God Punish Me Quotes

I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

I will find you," he whispered in my ear. "I promise. If I must endure two hundred years of purgatory, two hundred years without you - then that is my punishment, which I have earned for my crimes. For I have lied, and killed, and stolen; betrayed and broken trust. But there is the one thing that shall lie in the balance. When I shall stand before God, I shall have one thing to say, to weigh against the rest." His voice dropped, nearly to a whisper, and his arms tightened around me. Lord, ye gave me a rare woman, and God! I loved her well.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.

And now...farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude. I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.

I am the flail of god. Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.

There’s a Greek legend—no, it’s in something Plato wrote—about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male.

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one’s head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

You live in my head all the fucking time, even when I don’t want you to…” His palm slid to my hip, where his fingers dug grooves into my skin. “And God, I want to punish you for driving me so damn crazy. Every. Single. Day.

Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

And now,' said the unknown, 'farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been heaven's substitute to recompense the good - now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!

If I ask God to punish my enemy with vengeful prayers, then He is fair to allow the enemy to do the same for me.

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece.

Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God." "That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically. "Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady." "She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha. "A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind,

You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, ‘When you’re done, I’m going to punish you.’If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God.

What are my options?" "You could read obscure poetry while I play the triangle, I suppose. Or we can smother ourselves in peanut butter and howl at the moon. Use your imagination." "Fine,"I said. "You take my hand and back up toward the bed." "Excellent choice. What then?" "You sit down, and pull me down with you." "Where are you?" he asked. "You pull me onto your lap." "Where are your legs?" "Around your waist." "Well," Noah said, his voice slightly rough. "This is getting interesting. So I'm on the edge of your bed. I'm holding you on my lap as you straddle me. My arms are around you, bracing you there so you don't fall. What am I wearing?"... "What do you usually wear to bed?" I asked. Noah said nothing. I opened my eyes to an arched brow and a devious grin. Oh my God. "Close. Your. Eyes," he said. I did. "Now, where were we?" "I was straddling you," I said. "Right. And I'm wearing..." "Drawstring pants." "Those are quite thin, you know." I'm aware. ... "Right," he said. "So what are you wearing?" "I don't know. A space suit. Who cares?" "I think this should be as vivid as possible," he said. "For you," he clarified, and I chuckled. "Eyes closed," he reminded me. "I'm going to have to institute a punishment for each time I have to tell you." "What did you have in mind?" "Don't tempt me. Now, what are you wearing?" "A hoodie and drawstring pants too, I guess." "Anything underneath?" "I don't typically walk around without underwear." "Typically?" "Only on special occasions." "Christ. I meant under your hoodie." "A tank top, I guess." "What color?" "White tank. Black hoodie. Gray pants. I'm ready to move on now." I felt him nearer, his words close to my ear. "To the part where I lean back and pull you down with me?" Yes. "Over me," he said. Fuck. "The part where I tell you that I want to feel the softness of the curls at the nape of your neck? To know what your hipbone would feel like against my mouth?" he murmured against my skin. "To memorize the slope of your navel and the arch of your neck and the swell of your-

God…” I choked on the word. “I know we haven’t talked much in the past few years. Hell, I told you I hated you when Tye took his own life.” I cursed again and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t even care about myself anymore, just promise me she’ll be okay. If I don’t make it… if you take me, just let Kiersten be okay. She can’t go down that road — I don’t care if you have to punish me, God. If she’s going to suffer, give me her pain instead. If her heart’s going to break, break mine for hers. Please, God… please.

As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a God. I don’t think there is a God, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a God. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different God, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are.

You've injured me, Farshooter, most deadly of the gods; And I'd punish you, if I had the power.

What I am trying to say is that insofar as religion and many other beliefs are concerned, my mind no longer possesses the power to imprison me; any punishment which I perceive to be doled out by God, is moreover the result of my own doing.

But Anatole said suddenly, 'Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.' 'What are you telling me?' 'I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.

Trust me, little one. Everyone makes mistakes. Even the gods, and ours are much worse than those of humans. Unlike humans, we don’t suffer alone. Rather, we share the pain with thousands. That’s why you must learn to be like your father. To hold in your tears and anger. Try not to punish what you love. (Artemis)

What use is a god with boundless mercy, sir? You mock me as a pagan, yet the gods of my ancestors pronounce clearly their ways and punish severely when we break their laws. Your Christian god of mercy gives men licence to pursue their greed, their lust for land and blood, knowing a few prayers and a little penance will bring forgiveness and blessing.

...Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers... for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality... But I had gradually come by this time, i.e., 1836 to 1839, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, &c., &c., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ...By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported, (and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become), that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost uncomprehensible by us, that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eyewitnesses; by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can be hardly denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief... Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

I was trying to go... somewhere. But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn't stop walking, couldn't stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after I couldn't forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn't stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me-- I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn't get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it-- it had never been like that for me before. I'd always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick's and I knew. And then to find out the reason I felt like that-- like you were some part of me I'd lost and never ever knew I was missing until I saw you again-- that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don't even know for what-- for thinking that I actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be happy. I couldn't imagine what it was I'd done that I was being punished for--

Give your false prophet a message for me. Tell him Jesus befriended the whores and the thieves and the sinners. Tell him his Old Testament God is dead. God doesn't punish the wicked and save the righteous. God is love.

He burst in the door like he'd expected to find us, and in that horrible moment, with him raging like a storm, I knew why Mason had called him a god. In the blink of an eye, he crossed the room and jerked Jesse up by his shirt, nearly holding the Moroi off the ground. "What's your name?" barked Dimitri. "J-Jesse, sir. Jesse Zeklos, sir." "Mr. Zeklos, do you have permission to be in this part of the dorm?" "No, sir." "Do you know the rules about male and female interactions around here?" "Yes, sir." "Then I suggest you get out of here as fast as you can before I turn you over to someone who will punish you accordingly. If I ever see you like this again -" Dimitri pointed to where I cowered, half dressed, on the couch. - "I will be the one to punish you. And it will hurt. A lot. Do you understand me?" Jesse swallowed, eyes wide. None of the bravado he usually showed was there. I guess there was 'usually' and then there was being held in the grip of a really ripped, really tall, and really pissed-off Russian guy. "Yes, sir." "Then go." Dimitri released him, and, if possible, Jesse got out of there faster than Dimitri had burst in. My mentor then turned to me, a dangerous glint in his eyes.

I need no master to punish me in order to behave as I ought. If I did, I would be no more than a child who obeys his father's rules only because he fears the whip, and not because he actually means good.

When someone passes, Benjamin, people always ask, ‘Why did God take them?’ A better question would be ‘Why did God give them to us?’ What did we do to deserve their love, their joy, the sweet moments we shared? Didn’t you have such moments with Annabelle?” “Every day,” I rasped. “Those moments are a gift. But their end is not a punishment. I am never cruel, Benjamin. I know you before you are born. I know you after you die. My plans for you are not defined by this world. “Beginnings and endings are earthly ideas. I go on. And because I go on, you go on with me. Feeling loss is part of why you are on Earth. Through it, you appreciate the brief gift of human existence, and you learn to cherish the world I created for you. But the human form is not permanent. It was never meant to be. That gift belongs to the soul. “I know the tears you shed, Benjamin. When people leave this Earth, their loved ones always weep.” She smiled. “But I promise you, those who leave do not.

If you honestly feel you have done something so terrible that you cannot be forgiven, then I am willing to share your sins with you. When we die, if we should have to stand before God and be judged, then I will tell him I am as much to blame as you and that half your punishment should be portioned out to me.

Do we behave out of fear of punishment, or out of the demands of our heart? For me, it is the latter, as I would hope is true for all adults, thought I know from bitter experience that such is not often the case. To act in a manner designed to catapult you into heaven would seem transparent to a god, any god,for if ones heart is not in allignment with the creator of that heaven, then... what is the point?

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

Jeb regarded me with n o expression. "Do you believe in God, Allison?" "No," I said immediately. "Is this the part where you tell me I'm going to hell?" "This is hell," Jebbadiah said, gesturing to the town around us. "This is our punishment, our Tribulation. God has abandoned this world. The faithful have already gone on to their reward, and he has left the rest of us here, at the mercy of the demons and the devils. The sins of our fathers have passed to their children, and their children's children, and it will continue to be so until this world is completely destroyed. So it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not, because He is not here.

