on your path for you to lift up, not to pull down; for you to include, not to exclude. He deserves not pity but love. And, don’t look up gratituously to others, lest you sprain your neck and lose your sense of gratitude. Every ‘big man’ is put on your path for you to respect, not idolize; for you to honour, not resent. He deserves not envy but love. Love: that’s one debt you owe all men - the small and the big.

Is an American citizen more likely to be murdered by a Muslim terrorist or by a Mexican? According to CNN, twenty-nine Americans have been killed in Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11.67 I don’t know why they excluded 9/11, so by my count, it’s 3,029. In fact, let’s round it up to four thousand to cover the last several decades. According to the GAO’s extremely conservative figures, Mexicans alone—forget other immigrants—have murdered a minimum of twenty-three thousand Americans in the last few decades.68

It’s not easy to transform a culture built on exclusion. It’s hard to cooperate with people who want to dominate. But we don’t have a choice. We can’t just make the insiders into the new outsiders and call it change. We have to include everyone, even those who want to exclude us. It’s the only way to build the world we want to live in. Others have used their power to push people out. We have to use out power to bring people in. We can’t just add one more warring faction. We have to end factions. It’s the only way we become one.

in such moments I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple; here it is: I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour; I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one. I would even say more: If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth. I would rather not say anything more about it. And yet I don't know why certain topics may never be touched on in society, and why, if anyone does introduce them, it makes the others uncomfortable. Still, enough of it. I heard that you were desirous of travelling somewhere in the South. God grant that you may succeed in obtaining permission to do so. But will you please tell me when we shall be quite free, or at any rate as free as other people ? Perhaps only when we no longer need freedom ? For my part, I want all or nothing. In my soldier's uniform I am the same prisoner as before. I rejoice greatly that I find there is patience in my soul for quite a long time yet, that I desire no earthly possessions, and need nothing but books, the possibility of writing, and of being daily for a few hours alone. The last troubles me most. For almost five years I have been constantly under surveillance, or with several other people, and not one hour alone with myself. To be alone is a natural need, like eating and drinking ; for in that kind of concentrated communism one becomes a whole-hearted enemy of mankind. The constant companionship of others works like poison or plague; and from that unendurable martyrdom I most suffered in the last four years. There were moments in which I hated every man, whether good or evil, and regarded him as a thief who, unpunished, was robbing me of life. The most unbearable part is when one grows unjust, malignant, and evil, is aware of it, even reproves one's-self, and yet has not the power to control one's-self. I have experienced that. I am convinced that God will keep you from it. I believe that you, as a woman, have more power to forgive and to endure. Do

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.

Been given preferential doesn’t mean you are important and others are not. Been made an essential on this lockdown doesn't mean you are excluded from being infected. Now people are competing to get infected by the virus. They are playing power games and trying to prove a point ,that they can reason and they can also get what they want. Meanwhile their lives are at stake here. Its going to end in tears, not because of the lockdown being lifted, but because people don’t want to listen. People don’t want to do be told on what to do and people don’t want to follow orders or instructions on how they can save their lives.

The agreements of human society embrace not only protection against murder, but thousands of other things, and it is certainly true that in America—not to mention other continents—the whites have excluded the blacks from some of the benefits of those agreements. It is said that the exclusion has sometimes even extended to murder—that in parts of this country a white man may kill a black one, if not with impunity, at least with a good chance of escaping the penalty which the agreement imposes. That’s bad. It’s deplorable, and I don’t blame black men for resenting it. But you are confronted with a fact, not a theory, and how do you propose to change it?

But a feeling is only a feeling. There’s no right or wrong. There’s just my feeling and yours. We are wiser not to try to reason others out of their feelings, or try to cheer them up. It’s better to allow their feelings and keep them company, to say, “Tell me more.” To resist saying what I used to tell my children when they were upset because someone had teased or excluded them: “I know how you feel.” It’s a lie. You can’t ever know how someone else feels. It’s not happening to you. To be empathetic and supportive, don’t take on other people’s inner life as if it is your own. That’s just another way of robbing others of their experience—and of keeping them stuck.