The very quality of your life, whether you love it or hate it, is based upon how thankful you are toward God. It is one's attitude that determines whether life unfolds into a place of blessedness or wretchedness. Indeed, looking at the same rose bush, some people complain that the roses have thorns while others rejoice that some thorns come with roses. It all depends on your perspective. This is the only life you will have before you enter eternity. If you want to find joy, you must first find thankfulness. Indeed, the one who is thankful for even a little enjoys much. But the unappreciative soul is always miserable, always complaining. He lives outside the shelter of the Most High God. Perhaps the worst enemy we have is not the devil but our own tongue. James tells us, "The tongue is set among our members as that which . . . sets on fire the course of our life" (James 3:6). He goes on to say this fire is ignited by hell. Consider: with our own words we can enter the spirit of heaven or the agonies of hell! It is hell with its punishments, torments and misery that controls the life of the grumbler and complainer! Paul expands this thought in 1 Corinthians 10:10, where he reminds us of the Jews who "grumble[d] . . . and were destroyed by the destroyer." The fact is, every time we open up to grumbling and complaining, the quality of our life is reduced proportionally -- a destroyer is bringing our life to ruin! People often ask me, "What is the ruling demon over our church or city?" They expect me to answer with the ancient Aramaic or Phoenician name of a fallen angel. What I usually tell them is a lot more practical: one of the most pervasive evil influences over our nation is ingratitude! Do not minimize the strength and cunning of this enemy! Paul said that the Jews who grumbled and complained during their difficult circumstances were "destroyed by the destroyer." Who was this destroyer? If you insist on discerning an ancient world ruler, one of the most powerful spirits mentioned in the Bible is Abaddon, whose Greek name is Apollyon. It means "destroyer" (Rev. 9:11). Paul said the Jews were destroyed by this spirit. In other words, when we are complaining or unthankful, we open the door to the destroyer, Abaddon, the demon king over the abyss of hell! In the Presence of God Multitudes in our nation have become specialists in the "science of misery." They are experts -- moral accountants who can, in a moment, tally all the wrongs society has ever done to them or their group. I have never talked with one of these people who was happy, blessed or content about anything. They expect an imperfect world to treat them perfectly. Truly, there are people in this wounded country of ours who need special attention. However, most of us simply need to repent of ingratitude, for it is ingratitude itself that is keeping wounds alive! We simply need to forgive the wrongs of the past and become thankful for what we have in the present. The moment we become grateful, we actually begin to ascend spiritually into the presence of God. The psalmist wrote, "Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful singing. . . . Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, bless His name. For the Lord is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations" (Psalm 100:2, 4-5). It does not matter what your circumstances are; the instant you begin to thank God, even though your situation has not changed, you begin to change. The key that unlocks the gates of heaven is a thankful heart. Entrance into the courts of God comes as you simply begin to praise the Lord.

Sarkis turned around and began to beat his forehead very gently against the wall. “The great god is punishing me,” he said softly, “for my crimes. I cannot go to his hell, and so he has sent a woman to torment me.

Sometimes I think that God is punishing me. For what we did together. Sometimes I think that my life is a punishment for wanting. And the wanting is a punishment, too.

Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!

What are you? Weak? Don’t tell me you want me to spare this pathetic animal when it wouldn’t show you any such mercy. Believe me, it’s better to take the head off a cobra before the cobra strikes you. (Xypher) A cobra can’t help what it is. Why should you punish it because it’s doing what the gods created it to do? (Kat)

O gods, \ If any gods will listen, I deserve \ Punishment surely, I do not refuse it, \ But lest, in living, I offend the living, Offend the dead in death, drive me away \ From either realm, change me somehow, refuse me \ Both life and death! -- Myrrha, before being transformed into a tree

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

Why should I give up revenge? On behalf of what? Moral principles? And what of the higher order of things, in which evil deeds are punished? For you, a philosopher and ethicist, an act of revenge is bad, disgraceful, unethical and illegal. But I ask: where is the punishment for evil? Who has it and grants access? The Gods, in which you do not believe? The great demiurge-creator, which you decided to replace the gods with? Or maybe the law? [...] I know what evil is afraid of. Not your ethics, Vysogota, not your preaching or moral treaties on the life of dignity. Evil is afraid of pain, mutilation, suffering and at the end of the day, death! The dog howls when it is badly wounded! Writhing on the ground and growls, watching the blood flow from its veins and arteries, seeing the bone that sticks out from a stump, watching its guts escape its open belly, feeling the cold as death is about to take them. Then and only then will evil begin to beg, 'Have mercy! I regret my sins! I'll be good, I swear! Just save me, do not let me waste away!'. Yes, hermit. That is the way to fight evil! When evil wants to harm you, inflict pain - anticipate them, it's best if evil does not expect it. But if you fail to prevent evil, if you have been hurt by evil, then avenge him! It is best when they have already forgotten, when they feel safe. Then pay them in double. In triple. An eye for an eye? No! Both eyes for an eye! A tooth for a tooth? No! All their teeth for a tooth! Repay evil! Make it wail in pain, howling until their eyes pop from their sockets. And then, you can look under your feet and boldly declare that what is there cannot endanger anyone, cannot hurt anyone. How can someone be a danger, when they have no eyes? How can someone hurt when they have no hands? They can only wait until they bleed to death.

Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I’m talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what’s going on.

Next, the secretary advised me to take a seat while she notified the headmaster of my arrival. During those dreadful moments I did everything I could to remain calm. Nervously, I kept patting my foot to the floor and heard each and every tap. Suddenly, shouts of extreme havoc rung out just like the other times! “Oh God no! Jesus, please help me Lawd! I got you, Sir, I got you,” were screams filling the airwaves. The door opened and a battered female raced rightpast me with her hands covering her face. She kept mumbling phrases that shouldn’t be repeated by innocent lips. I couldn’t believe those disgusting words coming out of her baby-sized mouth. Then damn, another nightmare was possibly moments away. I needed an out and fast. Fearing for my life, I formulated my plan of action. Right before Principal Shellshock steadies his paddle, I was going to blow out all the gas I reserved in my little butt. I was never a fan of the fart game, but I was scheming like a veteran. That’s all I had, and it was my “A game.” My intentions were to rip a good hard one that opens my belt, ruffles my pants, and sends my new shoes flyingacross the room. Then all options would be left to the principal. He could chance tearing into me and losing a lung or take cover and let me go. Punishing me will become a hazard to his health. For the moment, I felt really good about that notion. I didn’t have much else to cling to, but I was dangerously packing breakfast from Aunt Kathy. Yes, I was sure my stink bomb defense would win that day. According to past reports, I would be the first and only kid at Mitchell Memorial to get on the scoreboard against the headmaster. Make that, Hal “1” and Principal Shell Shock “0.

He leant his two elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands and remained rapt in dumb meditation. On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely 'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!' 'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.' 'No, God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.

But this isn't their God, she decided. It's my God. This is a God I have found through sacrificing my own life, through my flesh being cut, my skin ripped off, my blood sucked away, my nails torn, all my time and hopes and memories being stolen from me. This is not a God with a form. No white clothes, no long beard. This god has no doctrine, no scripture, no precepts. No reward, no punishment. This God doesn't give, and doesn't take away. There is no heaven up in the sky, no hell down below. When it's hot, and when it's cold, God is simply there.

Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.

Was God punishing me? Why? What was I guilty of- except falling in love?

Jace, you don’t have to—” “I was trying to go…somewhere,” Jace said. “But I kept getting pulled back here. I couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t stop thinking. About the first time I ever saw you, and how after that I couldn’t forget you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t stop myself. I forced Hodge to let me be the one who came to find you and bring you back to the Institute. And even back then, in that stupid coffee shop, when I saw you sitting on that couch with Simon, even then that felt wrong to me—I should have been the one sitting with you. The one who made you laugh like that. I couldn’t get rid of that feeling. That it should have been me. And the more I knew you, the more I felt it—it had never been like that for me before. I’d always wanted a girl and then gotten to know her and not wanted her anymore, but with you the feeling just got stronger and stronger until that night when you showed up at Renwick’s and I knew. “And then to find out that the reason I felt like that—like you were some part of me I’d lost and never even knew I was missing until I saw you again—that the reason was that you were my sister, it felt like some sort of cosmic joke. Like God was spitting on me. I don’t even know for what—for thinking that I could actually get to have you, that I would deserve something like that, to be that happy. I couldn’t imagine what it was I’d done that I was being punished for—” “If you’re being punished,” Clary said, “then so am I.

Because you’re mine.” His teeth scored my neck. “You wear my ring. You’ve come on my face and hand. You live in my head all the fucking time, even if I don’t want you to...” His palm slid to my hip, where his fingers dug grooves into my skin. “And God, I want to punish you for driving me so damn crazy. Every. Single. Day.

The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church. Wherever the Bible and sword are in partnership, man is a slave. All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy -- making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment. It strikes me that God might write a book that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that a real God could produce a work that would excite the admiration of mankind.

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood.

Why, the angel asked, have you done this? Why does God divine punish and divine hurt, divine ache? There is a wound, shaped like God, in me. If there is any mercy in you, why did you create me, only to cast me out?

I swear to shit; god wanted to punish me and used my cock to do it.

Today, God, help me to know that it is okay to allow myself to be human. Help me not to feel guilty or punish myself when I need to “fall apart.

And now,' said the stranger, 'farewell, goodness, humanity, gratitude... Farewell all those feelings that nourish and illuminate the heart! I have taken the place of Providence to reward the good; now let the avenging God make way for me to punish the wrongdoer!

I froze. It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt. It was not a ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing. It was not a loathing of death that froze me. I had taught myself to think of death as a friend. It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair. It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction.

God punishing people for being good. God loving some people more than others. God asking fathers to kill their kids as proof of their faith. God giving kings special powers so they can slaughter entire nations. God not jumping in when His own kid get murdered. That's some crazy shit If that's the God they want me to believe in, no thank you. Ship me off to Hell right now so I can toss back a cold one with the zillion other people God never tortured with His infinite kindness.

Mysteriously, God in his providence must make use of our tragedies to remind our fallen human nature of his presence and his love, of the constancy of his concern and care for us. It is not vindictiveness on his part; he does not send us tragedies to punish us for having so long forgotten him. The failing is on our part.

That's very noble of you, cautionary tales of hubris notwithstanding.' 'Hah! Please. Find me a more universally REWARDED quality than hubris. Go on, I'll wait. The word is just ancient Greek for "uppity," as far as I'm concerned. Hubris isn't something that destroys you, it's something you are PUNISHED for. By the GODS. Well, I've never met a god, just powerful human beings with a lot to gain by keeping people scared. So fuck hubris! Punch the sun, baby!

Oh God, I'm sorry I bring trouble on people. I don't mean to, you know that, you know that. And don't punish me by taking Ned. Keep him safe that's all I ask. That's all I'll ever ask again, just keep him safe.

Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.

When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished me again for my wicked persistence. Then, as I said, everyone was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my fairy-tale books were taken away from me for a time - because I was too 'imaginative'. Eh! Yes, they did that! My father belonged to the old school.... And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to my pillow - my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears. And I added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one heartfelt request: 'Please God I may dream of the garden. O! take me back to my garden.

What a strange world this was, that I could come here to lose everything about myself, and instead lose everything but me. It was possible that I’d thrown one too many Molotov cocktails over God’s fence. It would be, after all, a divinely ironic punishment to watch me learn to care and then destroy the things I cared about.

It was not the sorrowful, lovely piece she had once played for Dorian, and it was not the light, dancing melodies she'd played for sport; it was not the complex and clever pieces she had played for Nehemia and Chaol. This piece was a celebration—a reaffirmation of life, of glory, of the pain and beauty in breathing. Perhaps that was why she'd gone to hear it performed every year, after so much killing and torture and punishment: as a reminder of that she was, of what she struggled to keep. Up and up it built, the sound breaking from the pianoforte like the heart-song of a god, until Rowan drifted over to stand beside the instrument, until she whispered to him, “Now,” and the crescendo shattered into the world, note after note after note. The music crashed around them, roaring through the emptiness of the theater. The hollow silence that had been inside her for so many months now overflowed with sound. She brought the piece home to its final explosive, triumphant chord. When she looked up, panting slightly, Rowan's eyes were lined with silver, his throat bobbing. Somehow, after all this time, her warrior-prince still managed to surprise her. He seemed to struggle for words, but he finally breathed, “Show me—show me how you did that.” So she obliged him.

The nymphs remained. When they finished their terms of service, others arrived to take their place. Sometimes there were four, sometimes six or seven. They trembled when I passed, ducking and calling me mistress, but it meant nothing. I had been put in my place. At a word and a whim from my father all my vaunted power blew away. Not even my father: any river-god had the right to fill my island, and I could not stop him. The nymphs wafted around me. Their smothered laughter drifted down the halls. At least, I told myself, it was not their brothers, who would have bragged and fought and hunted down my wolves. But of course that was never a real danger. Sons were not punished.

I will find you," he whispered in my ear. "I promise. If I must endure two hundred years of purgatory, two hundred years without you--then that is my punishment,which I have earned for my crimes. For I have lied, and killed, and stolen; betrayed and broken trust. But there is one thing that shall lie in the balance. When I shall stand before God, I shall have one thing to say, to weigh against the rest." His voice dropped, nearly to a whisper, and his arms tightened around me. "Lord, ye gave me a rare woman, and God! I loved her well.

When Allah makes us aware of a sin we committed, He is not punishing us, but rather inviting us toward His presence. In this way, the moment we are drawn to sincere repentance, we are in effect unveiling the forgiveness that Allah has already written for us to experience. Someone asked the great eighth-century mystic Rabia Al-Adawiyya, “I have sinned much; if I repent, will Allah forgive me?” She profoundly replied, “It is the opposite; if Allah forgives you, you are capable of repentance.

I cannot get into this swamp or I will never get out; and if I start crying again I'll remember that I have no one to love, and if anyone treats me like that again, I'll kill him. Only I mustn't because they'll punish me.

When you come home, darling, I shant have your letters, but I shall have yourself, which is more-- oh more, and better, than I can even think! I sit here with my little whip, cracking the time away, 'till not an hour is left of it- then you are here! And joy is here-- joy now and forevermore! Tis only a few days, Susie, it will soon go away, yet I say, "go now, this very moment, for I need her- I must have her, oh, give her to me!" Sometimes when I do feel so, I think it may be wrong, and that God will punish me by taking you away; for He is very kind to let me write to you, and to give me your sweet letters, but my heart wants more.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are: but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril. And I warn you so that if God punish you for it, I shall have done my duty in telling you.

After all, it's not my fault. I can't force myself to believe. If there is a God after all and he punishes me because I honestly don't believe in Him I can't help it.

Don Juan: I feel like God is punishing me and I don't know what for. Nurse 2: God's not punishing you. Life is Hell for all of us. You're not special.

Even in faith, it is not easy for me to say to God, I am sorry for wanting my enemies to be destroyed and punished before my eyes. It is dishonest to say that it is easy to forgive our enemies, even to ask forgiveness for longing for revenge.

He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong. And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It’s not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action. It’s as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It’s slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can’t stand one more second without him. It’s on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I’m alive again. It’s punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn’t just die for him—I’d kill for him, too. Like I did tonight.

When I was eight years old,” the priest-king confessed, “I wanted to be a god.” The holy man looked around the ragged tent. “Perhaps this is my punishment, but between you and me, I do not believe that the desires of young boys cause catastrophic events. The actions of humans do.

Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words.

Do I repine, is it all murmuring, or am I sad and lone, and cannot, cannot help it? Sometimes when I do feel so, I think it may be wrong, and that God will punish me by taking you away; for he is very kind to let me write to you, and to give me your sweet letters, but my heart wants more.

Human nature, gentleman. It is original sin that leads men to misfortune, every time. I am a speculator in the market, gentlemen, and that is part of God's plan. Men only learn through suffering. So I punish human weakness, and God rewards me.

He was without any comforts of God — no feeling that God loved him — no feeling that God pitied him — no feeling that God supported him. God was his sun before — now that sun became all darkness… He was without God — he was as if he had no God. All that God had been to him before was taken from him now. He was Godless — deprived of his God. He had the feeling of the condemned, when the Judge says: “Depart from me, ye cursed,” “who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” He felt that God said the same to him. Ah! This is the hell which Christ suffered. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable… He was forsaken in the [place] of sinners. If you close with him as your surety, you will never be forsaken… “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [The answer?] For me — for me.

Jesus' sacrifice wasn't just a nice plan to get us out of trouble. His punishment replaced ours! Because God so loved the world, Christ paid the debt we owed.

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man's actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes and the world would shrink from me instead.

I also saw that theologically speaking the whole idea of a smacking is not congruent with the teaching revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. God sent His Son into the world to save the world so they would not have to suffer for their own sins, but parents today punish their children and make them undergo the horrors of punishment for even the most minor of infractions. The idea of mercy is seemingly not applied at all. When parents' sin, they ask God to forgive them, repent and know they are forgiven. When children sin, they are judged, tried, condemned and punished.

In belief in what? In love with what? In hope for what?—There’s no doubt that these weak people—at some time or another they also want to be the strong people, some day their "kingdom" is to arrive—they call it simply "the kingdom of God" as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! Only to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death—in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can also win eternal recompense in the "kingdom of God" for that earthly life "in faith, in love, in hope." Recompense for what? Recompense through what? In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity inspiring terror, he set that inscription over the gateway into his hell:"Eternal love also created me." Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its "eternal blessedness" it would, in any event, be more fitting to let the inscription stand "Eternal hate also created me"—provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie! For what is the bliss of that paradise? Perhaps we might have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate in such matters, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: "In the kingdom of heaven" he says as gently as a lamb, "the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.

The gods were not content to punish me with eternal torture. They took out their wrath upon my two favourite sons - Vali and Narvi. They turned Vali into a wolf and watched in amusement as he disemboweled his brother Narvi. Then they shot and gutted the wolf. The gods took my innocent sons' own entrails..." Loki's voice cracked with grief. "Well, Magnus Chase, let's just say I was not bound with ropes.

I then reflected, that as God, who was not only righteous but omnipotent, had thought fit thus to punish and afflict me, so He was able to deliver me: that if He did not think fit to do so, it was my unquestioned duty to resign myself absolutely and entirely to His will; and, on the other hand, it was my duty also to hope in Him, pray to Him, and quietly to attend to the dictates and directions of His daily providence.

Let us therefore learn while there is yet time, let us learn to do good. Let us raise our eyes to Heaven for the sake of our honor, for the very love of virtue, or, to speak wisely, for the love and praise of God Almighty, who is the infallible witness of our deeds and the just judge of our faults. As for me, I truly believe I am right, since there is nothing so contrary to a generous and loving God as tyranny---I believe He has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices

Because you’re mine.” His teeth scored my neck. “You wear my ring. You’ve come on my face and hand. You live in my head all the fucking time, even if I don’t want you to…” His palm slid to my hip, where his fingers dug grooves into my skin. “And God, I want to punish you for driving me so damn crazy. Every. Single. Day.