She felt that she was trembling. She studied Clerfayt. He asked no questions. I don’t have to explain anything to him, she thought. He takes me at my word. What to me is the decision of my life is to him only the kind of ordinary decision people make every day. Perhaps he doesn’t even think me particularly sick; I suppose it takes an auto smashup to convince him that someone is really incapacitated. She felt to her surprise as if a burden she had borne for years were sliding from her shoulders. Here was the first person in years who was not concerned about her illness. It made her happy in a strange way. It was as if she had crossed a frontier hitherto impassable to her. Her sickness, which had always been like an opaque window between herself and the world, no longer existed, at least for the moment. Instead, life lay outspread before her, breathtakingly clear and wide, flooded with moonlight; life with clouds and valleys and happenings. And she belonged to it, she was no longer excluded from it; she stood like all the others, the healthy people, at the starting point, a burning, crackling torch in her hand, ready for the steep drop, the rush down and into life. What had Clerfayt said once? That the most desirable thing in life was to be able to choose your own death, because then death could not kill you like a rat or extinguish you, suffocate you, when you were not ready. She was ready. She trembled, but she was ready.

The invisibility factor of women in this industry is not unlike the invisibility of girl geeks. We know we exist, but everyone else seems to think we’re an enigma every time they get the notion to write about us and what we apparently want. What we want isn’t any different than what anyone wants. Good stories. With characters we can relate to or identify with or that are interesting to read about. And we’d like to feel welcome, not the perpetual other. We don’t want to feel excluded or like props in every narrative. We don’t want or need every story to be about a girl character. But we’d like them to be treated with the same care and attention male characters are. And it is possible, even in male dominated narratives.

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

Immigrants are almost always outsiders. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to margins the people who trigger in us the feelings we try to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and poor and sick people on the margins of the society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we are most afraid we will find in ourselves. ....And we are often not honest about what's happening. If we are in the inside and we see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves: " I'm not in that situation because I'm different. But that's just prime talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don't want to confess what we have in common with the outsiders because it is too humbling. It suggests that success and failure aren't entirely fair. And if you know, you got the better deal, then you have to be humble and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say :" I am no better than others." So instead, we invent ways for our need to exclude. We say it is about merit or tradition when it's just protecting our privilege and our pride.

Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different.” But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

Peter announced: “There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12 NLT). Many recoil at such definitiveness. John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 sound primitive in this era of broadbands and broad minds. The world is shrinking, cultures are blending, borders are bending; this is the day of inclusion. All roads lead to heaven, right? But can they? The sentence makes good talk-show fodder, but is it accurate? Can all approaches to God be correct? Islam says Jesus was not crucified. Christians say he was. Both can’t be right. Judaism refuses the claim of Christ as the Messiah.6 Christians accept it. Someone’s making a mistake. Buddhists look toward Nirvana, achieved after no less than 547 reincarnations.7 Christians believe in one life, one death, and an eternity of enjoying God. Doesn’t one view exclude the other? Humanists do not acknowledge a creator of life. Jesus claims to be the source of life. One of the two speaks folly. Spiritists read your palms. Christians consult the Bible. Hindus perceive a plural and impersonal God.8 Christ-followers believe “there is only one God” (1 Cor. 8:4 NLT). Somebody is wrong. And, most supremely, every non-Christian religion says, “You can save you.” Jesus says, “My death on the cross saves you.” How can all religions lead to God when they are so different? We don’t tolerate such illogic in other matters. We don’t pretend that all roads lead to London or all ships sail to Australia.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