God…” I choked on the word. “I know we haven’t talked much in the past few years. Hell, I told you I hated you when Tye took his own life.” I cursed again and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t even care about myself anymore, just promise me she’ll be okay. If I don’t make it… if you take me, just let Kiersten be okay. She can’t go down that road — I don’t care if you have to punish me, God. If she’s going to suffer, give me her pain instead. If her heart’s going to break, break mine for hers. Please, God… please.” The drugs Angela had given me started to kick in, I fell into a dreamless sleep with that prayer repeating over and over again in my head.

The strange idea of having to love God so that He does not punish me for my rebelliousness and disappointment, but instead rewards me with the love that forgives all, becomes just as much the expression of our childish dependency and insecurity as the assumption that, like our parents, God is in desperate need of our love. But is this not a completely grotesque idea? A higher being dependent on inauthentic feelings dictated by morality is strongly reminiscent of the insecurity displayed by our frustrated and disoriented parents. Such a being can be called God only by people who have never questioned their own parents or thought about their dependency on them.

Heaven is boring. Didn't you see, in that picture book back when we used to go to school? It's just plain and white and there is not even any color and it's too orderly. Like there will be crazy prefects telling you all the time: Do thus, don't do that, where are your shoes, tuck in your shirt, shhh, God doesn't like it and will punish you, keep your voice low you'll wake the angels, go and wash, you are dirty, Bastard says. Me, when I die I want to go where there's lots of food and music and a party that never ends and we're singing that Jobho song, Godknows says.

Well… Five… I just wanted to say rest in peace. To me you are a dead man… I am ashamed that I am related to you. I am ashamed that we have the same bloodline, it is obvious that yours contains a defect in the structure. I’m going to endure the punishment for this gun just because I made the mistake of hanging with a lame. But I swear to God on everything I ever loved… you better change your last fucking name as soon as possible. You will never in your life again be referred to as Powers! Change that shit, or I will kill you with my bare hands the first chance I get. Disconnect yourself bitch!

Oh, gods, gods, why do you punish me? . . . Yes, no doubt, this is it, this is it again, the invincible, terrible illness . . . hemicrania, when half of the head aches . . . there’s no remedy for it, no escape . . . I’ll try not to move my head . . .

And now," said the unknown, "farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been heaven's substitute to recompense the good--now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!

The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. 'Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock....Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.' The crowd's shout 'Crucify him!' (Mk 15:14) anticipated the white mob's shout 'Lynch him!' Jesus' agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Mk 15:34), was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose's awful scream as he drew his last breath, 'Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.' In each case it was a cruel, agonizing, and contemptible death.

I had once thought that I came from a line of Gods, and I had punished myself for failing to be Godlike. But we were not Gods, and I was not the avatar for our family’s unraveling. I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief, and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.

When someone passes ... people always ask, 'Why would God take them?' A better question would be 'Why did God give them to us?' What did we do to deserve their love, their joy, the sweet moments we shared? ... Those moments are a gift. But their end is not a punishment ... My plans for you are not defined by this world ... Beginnings and endings are earthly ideas. I go on. And because I go on, you go on with me. Feeling loss is part of why you are on Earth. Through it, you appreciate the brief gift of human existence, and you learn to cherish the world I created for you. But the human form is not permanent. It was never meant to be. That gift belongs to the soul.

And at half past nine in the evening at that restaurant table in Portugal,” Mary continued, “someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It’s full of treasures and strangeness and mystery and joy. I thought, Will anyone be better off if I go straight back to the hotel and say my prayers and confess to the priest and promise never to fall into temptation again? Will anyone be the better for making me miserable? “And the answer came back—no. No one will. There’s no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there never had been a God at all. Either way I felt free and lonely and I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I’d even swallowed it. A taste—a memory—a landslide...

Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in Him. Instead i felt that God chose to exclude me from His world. Since i was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, i thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought i was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had i done, i asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with Him.

For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.' 'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a mans actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes and the world would shrink from me instead.

[I]f my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4: 18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be “cast out” like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation! Fear-based faith (a paradox) is the ultimate deception. We need to examine closely whether the devil has been hiding in plain sight - squatting within the very message that we’ve preached. Parasite and deceiver that he is, he found the ultimate host to help disseminate his terror campaign - the Church! If our faith message begins in fear, as it did for many evangelicals like me, it’s in trouble. I am reminded of Jesus’ warning, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are” (Matt 23:15). The negation of negation. Does preaching on hell produce converts? Oh yes! But if in the process it also saddles someone with fear of punishment, then it has simultaneously reproduced a “son of hell.

Look, back in the old days, ravens used to be gentle and white, like doves, okay? But they were terrible gossips. One time I was dating this girl, Koronis. The ravens found out she was cheating on me, and they told me about it. I was so angry, I got Artemis to kill Koronis for me. Then I punished the ravens for being tattletales by turning them black.” Reyna stared at me like she was contemplating another kick to my nose. “That story is messed up on so many levels.” “Just wrong,” Meg agreed. “You had your sister kill a girl who was cheating on you?” “Well, I—” “Then you punished the birds that told you about it,” Reyna added, “by turning them black, as if black was bad and white was good?” “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound right,” I protested. “It’s just what happened when my curse scorched them. It also made them nasty-tempered flesh-eaters.” “Oh, that’s much better,” Reyna snarled. “If we let the birds eat you,” Meg asked, “will they leave Reyna and me alone?” “I—What?” I worried that Meg might not be kidding. Her facial expression did not say kidding. It said serious about the birds eating you. “Listen, I was angry! Yes, I took it out on the birds, but after a few centuries I cooled down. I apologized. By then, they kind of liked being nasty-tempered flesh-eaters. As for Koronis—I mean, at least I saved the child she was pregnant with when Artemis killed her. He became Asclepius, god of medicine!” “Your girlfriend was pregnant when you had her killed?” Reyna launched another kick at my face. I managed to dodge it, since I’d had a lot of practice cowering, but it hurt to know that this time she hadn’t been aiming at an incoming raven. Oh, no. She wanted to knock my teeth in. “You suck,” Meg agreed.

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one's head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me believe in the existence of heaven.

My older cousins told me that white people used to be brown, like us, until they did something to anger God. He turned them into fleshless, pale shells as punishment. “Look at how their skin reddens in the sun. Look at how it burns. Look at how the sweat pours down their faces and flattens their hair.” They used my fear to convince me to steal coconut sweets and biscuits from the market—threatening me with “God said to listen, or do you want to become one of the white people?

Baali scoffed, ‘I don’t believe in God. No creature except man believes in God, Tara. The animals and birds believe in the power of their limbs, in the speed of their feet, in the strength of their wings. No God has punished any animal for not worshiping him or her. I’m Vanara, an animal and no God—if he exists—will punish me for being me, Tara.

We all kind of hate each other in this minute, me most of all because I taught them the word bitch and I yell so they yell and Edward missed another brawl so they'll like him more today and he's better anyway and whatever lust for combat my daughters have comes straight from me and I thought I was going to be a good mom like Michelle Constable or Tammy Stedman and I'm not and according to a parenting blog I saw, yelling is as bad as corporal punishment and particularly destructive to self-esteem so oh my God, what am I doing?

And now," said the unknown, "farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been heaven's substitute to recompense the good — now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!" At these words he gave a signal, and, as if only awaiting this signal, the yacht instantly put out to sea.

I've put myself in the place of Providence to reward the good ones... and now let the god of vengeance grant me it's place to punish the wicked!

Leave me alone then, and cease your kindness. I may be ungrateful, I may be base, only let me be. For God's sake, do so! Go! Go! Go!

stood at the window at four a.m. and told myself: You, too, have a core of precious salt. The human core of inner salt, like this salt of Cardona, comes from the deepest part. Human salt, like this salt, is everlasting. Mine it, use it, and it will not deplete. In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random. This truth is stored in their salt. Some have access. Others don’t. A gift or a curse, that my salt is right here, with me all the time? A gift. I’d rather be driven by immutable truths than the winds of some opinion, whose real function is to underscore a person’s social position in a group, a belief without depth. These boys in the library would profess to share beliefs.

God, I give this situation to You. I release my evidence of all the reasons they were so wrong. I release my need to see this person punished. I release my need for an apology. I release my need for this to feel fair. I release my need for You to declare me right and them wrong. Show me what I need to learn from all of this. And then give me Your peace in place of my anger.

Although, as God, he needed no glorification, as man, he did bring about the glorification of his human body through his final suffering. He rose because He died; he was glorified because he suffered. He could have had the glory and the peace and the unending joy in his body at any time, because he was God and he had a right to it. But the fact remains that he had none of these things until after he suffered. We have many, many examples from the life of Christ, but there is none greater than his suffering. He taught you and me how to live with it. If he cried, cannot we? If he showed hurt in his life, cannot we? If he begged to be relieved, cannot we? If he even complained to God, will God punish us if, in the midst of our hurt or pain, we complain to him, Our Father?

In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved—in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won’t see it'…Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw—a disastrous misinterpretation of God’s love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents’ affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents’ love and experience love as an enemy—which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy… Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love...Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could sooner cease to shine than God cease to be God...The lovelessness of the damned blinds them to the light of glory in which they stand, the glory of God’s fire. God is in the fire that to them is Hell. God is in Hell ('If I make my bed in Hell, Thou art there' [Ps 139:8]) but the damned do not know Him.

To me, many of what seemed to be Bible contradictions only pointed to the grace of Christ. It is not so much a rule book on how to be holy as it is a prophecy of the One who can make you holy. In this, I see God as the least bigoted of all in existence: While men always, in their hearts, delight in vengeance for being wronged, God is the only Being who wants to free you from the penalty of His own laws.

Nico unsheathed his sword. “You know the Underworld? Would you like me to arrange a visit?” Bryce laughed. His front teeth were two different shades of yellow. “Do you think you can frighten me? I’m a descendant of Orcus, the god of broken vows and eternal punishment. I’ve heard the screams in the Fields of Punishment firsthand. They’re music to my ears. Soon, I’ll be adding one more damned soul to the chorus.

It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt It was not a ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing. It was not a loathing of death that froze me. I had taught myself to think of death as a friend. It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well took for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair. It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.

God ... had not only punished me less than my iniquity had deserved, but had so plentifully provided for me - this gave me great hopes that my repentance was accepted, and that God yet had mercy in store for me.

The belief of God is not a matter of common sense, or logic, or argument, but of feeling. It is as impossible to prove the existence of God as to disprove it. I do not believe in God. I see no need of such an idea. It is incredible to me that there should be an after-life. I find the notion of future punishment outrageous and of future reward extravagant. I am convinced that when I die, I shall cease entirely to live; I shall return to the earth I came from. Yet I can imagine that at some future date I may believe in God; but it will be as now, when I don't believe in Him, not a matter of reasoning or of observation, but only of feeling.

Let’s say that you and I are close friends, but after an argument one night, you stole my car and drove it into a lake. This is a serious crime with a serious penalty—let’s say $10,000 in damages and three years spent in prison. Now imagine you came to me and apologized, expressing sincere regret and grief over your actions. What if I responded by telling you I could forgive you, but only if my daughter took your place in prison and paid the fine on your behalf, because I am a merciful and just friend. My mercy compels me to forgive you, but my justice demands that the crime be punished. This is the exact picture that most Christians paint of God: a God who offers no choice but to demand punishment for sins. But if a good friend of mine wrecked my car, I could simply forgive that friend without anyone’s being punished. I’m a nice guy but certainly not the embodiment of perfect love—so why can I forgive with no strings attached but God can’t?

What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?

And now,” said the unknown, “farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been heaven’s substitute to recompense the good—now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!

Oh, please.” Loki stepped back, examining me with a look of disappointment. “It’s only a matter of degree. So I killed a god. Big deal! He went to Niflheim and became an honored guest in my daughter’s palace. And my punishment? You want to know my punishment?” “You were tied on a stone slab,” I said. “With poison from a snake dripping on your face. I know.” “Do you?” Loki pulled back his cuffs, showing me the raw scars on his wrists. “The gods were not content to punish me with eternal torture. They took out their wrath upon my two favorite sons–Vali and Narvi. They turned Vali into a wolf and watched with amusement while he disemboweled his brother Narvi. Then they shot and gutted the wolf. The gods took my innocent sons’ own entrails…” Loki’s voice cracked with grief. “Well, Magnus Chase, let’s just say I was not bound with ropes.” Something in my chest curled up and died–possibly my hope that there was any kind of justice in the universe. “Gods.” Loki nodded. “Yes, Magnus. The gods. Think about that when you meet Thor.” “I’m meeting Thor?” “I’m afraid so. The gods don’t even pretend to deal in good and evil, Magnus. It’s not the Aesir way. Might makes right. So tell me… do you really want to charge into battle on their behalf?

I had never before spent a night with a woman, had someone lying by my side in the quietness of the dark, hearing her breath and feeling her warmth beside me. It is a sin, and it is a crime. I say it frankly, for I have been taught so all my life, and only madmen have said otherwise. The Bible says it, the fathers of the church have said it, the prelates now repeat it without end, and all the statues of the land prescribe punishment for what we did that night. Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. It must be so, for the Bible speaks only God’s truth. I sinned against the law, against God’s word reported, I abused my family and exposed them even more to risk of public shame, I again risked permanent exclusion from those rooms and books which were my delight and my whole occupation; yet in all the years that have passed since I have regretted only one thing: that it was but a passing moment, never repeated, for I have never been closer to God, nor felt His love and goodness more.

good way is to study Bible characters—take them right from the cradle to the grave. You find that skeptics often take one particular part of a man’s life—say, of the life of Jacob or of David—and judge the whole by that. They say these men were queer saints; and yet God did not punish them. If you go right through these men’s lives you will find that God did punish them, according to the sins they committed. A lady once said to me that she had trouble in reading the Bible, that she seemed to not feel the interest she ought. If you don’t keep up your interest in one way, try another. Never think you have to read the Bible by courses. PROPER NAMES. Another interesting study is the meaning of proper names. I need hardly remark that every name in the Bible, especially Hebrew names,

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find me, unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

New Rule: Death isn’t always sad. This week, the Reverend Jerry Falwell died, and millions of Americans asked, “Why? Why, God? Why…didn’t you take Pat Robertson with him?” I don’t want to say Jerry was disliked by the gay community, but tonight in New York City, at exactly eight o’clock, Broadway theaters along the Great White Way turned their lights up for two minutes. I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I think we can make an exception, because speaking ill of the dead was kind of Jerry Falwell’s hobby. He’s the guy who said AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality and that 9/11 was brought on by pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, and the ACLU—or, as I like to call them, my studio audience. It was surreal watching people on the news praise Falwell, followed by a clip package of what he actually said—things like: "Homosexuals are part of a vile and satanic system that will be utterly annihilated." "If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being." "Feminists just need a man in the house." "There is no separation of church and state." And, of course, everyone’s favorite: "The purple Teletubby is gay." Jerry Falwell found out you could launder your hate through the cover of “God’s will”—he didn’t hate gays, God does. All Falwell’s power came from name-dropping God, and gay people should steal that trick. Don’t say you want something because it’s your right as a human being—say you want it because it’s your religion. Gay men have been going at things backward. Forget civil right, and just make gayness a religion. I mean, you’re kneeling anyway. And it’s easy to start a religion. Watch, I’ll do it for you. I had a vision last night. The Blessed Virgin Mary came to me—I don’t know how she got past the guards—and she told me it’s time to take the high ground from the Seventh-day Adventists and give it to the twenty-four-hour party people. And that what happens in the confessional stays in the confessional. Gay men, don’t say you’re life partners. Say you’re a nunnery of two. “We weren’t having sex,officer. I was performing a very private mass.Here in my car. I was letting my rod and my staff comfort him.” One can only hope that as Jerry Falwell now approaches the pearly gates, he is met there by God Himself, wearing a Fire Island muscle shirt and nut-hugger shorts, saying to Jerry in a mighty lisp, “I’m not talking to you.

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. Contrary

Then, while the other members of my family were waiting in the living room, my mom pulled me aside at the top of the stairs. "Before it gets too crazy, I need to tell you something," she said... "Elizabeth, what this man has done is terrible. There aren't any words that are strong enough to describe how wicked and evil he is! He has taken nine months of your life that you will never get back again. But the best punishment you could ever give him is to be happy. To move forward with your life. To do exactly what you want. Because, yes, this will probably go to trial and some kind of sentencing will be given to him and that wicked woman. But even if that's true, you may never feel like justice has been served or that true restitution has been made. "But you don't need to worry about that. At the end of the day, God is our ultimate judge. He will make up to you every pain and loss that you have suffered. And if it turns out that these wicked people are not punished here on Earth, it doesn't matter. His punishments are just. You don't ever have to worry. You don't ever have to even think about them again. ... “You be happy, Elizabeth. Just be happy. If you go and feel sorry for yourself, or if you dwell on what has happened, if you hold on to your pain, that is allowing him to steal more of your life away. So don't you do that! Don't you let him! There is no way he deserves that. Not one more second of your life. You keep every second for yourself. You keep them and be happy. God will take care of the rest.” It's been ten years since my mother said those words. The years have proved she was right.

William Ernest Henley Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.

And where does this leave God? God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered. Show me the moral logic in it. You can't. There is none. Only the devil operates with any reason, promising to punish those who would make earth itself Hell for those who dare to love and feel.

The Bible teaches about the hand of the heavenly Father not only that it provides but also that it punishes. And his hand is upon his children. If I Iay my hands on somebody else’s child I’ll either have them at my front door or the policeman with them. I must not lay my hand in punishment on someone else’s child, but on my own child I could. That is why whom the Lord loves he chastises or chastens.  Indeed, says the New Testament, if you never feel the hand of God upon you in punishment you are a bastard, you are not a son of God; you are not his true son.