Live to start. Start to live. Don’t Wait. Start Stuff. People are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. You are innately passionate about certain unique aspects of life. And people are blessed with bouts of clear and concise intuition that drive them toward distinct goals and aspirations within their jobs and their lives as a whole.(You are not excluded from this group.) But people disregard these inspired thoughts, these high-potential opportunities, as “just another stupid idea.” Why? Perhaps they are concerned about a lack of support (perceived or otherwise) from others, or maybe they are afraid of what others will think of them if they fail. Whatever the reason, they convince themselves: “This would be a great idea for someone who has more free time.” “This would be a great idea for someone with a higher level of education.” “This would be a great idea for someone who has more money.” “Everybody thinks this idea is crazy. They must be right.” No matter the justification, the response is the same. These inspired thoughts, these high-potential ideas, are stuffed deep into the drawer labeled “stupid,” and they’re never heard from again . . . or the waiting game begins. People wait. They wait for that elusive day when they’ll finally have enough time (guess what? — you never will), enough education (there is always more to know), enough money (no matter how much you make, someone will always have more). They wait until the children are grown (news flash: just because they’re grown, it doesn’t mean you’re rid of them) or until things settle down at work (they never will). People wait until . . . until . . . until . . . They wait, and they wait, and they wait, until that fateful day when they wake up and realize that while they were sitting around, paying dues, earning their keep, waiting for that elusive “perfect time,” their entire life has passed them by.

So when Jesus defended his disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath, he was essentially telling his interrogators that they misunderstood God’s relationship with human beings. He was saying, in effect, Yes, there are rules, but don’t let the rules get in the way of loving God and others. And when Jesus healed a leper, he was giving an object lesson in the same: by the power of God’s Spirit, the people who have been excluded are now included.

The confirmation bias is so fundamental to your development and your reality that you might not even realize it is happening. We look for evidence that supports our beliefs and opinions about the world but excludes those that run contrary to our own.

The intrusion of private property into these settings, generally inspired by economists who don’t understand the logic of the context (and love private ownership), has often been a disaster.9 It also suggests a selfish reason for why people in villages often seem to help each other out; it is probably partly in anticipation of receiving similar help when they need it.10 The punishment sustaining the norm is that those who refuse to help will themselves be excluded from the community’s help in the future.

How can it be so, this hovering sense of being both victim and perpetrator, both us and them, both me and him? Have we been expelled from an arcadia of fun where nature provided us with innocent automata, lowing and braying machines for our amusement? I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I tell you what I think, since you ask, since you dare to push your repulsive face at me, from out of the smooth paintwork of my heavily mortgaged heart. I think there was only so much fun to go round, only so much and no more available. We've used it all up country dancing in the gloaming, kissing by moonlight, eating shellfish while the sun shatters on our upturned fork and we make the bon point. And of course, the think about fun is that it exists solely in retrospect, in retroscendence; when you're having fun you are perforce abandoned, unthinking. Didn't we have fun, well, didn't we? You know we did. You're with me now, aren't you? We're leaving the party together. We pause on the stairs and although we left of our own accord, pulled our coat from under the couple entwined on the bed, we already sense that it was the wrong decision, that there was a hidden hand pushing us out, wanting to exclude us. We pause on the stairs and we hear the party going on without us, a shrill of laughter, a skirl of music. Is it too late to go back? Will we feel silly if we go back up and announce to no one in particular, 'Look, the cab hasn't arrived. We thought we'd just come back up and wait for it, have a little more fun.' Well, yes, yes, we will feel silly, bloody silly, because it isn't true. The cab has arrived, we can see it at the bottom of the stairs, grunting in anticipation, straining to be clutched and directed, to take us away. Away from fun and home, home to the suburbs of maturity. One last thing. You never thought that being grown up would mean having to be quite so - how can I put it? Quite so - grown up. Now did you? You didn't think that you'd have to work at it quite so hard. It's so relentless, this being grown up, this having to be considered, poised, at home with a shifting four-dimensional matrix of Entirely Valid Considerations. You'd like to get a little tiddly, wouldn't you? You'd like to fiddle with the buttons of reality as he does, feel it up without remorse, without the sense that you have betrayed some shadowy commitment. Don't bother. I've bothered. I've gone looking for the child inside myself. Ian, the Startrite kid. I've pursued him down the disappearing paths of my own psyche. I am he as he is me, as we are all . . . His back, broad as a standing stone . . . My footsteps, ringing eerily inside my own head. I'm turning in to face myself, and face myself, and face myself. I'm looking deep into my own eyes. Ian, is that you, my significant other? I can see you now for what you are, Ian Wharton. You're standing on a high cliff, chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea. You're standing hunched up with the dull awareness of the hard graft. The heavy workload that is life, that is death, that is life again, everlasting, world without end. And now, Ian Wharton, now that you are no longer the subject of this cautionary tale, merely its object, now that you are just another unproductive atom staring out from the windows of a branded monad, now that I've got you where I want you, let the wild rumpus begin.

You got all these people who have a perspective that paints the landscape. But they don’t realize that their perspective paints the landscape. So, when you say, ‘Hey, let’s repaint the picture a bit to recognize other races,’ they don’t know why race even matters. They don’t understand that it’s already racial. It’s just that it’s racial in a way that favors them and excludes others.

It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted! … ’ ‘You are wrong there,’ cried Porfiry Petrovitch – he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever. ‘Nothing is admitted,’ Razumihin interrupted with heat. ‘I am not wrong. I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is “the influence of environment”, and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That

Extend Invitations "How many times have you sat at home alone feeling jealous or sad that you were not invited to a party or out to dinner? You may have seen people having fun on Facebook and wondered what it would take to be included next time. And when you don’t feel included, it can leave you feeling rejected, dismissed, lonely and excluded. It does not have to be this way. Why do we wait for others to do the inviting? You can change your social life instantly by taking the initiative to reach out and connect with someone.

Don’t exclude others just because they disagree with you on many things. Such strife smells of and breeds disunity. Instead, allow the sweet aroma of the gospel to draw others to you and into the House of God, where they may also meet the One who saved you.

Examine the witness who will introduce the exhibit in a way that establishes competence and relevance and makes the introduction of the exhibit become part of the story of the trial. 2) Show the exhibit to opposing counsel, the judge, and the witness. Say to opposing counsel and the judge, “I’m going to show the witness the exhibit marked as Plaintiff’s Number 1.” Show them a copy. Say to the judge, “Your Honor, may I approach the witness?” Say to the witness, “I am showing you what has been marked for identification as Plaintiff’s Exhibit Number 1.” 3) Have the witness identify the exhibit. Show the exhibit to the witness. Say, “Please tell the jury what it is.” Or, “What is it?” 4) Lay any necessary evidentiary foundation: Authenticate the exhibit through testimony that shows that the exhibit is what you say it is. Complete the foundation with testimony that shows that the exhibit is not excludable on any other grounds. 5) Offer the exhibit. Say, “Your Honor, I move plaintiff’s exhibit Number 1 be admitted into evidence.” Or, “Your honor, I offer plaintiff’s exhibit Number 1 in evidence.” 6) Publish the exhibit to the jurors. Don’t forget to use it!

When we pray we admit that we don’t know what God is going to do, but remember that we will never find out if we are not open to risks. We learn to stretch out our arms to the deep sea and the high heavens with an open mind and heart. In many ways prayer becomes an attitude toward life that opens itself up to a gift that is always coming. We find courage to let new things happen, things over which we have no control, but which now loom as less threatening. And it is here that we find courage to face our human boundaries and hurts, whether our physical appearance, our being excluded by others, our memories of hurt or abuse, our oppression at the hands of another. As we find freedom to cry out in our anguish or protest someone’s suffering, we discover ourselves slowly led into a new place. We become conditioned to wait for what we in our own strength cannot create or orchestrate. We realize that joy is not a matter of balloons and parties, not owning a house, or even having our children succeed in school. It has to do with a deep experience— an experience of Christ. In the quiet listening of prayer, we learn to make out the voice that says, “I love you, whoever else likes you or not. You are mine. Build your home in me as I have built my home in you.