For those willing to keep heaving themselves toward the light, things can change. What has been lost gradually becomes less important than what is to be found. Curiosity pokes its green head up through the asphalt of grief, and fear of the unknown takes on an element of wonder as the disillusioned turn away from the God who was supposed to be in order to seek the God who is. Every letdown becomes a lesson and a lure. Did God fail to come when I called? Then perhaps God is not a minion. So who is God? Did God fail to punish my adversary? Then perhaps God is not a policeman. So who is God? Did God fail to make everything turn out all right? Then perhaps God is not a fixer. So who is God? Over and over, my disappointments draw me deeper into the mystery of God’s being and doing. Every time God declines to meet my expectations, another of my idols is exposed.

She drove down the street, talking to herself furiously. I loved them too much. God is punishing me for loving people the way I should love God. Something was wrong there, too, that God would punish her, but she could not be bothered to think it through, because she was tired of God. Demand, demand, demand, and never any good to come of it except loneliness and despair, it was all--Enough. She'd had enough of all this. She would have revenge. She would go to movies by herself again, and go out for dinner wherever she wanted, and she would have a tidy house and a little job.

I was created a warrior, meant to guard the king of gods. For many years, I served him well, helping to keep him in power, protecting him even from his own family. But he did not think me strong enough to guard his most precious possession, a box formed from the bones of the dead goddess of oppression. No, he commanded a woman to do it. She was known as the greatest female warrior, true, but my pride was stung.” Thankfully, Ashlyn remained relaxed. “Thinking to prove a mistake had been made, I helped release the demons inside upon the world. And in punishment, I was bonded to one.

And don’t forget, the Son of God himself spent his entire life on earth far from the mountaintop. . . . He was persecuted and punished by a “mountain king” named Pilate and executed next to a thief. When he rose, he appeared not to Caesar but to a small band of ordinary men and women who would become martyrs, not rulers. Christ prevailed . . . not by fighting from the commanding power of the heights, but by fighting from “utterly different terrain.” When scripture calls Christians to “take up your cross and follow me,” it’s declaring . . . that “our mountain is Golgotha”—the dusty Israeli hill where Christ was crucified.

Why don’t you ask them to imagine what sort of Underworld punishment the gods would devise for the department’s four dead professors? Personally, I’d have the Furies tie them up while the shades of the women they murdered slowly skinned them alive to the sound of one of their own ritualistic drums. But that’s just me.

Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that’s what he has the Father say. “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” ... Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God... But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting “the gospel” is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God create, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that.

Religionists from pulpits and evangelical TV stations announced that this [AIDS] was all God’s punishment for the perverted vice of homosexuality, quite failing to explain why this vengeful deity had no interest in visiting plagues and agonized death upon child rapists, torturers, murderers, those who beat up old women for their pension money (or indeed those cheating, thieving, adulterous and hypocritical clerics and preachers who pop up on the news from time to time weeping their repentance), reserving this uniquely foul pestilence only for men who choose to go to bed with each other and addicts careless in the use of their syringes. What a strange divinity. Later he was to take his pleasure, as he still does, on horrifying numbers of women and very young girls raped in sub-Saharan Africa while transmitting his avenging wrath on the unborn children in their wombs. I should be interested to hear from the religious zealots why he is doing this and what kind of a kick he gets out of it.

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching oven me so long. Ya Allah show me some sign, some small mark of your favour, that I may find in myself the strength to cure my ills. O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to _thin air_, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing nothing, and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

Don’t suppose that I think you are right, Tom, or that I bow to your will. I despise the feelings you have shown in speaking to Philip – I detest your insulting unmanly allusions to his deformity. You have been reproaching people all your life – you have always been sure you yourself are right: it is because you have not a mind large enough to see that there is anything better than your own conduct and your own petty aims. […] I don’t want to defend myself –“ said Maggie, still with vehemence: “I know I have been wrong – often, continually. But yet, sometimes when I have done wrong, it has been because I have feeling that you would be the better for if you had them. If you were in fault ever – if you had done anything very wrong, I should be sorry for the pain it brought you – I should not want punishment to be heaped on you. But you have always enjoyed punishing me – you have always been hard and cruel to me – even when I was a little girl, and always loved you better that any one else in the world, you would let me go crying to bed without forgiving me. You have no pity – you have no sense of your own imperfections and your own sins. It is a sin to be hard – it is not fitting for a mortal – for a Christian. You are nothing but a Pharisee. You thank God for nothing but your own virtues – you think they are great enough to win you everything else. You have not even a vision of feelings by the side of which your shining virtues are mere darkness! […] You boast of your virtues as if they purchased you a right to be cruel and unmanly as you’ve been today. Don’t suppose I would give up Philip Wakem in obedience to you. The deformity you insult would make me cling to him and care for him the more.

and then cried for the first time, but it wasn’t a sorrowful crying. I was so awful angry that the Lord had let this happen, angry right down to the marrow of my bones. It made me even more afraid to feel that way. I had been taught, and I believed, that it was a sin to be angry with God. I was afraid that God would punish me for the way I felt.

Even with the questions and worries that flooded her, Lillian was overcome with sudden exhaustion. The waking nightmare had come to a precipitate end, and it seemed that for now there was nothing more she could do. She waited docilely, her cheek resting against the steady support of Marcus’s shoulder, only half hearing the conversation that ensued. “… have to find St. Vincent…” Marcus was saying. “No,” Simon Hunt said emphatically, “I’ll find St. Vincent. You take care of Miss Bowman.” “We need privacy.” “I believe there is a small room nearby— more of a vestibule, actually…” But Hunt’s voice trailed away, and Lillian became aware of a new, ferocious tension in Marcus’s body. With a lethal shift of his muscles, he turned to glance in the direction of the staircase. St. Vincent was descending, having entered the rented room from the other side of the inn and found it empty. Stopping midway down the stairs, St. Vincent took in the curious tableau before him… the clusters of bewildered onlookers, the affronted innkeeper… and the Earl of Westcliff, who stared at him with avid bloodlust. The entire inn fell silent during that chilling moment, so that Westcliff’s quiet snarl was clearly audible. “By God, I’m going to butcher you.” Dazedly Lillian murmured, “Marcus, wait—” She was shoved unceremoniously at Simon Hunt, who caught her reflexively as Marcus ran full-bore toward the stairs. Instead of skirting around the banister, Marcus vaulted the railings and landed on the steps like a cat. There was a blur of movement as St. Vincent attempted a strategic retreat, but Marcus flung himself upward, catching his legs and dragging him down. They grappled, cursed, and exchanged punishing blows, until St. Vincent aimed a kick at Marcus’s head. Rolling to avoid the blow of his heavy boot, Marcus was forced to release him temporarily. The viscount lurched up the stairs, and Marcus sprang after him. Soon they were both out of sight. A crowd of enthusiastic men followed, shouting advice, exchanging odds, and exclaiming in excitement over the spectacle of a pair of noblemen fighting like spurred roosters. White-faced, Lillian glanced at Simon Hunt, who wore a faint smile. “Aren’t you going to help him?” she demanded. “Oh no. Westcliff would never forgive me for interrupting. It’s his first tavern brawl.” Hunt’s gaze flickered over Lillian in friendly assessment. She swayed a little, and he placed a large hand on the center of her back and guided her to the nearby grouping of chairs. A cacophony of noise drifted from upstairs. There were heavy thudding sounds that caused the entire building to shake, followed by the noises of furniture breaking and glass shattering. “Now,” Hunt said, ignoring the tumult, “if I may have a look at that remaining handcuff, I may be able to do something about it.

I am in the native land of hypocrite sir! These men and women of principles; I loathe them. I can scorn at a man disdainfully and forget him. Man is filth, sir! he is dutibound to be filthy. While I believe women are chaste, these principles they confine themselves to make them indelicate and hateful. A beautiful woman sir! Stupefying beauty should not be sole possession of one rodent. God created beauty or maybe he did not, but in it's most primitive state, it belonged to everyman before these principles; these God forsaken principles plagued us. Do you believe in God sir? Oh you do! I can tell that by your expression. Sir! God is not of principles, if he were, world would be just. And I belive, no; actually i know God isn't of principles because He will punish me for years for just one glass; this one glass of wine, you bought me, whereas I deserve far lesser punishment. It is empty sir! I can see the bottom of the glass and depth of my wretchedness in this glass. Perhaps another time sir! I am drunk now, and I don't want to squander this temporal leave.

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God." From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good. In the Old Testament, they said. God is the judge -- but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison -- no everlasting fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead. In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal. The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." These are the words of "eternal love." No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror. All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ. This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God. While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

A woman is praying beside me. I would really like to be able to believe like that, I would like to be able to feel something when I pray but I don't. Maybe looking for God is just looking for something to be in awe of, something to tremble before, a standard to uphold. Perhaps religion is a way of punishing oneself, a manifestation of the shame built into the human experience.

To touch her, to have her, would be a gift from the universe—but the gods have never been all that generous with me. They prefer my abuse to my award. My torture to my treasure. I’m not sure what my penance is for, but it’s always been rather obvious that I am paying one. Not being able to have her, not being able to allow her to have me, will be the greatest punishment yet.

If you choose to believe in a God who somehow needs something—and has such hurt feelings if He doesn’t get it that He punishes those from whom He expected to receive it—then you choose to believe in a God much smaller than I. You truly are Children of a Lesser God. No, my children, please let Me assure you again, through this writing, that I am without needs. I require nothing.

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or in the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.

God the Son wishes to form Himself, and, so to speak, to incarnate Himself, every day by His dear Mother in His members, and He has said to her, In Israel hæreditare,—“Take Israel for your inheritance.” It is as if He had said, God the Father has given Me for an inheritance all the nations of the earth, all the men good and bad, predestinate and reprobate. The one I will lead with a rod of gold, and the others with a rod of iron. Of one I will be the Father and the Advocate, the Just Punisher of others, and the Judge of all. But as for you, My dear Mother,—you shall have for your heritage and possession only the predestinate, figured by Israel; and, as their good Mother, you shall bring them forth and maintain them; and, as their sovereign, you shall conduct them, govern and defend them.

The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman. This sentence strangely impressed me. How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God might choose more becoming expressions when he speaks of the fair sex. "The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman," I repeated to myself. What shall I do, so that He may punish me?

None of that matters right now. Don’t give it another thought. All that matters now is you and me. You know you are a mess. You are a sinner. Your entire existence has been built around you. Step in out of that storm. Let your heart crack open to Joy. I was punished so that you don’t have to be. I was arrested so you could go free. I was indicted so you could be exonerated. I was executed so you could be acquitted. And all of that is just the beginning of my love. That proved my love, but it’s not an endpoint; it’s only the doorway into my love. Humble yourself enough to receive it. Plunge your parched soul into the sea of my love. There you will find the rest and relief and embrace and friendship your heart longs for. The wraparound category of your life is not your performance but God’s love.

While Jason’s back was turned, Caligula wheeled about. He threw his spear, driving its point between Jason’s shoulder blades. Piper screamed. Jason stiffened, his blue eyes wide in shock. He slumped forward, wrapping his arms around Tempest’s neck. His lips moved, as if he was whispering something to his steed. Carry him away! I prayed, knowing that no god would listen. Please, just let Tempest get him to safety! Jason toppled from his steed. He hit the deck facedown, the spear still in his back, his gladius clattering from his hand. Incitatus trotted up to the fallen demigod. Arrows continued to rain around us. Caligula stared at me across the chasm—giving me the same displeased scowl my father used to before inflicting one of his punishments: Now look what you’ve made me do. “I warned you,” Caligula said. Then he glanced at the pandai above. “Leave Apollo alive. He’s no threat. But kill the girl.” Piper howled, shaking with impotent rage. I stepped in front of her and waited for death, wondering with cold detachment where the first arrow might strike. I watched as Caligula plucked out his spear, then drove it again into Jason’s back, removing any last hope that our friend might still be alive.

The topic of disinterested, non-calculating, and purposeless love for the sake of love is central to mysticism as such. To love God, not because of powerful institutions, or even because God commands it, but to do so in an act of unencumbered freedom, is the very source of mystical relation. To love God is all the reason there needs to be . . . The orthodoxies that have been handed down to us in the monotheistic religions called for obedience to the commanding God. They threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards - images of hell and heaven resting on that authority. In technologically advanced centers of the world, authoritarian religious systems are in sharp decline. Mystical perceptions and approaches to God, however, are entirely different: "God, if I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell. And if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting Beauty" (Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy). Mysticism may he regarded as the anti-authoritarian religion per se. In it, the commanding lord becomes the beloved; what is to come later becomes the now; and naked or even enlightened self-interest that is oriented by reward and punishment becomes mystical freedom.

The torches were fading, and the shadows lapped at us like dark water. 'Is it true that you refused to beg for pardon? And that you were not caught, but confessed to Zeus freely what you did?' 'It is.' 'Why?' His eyes were steady on mine. 'Perhaps you will tell me. Why would a god do such a thing?' I had no answer. It seemed to me madness to invite divine punishment, but I could not say that to him, not when I stood in his blood. 'Not every god need be the same,' he said. What I might have said in return, I do not know. A distant shout floated up the corridor. 'It is time for you to go now. Allecto does not like to leave me for long. Her cruelty springs fast as weeds and must any moment be cut again.' It was a strange way to put it, for he was the one who would be cut. But I liked it, as if his words were a secret. A thing that looked like a stone, but inside was a seed.

the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.

But there’s this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. Totally like whacked, insane. Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of peanut butter or something. You know what I’m saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I’m saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let me just say I’m ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I’m owning my part in it is what I’m saying. Can I ask am I going to get Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight Log. If you want to look. But I’m not trying to get out of owning my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works through you saying I’ve got some kind of a punishment due, I won’t try to get out of a punishment. If I’ve got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I’m grateful to be here?

I’m not exactly lying. Yes, I don’t have much in the way of options right now, but the idea of sleeping with Hades to ruin any chances of Zeus’s ring on my finger… It appeals to a very dark, very secret part of me. I want to twist the knife, to punish Zeus for acting like I’m a piece of art up for auction instead of a person with thoughts and feelings and plans. I want him to writhe in pain around a blade of my crafting, to undermine his authority by slipping through his fingers to take up with his enemy.

I don't want to defend myself," said Maggie, still with vehemence: "I know I've been wrong — often, continually. But yet, sometimes when I have done wrong, it has been because I have feelings that you would be the better for, if you had them. If you were in fault ever - if you had done anything very wrong, I should be sorry for the pain it brought you; I should not want punishment to be heaped on you. But you have always enjoyed punishing me - you have always been hard and cruel to me: even when I was a little girl, and always loved you better than any one else in the world, you would let me go crying to bed without forgiving me. You have no pity: you have no sense of your own imperfection and your own sins. It is a sin to be hard; it is not fitting for a mortal - for a Christian. You are nothing but a Pharisee. You thank God for nothing but your own virtues - you think they are great enough to win you everything else. You have not even a vision of feelings by the side of which your shining virtues are mere darkness!

She'd barely sat down when he reminded her of that kiss: "Couldn't find any mud?" He said it so casually, she couldn't tell if he was teasing. "Behave," she hissed at him. "Never." He grinned at her. That brought on a slight blush, which in turn brought back her earlier frustration. "If trying to punish me by making me want you,I won't fall for that again," she warned him. "Do you want me?" What a ridiculous question. How could she not want him? But she wasn't telling him that. For him to even ask proved his intent was wicked in some form. "Be at ease,Becca." Then he completely ruined that by adding, "I'm not going to ravish you here at the table, though I confess,I'll probably be thinking about nothing else." She could have melted off the chair right to the floor, and not just from the scalding blush that flew up her cheeks. She was seeing him in her mind making love to her on the table! She couldn't look down at the table without seeing it now! Oh,God... She had no iea how she got through that meal. She barely heard a word around her.

To the extent the divine source and inalienability of our rights are purported to be factual, history has proved our Founding Fathers plainly wrong: Every right has, in fact, been alienated by governments since the beginning of time. Within a generation of the establishment of our nation, the Founding Fathers rescinded virtually every right they previously declared unalienable. John Adams, one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, alienated the right to speak freely and express dissenting views when, as president, he enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts against his political opponents—with Hamilton’s support. (Perhaps Hamilton’s God had not given “sacred rights” to Jeffersonians!) Another of the drafters, Jefferson himself, alienated the most basic of rights—to the equal protection of the laws, based on the “truth” that “all men are created equal”—when he helped to write (and strengthen) Virginia’s “Slave Code,” just a few years after drafting the Declaration of Independence. The revised code denied slaves the right to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness by punishing attempted escape with “outlawry” or death. Jefferson personally suspected that “the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” In other words, they were endowed by their Creator not with equality but with inferiority. There is no right that has not been suspended or trampled during times of crisis and war, even by our greatest presidents. ... I wish there were an intellectually satisfying argument for the divine source of rights, as our Founding Fathers tried to put forth. Tactically, that would be the strongest argument liberals could make, especially in America, where many hold a strong belief in an intervening God. But we cannot offer this argument, because many liberals do not believe in concepts like divine hands. We believe in separation of church and state. We are pragmatists, utilitarians, empiricists, secularists, and (God forgive me!) moral relativists. We are skeptical of absolutes (as George Bernard Shaw cynically quipped: “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”).

Then I repented heartily of all my life past, but that repentance yielded me no satisfaction, no peace, no, not in the least, because, as I said to myself, it was repenting after the power of further sinning was taken away. I seemed not to mourn that I had committed such crimes, and for the fact, as it was an offence against God and my neighbour, but that I was to be punished for it. I was a penitent, as I thought, not that I had sinned, but that I was to suffer, and this took away all the comfort of my repentance in my own thoughts.

Then he spoke to me mockingly, 'And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my design! You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home. Whilst they played wits against me, against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born, I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, kin of my kin, my bountiful wine-press for a while, and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn, for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me. Now you shall come to my call. When my brain says "Come!" to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding. And to that end this!' "With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some to the… Oh, my God! My God! What have I done? What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days. God pity me! Look down on a poor soul in worse than mortal peril. And in mercy pity those to whom she is dear!" Then she began to rub her lips as though to cleanse them from pollution.