Of course, television is not alone in being confronted with this destiny - this vicious circle: the destiny of all those things which , no longer having an objective purpose, take themselves for their own ends. In so doing, they escape all responsibility, but also become bogged down in their own insoluble contradictions. This is, however, more particularly the critical situation of all the current media. Opinion polls themselves are a good example. They have had their moment of truth (as, indeed, did television), when they were the representative mirror of an opinion, in the days when such a thing still existed, before it became merely a conditioned reflex. But perpetual harassment by opinion polls has resulted in their being no longer a mirror at all; they have, rather, become a screen. A perverse exchange has been established between polls which no longer really ask questions and masses who no longer reply. Or rather they become cunning partners, like rats in laboratories or the viruses pursued in experiments. They toy with the polls at least as much as the polls toy with them. They play a double game. It is not, then, that the polls are bogus or deceitful, but rather that their very success and automatic operation have made them random. There is the same double game, the same perverse social relationship between an all-powerful, but wholly self-absorbed, television and the mass of TV viewers, who are vaguely scandalized by this misappropriation, not just of public money, but of the whole value system of news and information. You don't need to be politically aware to realize that, after the famous dustbins of history, we are now seeing the dustbins of information. Now , information may well be a myth, but this alternative myth, the modern substitute for all other values, has been rammed down our throats incessantly. And there is a glaring contrast between this universal myth and the actual state of affairs. The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information- its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power - political power- to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all. The fantasy then shifted on to the media and information. At times we dreamed (at least collectively, even if individually we continued to have no illusions) of finding some freedom there — an openness, a new public space. Such dreams were soon dashed: the media turned out to be much more conformist and servile than expected, at times more servile than the professional politicians. The latest displacement of the imagination has been on to the judiciary. Again this has been an illusion, since, apart from th e pleasing whiff of scandal produced, this is also dependent on the media operation. We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further and further removed from power - from any form of power whatever (and definitely far removed from cultural power, which has become the most conventional and professional form ther e is). Among the excluded, the immigrants, the homeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they, who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products of a whole society's loss of imagination, of the loss of any social imagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is no use trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, because there no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, the vague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become a massive sickening feeling.

they don’t even mention the logical possibility of a third position: namely, that the United States did not have the right, either the legal or the moral right, to intervene by force in the internal affairs of Vietnam. We leave to history the task of judging the debate between the hawks and the respectable doves, but the third position, opposed to the other two, is excluded from discussion.

I have most of my patients with Hashimoto’s follow an elimination diet initially in the form of the AIP diet. I have them do this for the first month, and if they are doing well, I’ll encourage them to follow this diet for a longer period. Eventually, I’ll have them reintroduce some of the excluded foods, as the goal isn’t to keep them on this diet permanently. However, at times, I will order an IgG food sensitivity panel. If someone insists on ordering this type of testing, then I’m fine ordering it. Another situation when I might order such testing is if the patient started out with an elimination diet and followed my other recommendations, but a few months later they still aren’t progressing. Another scenario where I might order a food sensitivity panel is if the patient is progressing but then they hit a roadblock and don’t show further improvement.

If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think of how having one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don’t mind saying, life was beautiful in those days.

if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, first and foremost, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.

Freedom that is gained at another person’s expense isn’t freedom; it is just diverted oppression. A lot of people who say they want freedom really just want to cosplay as oppressors by excluding and harming the people they believe are beneath them. We don’t get free by lording our power over others. Freedom is a collective endeavor that requires us to imagine a different world than the one we presently inhabit. As we imagine freedom, it is critical that we imagine freedom for all people.

The key to this process,” Sanchez said, “is to speak up when it is your moment and to project energy when it is someone else’s time.” “Many things can go wrong,” Julia interjected. “Some people get inflated when in a group. They feel the power of an idea and express it, then because that burst of energy feels so good, they keep on talking, long after the energy should have shifted to someone else. They try to monopolize the group. “Others are pulled back and even when they feel the power of an idea, they won’t risk saying it. When this happens, the group fragments and the members don’t get the benefit of all the messages. The same thing happens when some members of the group are not accepted by some of the others. The rejected individuals are prevented from receiving the energy and so the group misses the benefit of their ideas.” Julia paused and we both looked at Sanchez who was taking a breath to speak. “How people are excluded is important,” he said. “When we dislike someone, or feel threatened by someone, the natural tendency is to focus on something we dislike about the person, something that irritates us. Unfortunately, when we do this—instead of seeing the deeper beauty of the person and giving them energy—we take energy away and actually do them harm. All they know is that they suddenly feel less beautiful and less confident, and it is because we sapped their energy.” “That is why,” Julia said, “this process is so important. Humans are aging each other at a tremendous rate out there with their violent competitions.” “But remember,” Sanchez added, “in a truly functional group, the idea is to do the opposite of this, the idea is for every member’s energy and vibration to increase because of the energy sent by all of the others. When this occurs, everyone’s individual energy field merges with everyone else’s and makes one pool of energy. It is as if the group is just one body, but one with many heads. Sometimes one head speaks for the body. Sometimes another talks. But in a group functioning this way, each individual knows when to speak and what to say because he truly sees life more clearly.

For me, the other compelling thread, which dates back to my college days in the 1980s, has been my growing recognition that liberalism—the political ideology I was raised in and still am most generally attracted to—has a serious elitism problem that needs correcting.

I should like to see your home town." "There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes." That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him. "Nothing? There is you." "Oh, me? But I am here." "I will not go, of course, until you are there." "We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees." "Could I find that?" "If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly. "I'll inquire about--" "What?" "The house of the prettiest girl in the town." "There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere." "It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically. "I thought you, at least, would not say such things." "Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--" "Are you withdrawing the compliment?" "Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--" "If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily. "Exactly." "It must be ugly." "Always?

The notion that God blesses us with money, experiences, and achievements correlating to our obedience now pervades our culture. But what does this mean for the majority of people who aren’t receiving all these divine handouts? What about poor people and abused people and abandoned people and disabled people and the more than 650 million people who don’t even have access to basic clean water?7 If we consider the size and scope of the human race on earth, we realize that the popular definition of blessing comforts a tiny subset of God’s megafavored while excluding the majority of others.

You still want to know, don’t you? You’re still curious. I mean, I don’t blame you. Here’s the thing: does it matter exactly what happened and why those girls were excluded? It’s irrelevant. It happened. Done. Over. I’d rather not go into it. We don’t have to reveal everything to each other. That’s another thing I’ve learned in therapy: it’s OK to be private. It’s OK to say no. It’s OK to say, “I’m not going to share that.” So, if you don’t mind, let’s just leave it there. I mean, I appreciate your interest and concern, I really do. But you don’t need to pollute your brain with that stuff. Go and, like, listen to a nice song instead. MY SERENE AND LOVING FAMILY—FILM TRANSCRIPT INTERIOR.

Fight, fight and fight – all they do is fight – they don’t care about harmony or world peace, all they care about is to prove that they are right and others are wrong – the scientists, the philosophers, the preachers, the spiritualists – every single one of them (excluding the exceptions) just want to triumph over the other – and that’s precisely what’s wrong with this world – they all want victory to be their exclusive possession and defeat to be the possession of the others. This way, no amount of riches will ever bring happiness and harmony in this world, because to have happiness and harmony, we all must act together to rise triumphant as one species, and not as individuals or tiny groups.

We have seen a movement from many deities to two to one. Whether you take that movement to be fact, mythology, or theology, it is the story of how we got to where most (Western) religions are now. And, as I said, it even defines where atheism is at. Have you heard the old joke about the Jewish man who was left on a desert island for years? When a ship found him, they saw two large huts that he had built on a hill. They asked him what they were. He said, "That one's my synagogue." ... And they asked him what the other hut was. He said, "That's the synagogue I don't go to!" (You can change this to churches or any house of worship you like when you tell the joke.) So we hear people say, "Do you believe in God?" But we do not generally hear people say, "Do you believe in the gods?" The religion that atheists don't go to is monotheism--by default. Or, better: by history. ... I have read and heard it said many times that monotheism has done more harm than polytheism. The claim is that monotheism is exclusive--"If my belief is right, then everybody else's belief must be wrong"--so monotheists are more likely than polytheists or atheists to exclude, persecute, and purge others. We can admit there is some logic to that claim, but still the evidence of history goes both ways. Polytheists and atheist nations and empires have done their share of atrocities. I would not want to take a side in a depressing debate over which has done more horrible things. My task here has not been to argue that monotheism is higher or lower than other ideas. It has just been to track how it came about and to recognize that it succeeded. Monotheism won. One won.

An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of self-identification. We try to make ourselves recognizable to ourselves and others, as though the foundation of what we call identity is not having one. On Kafka's principle — I can't really swim because I was originally unable to swim — since I didn't originally have an identity I don't really have one. 'Do you know who I am?' the excluded say to their excluders, and then proceed to tell them, or try to tell them. And to tell themselves.

Note: The first incident happened after the arrest by the Netherlands police in May 1980. I suffered from that, which destroyed my career, future, health, and life. I tried and tried to investigate that, but the police didn't even register the first information report (FIR). It stayed, refusing since 1980 until now, which creates suspicious questions about what the reasons are for not filing the case. It mirrors whether the Netherlands government victimised me or whether the hired ones of the international intelligence agencies have been a hindrance or the criminal groups. - The second incident happened in the shape of uncurable cancer; it was a deliberate mistake and ignorance of the Netherlands Urologists, who did not follow even the primary medical borderlines for the checkup during one year from 2016 to 2017. After the diagnosis, they are hiding the reality, and they still do not take it seriously. I still hope that the Netherlands' neutral and free media will awaken to help me investigate the incident. It will save millions of lives around the world. In God's name, take it seriously to protect me and others. I feel suspicious elements around me. I cry and pray day and night for God's protection since I do not exclude the Qadeyanis witches and magicians, who keep doing black magic continuously that the West does not understand. My Real Story In A Poem *** I never thought I would suffer from cancer The metastatic prostate gland I still cannot decide that It is natural or human-made Since everything is possible In the medical-criminal world How it happened in Western society; Civilized urologists ignored it deliberately From 2016 to 2017 Telling that nothing was wrong Whereas I was suffering from Bleeding, burning, and pain During urinating I begged urologists for a wide-scale checkup With MRI scans and other new technologies But urologists stayed rejecting; Whereas I was paying insurance for that Consequently, at the beginning of 2017 The diagnosis became a time bomb that I had metastatic prostate gland cancer, Which was not curable, They listed me on the death list, Treating for longer life expectancy However, they do tell not the truth And stay suspicious It confuses me and creates grave fear Since then I am bearing terrible side effects Factually, I became victimized twice By criminals, Intelligence Agencies And underground-mafias Which I am unable to trace alone In this regard, I approached Western Media, Ministries, police, courts, Euro Union Unfortunately, none of those responded Even my motherland media cruelly ignored It seems as if I am in the grip of the demon And The Prisoner Of The Hague Everyone has left me alone in pain, Stress, fear, depression Even my children don't care And realize my tears Where resides sympathy, empathy, And humanity? I feel death before death It is a silent cruelty Ah, where should I ask and beg For justice, help, and investigation That civilized world should know An innocent is under victimization I believe God will help and protect And someone from somewhere Appear to hold my hands To eliminate all criminals and demons My cancer will be curable With a longer life expectancy, in some ways Amen, O' merciful God amen.