An old story is told about Rabia of Basra, an eighth-century Sufi mystic who was seen running through the streets of her city one day carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she said she wanted to burn down the rewards of paradise with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, because both blocked the way to God, 'O, Allah,' Rabia prayed, 'if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.' In Christian tradition this comes under the heading of unconditional love, though it is usually understood as the kind of love God exercises toward humans instead of the other way around. Now, thanks to a Muslim mystic from Iraq, I have a new way of understanding what it means to love God unconditionally. Whenever I am tempted to act from fear of divine punishment or hope of divine reward, Rabia leans over from here religion into mine and empties a bucket of water on my head.

Burn? Smite? Punish? Why is your god so intolerant? So jealous? Why must there be only one god? Why is there not room for many?' 'What?' 'One god, why can you honor only one god?' 'Why...every child in Bible school knows the answer to that. It is the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before me."' 'You have not answered my question. Wherein lies the harm? Since earliest time men have sought the shelter of many gods, harmony with all the wild spirits. It would seem the more gods one had standing watch over one's self the better. Would it not?

Why should men in the name of religion try to harmonize the contradictions that exist between Nature and a book? Why should philosophers be denounced for placing more reliance upon what they know than upon what they have been told? If there is a God, it is reasonably certain that he made the world, but it is by no means certain that he is the author of the bible. Why then should we not place greater confidence in Nature than in a book? And even if this God made not only the world but the book besides, it does not follow that the book is the best part of Creation, and the only part that we will be eternally punished for denying. It seems to me that it is quite as important to know something of the solar system, something of the physical history of this globe, as it is to know the adventures of Jonah or the diet of Ezekiel. (...) It seems to me that a belief in the great truths of science are fully as essential to salvation, as the creed of any church. We are taught that a man may be perfectly acceptable to God even if he denies the rotundity of the earth,(...) and yet, for failing to believe in the „scheme of salvation” another may be eternally lost.

But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could and used foul language; we had one or two had hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn't altogether his fault; he'd never had any money before, and when he got more than he'd ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I'd known had men in Paris and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn't help, or to their environment, which they didn't choose: I'm not sure that society wasn't more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I'd been God I couldn't have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Esheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God's presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, he created men, if he so created them that ti was possible for them to sin, it was because he willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into by back yard, it wouldn't be fair to beat him when he did so. If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive his grace. It seem to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn't prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn't common sense. I didn't see why you shouldn't believe in a God who hadn't created the world, buyt had to make the best of the bad job he'd found, a being enormously better, wiser and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn't made and who might be hoped in the end to overcome it. But on the other hand I didn't see why you should.

Because I have been punished. By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape. And now at last I am free from you all, although you may hold me for a few years more. If I am not free, I am at least locked up in my own prison, but I shall get me some beauty, I shall get me some order out of this jungle of my life: I shall find my way out of it yet, though it take me twenty years more--alone.

Not sure. Anyway, if his spirit shows up, torture him for me. Something cool…like Zeus did with Prometheus. Except not with an eagle. Maybe vultures, or something.” “Vultures, or something?” Hades asked. “Yeah! Perfect!” Hades must not have been feeling very creative, because he followed Apollo’s suggestion exactly. When the spirit of Tityos turned up, the giant was convicted of assaulting Leto. He was sent to the Fields of Punishment, where he was chained down, given a regenerating liver, and cut open so that vultures could feast on it forever. (I think Prometheus filed a copyright infringement suit later on.)

I’ve bought a town house,” said Oswald. “In Aphrany. A huge black and white timbered monstrosity. The kind a very rich merchant lives in.” “Why in god’s name?” asked Mason. “Because Fenella once said she likes them,” said Oswald. “In a purely throw-away conversation. But for some reason, every word she speaks is seared on my brain.” Roland cleared his throat. “Bit impulsive for you, isn’t it?” “A bit?” echoed Oswald. “I forced the King to sign annulment papers to an eight-year marriage. Simply because I feel sick to my stomach at the idea of her ever belonging to another man. And the worst of it is, that the annulment is the least drastic course of action that occurred to me. For the last three months, in my head I have been drawing up legal papers to sue Thane for the eight years he spent at my wife’s side, masquerading in my rightful place. In her life, in her heart and in her bed.” He heard his voice shake with anger and realized his brothers must too. Taking a deep breath, he continued more evenly. “Each time I mentally draft the petition, I request a more severe punishment befitting of his crime.” “What kind of punishments?” asked Mason with interest, sitting back in his seat. Oswald blew out a shaky breath. “In the latest version, it was beheading.

John Piper has a powerful way of bringing this concept home: When God visits the sins of the fathers on the children, he doesn’t punish sinless children for the sins of their fathers. He simply lets the effects of the fathers’ sins take their natural course, infecting and corrupting the hearts of the children. For parents who love their children this is one of the most sobering texts in all the Bible. The more we let sin get the upper hand in our own lives, the more our children will suffer for it. Sin is like a contagious disease. My children don’t suffer because I have it. They catch it from me and then suffer because they have it.1

The sour old cow gave me a sum much more difficult than any I had encountered before: say, a four-digit number divided by a three-digit number. I guessed how to do it, and got it wrong. Without offering help, she told me to do it again. I failed a second time; she warned me to try hard; I did; I failed again; and she told me to hold my hand out and, grasping it firmly, she caned the palm three times, hard. My first reaction was astonishment: none of my kindergartens had been Catholic establishments, so I was unprepared for this kind of assault. Then it hurt, a lot! My precious palm! When I first started having therapy twenty-five years later, this was one of the first traumas I recalled, and I was astonished at the power of the feelings that came flooding back: anger—no, fury; self-pity; humiliation; a deep, deep sense of hurt; and a pure indignation at not so much the unfairness, but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat—a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God. (A

Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that’s what he has the Father say. “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” ... Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God... But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them "the gospel" does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting the gospel is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God creates, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that. (excerpts all from chapter 7)

I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children. I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. Imiss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

It was a kiss that shattered time. I felt it stutter to a halt around us before snapping back with such intensity that it warped, taking us into a new dimension. It was as punishing as it was reverent, brutal and yet tender, like Jaxson was pissed he was doing it just as much as he was certain he never wanted to stop. One arm held me to him while the other slid down and palmed my ass, taking one cheek in a handful that he squeezed roughly. My leg hiked up automatically, dress riding up with it, and he slid his thigh between mine, biting my lower lip as I moaned into his mouth. God, it was all-consuming. His hands rocked me against him, and I shook at the sensation, at the forbiddenness of it all.

Lincoln’s liberal use of his pardoning power created the greatest tension between the two men (Lincoln and Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War). Stanton felt compelled to protect military discipline by exacting proper punishment for desertions or derelictions of duty, while Lincoln looked for any “good excuse for saving a man’s life.” When he found one, he said, “I go to bed happy as I think how joyous the signing of my name will make him and his family and his friends.” Stanton would not allow himself such leniency. A clerk recalled finding Stanton one night in his office, “the mother, wife, and children of a soldier who had been condemned to be shot as a deserter, on their knees before him pleading for the life of their loved one. He listened standing, in cold and austere silence, and at the end of their heart-breaking sobs and prayers answered briefly that the man must die. The crushed and despairing little family left and Mr. Stanton turned, apparently unmoved, and walked into his private room.” The clerk thought Stanton an unfeeling tyrant, until he discovered him moments later, “leaning over a desk, his face buried in his hands and his heavy frame shaking with sobs. ‘God help me to do my duty; God help me to do my duty!’ he was repeating in a low wail of anguish.” On such occasions, when Stanton felt he could not afford to set a precedent, he must have been secretly relieved that the president had the ultimate authority.

{From Luther Burbank's funeral. He was loved until he revealed he was an atheist, then he began to receive death threats. He tried to amiably answer them all, leading to his death} It is impossible to estimate the wealth he has created. It has been generously given to the world. Unlike inventors, in other fields, no patent rights were given him, nor did he seek a monopoly in what he created. Had that been the case, Luther Burbank would have been perhaps the world's richest man. But the world is richer because of him. In this he found joy that no amount of money could give. And so we meet him here today, not in death, but in the only immortal life we positively know--his good deeds, his kindly, simple, life of constructive work and loving service to the whole wide world. These things cannot die. They are cumulative, and the work he has done shall be as nothing to its continuation in the only immortality this brave, unselfish man ever sought, or asked to know. As great as were his contributions to the material wealth of this planet, the ages yet to come, that shall better understand him, will give first place in judging the importance of his work to what he has done for the betterment of human plants and the strength they shall gain, through his courage, to conquer the tares, the thistles and the weeds. Then no more shall we have a mythical God that smells of brimstone and fire; that confuses hate with love; a God that binds up the minds of little children, as other heathen bind up their feet--little children equally helpless to defend their precious right to think and choose and not be chained from the dawn of childhood to the dogmas of the dead. Luther Burbank will rank with the great leaders who have driven heathenish gods back into darkness, forever from this earth. In the orthodox threat of eternal punishment for sin--which he knew was often synonymous with yielding up all liberty and freedom--and in its promise of an immortality, often held out for the sacrifice of all that was dear to life, the right to think, the right to one's mind, the right to choose, he saw nothing but cowardice. He shrank from such ways of thought as a flower from the icy blasts of death. As shown by his work in life, contributing billions of wealth to humanity, with no more return than the maintenance of his own breadline, he was too humble, too unselfish, to be cajoled with dogmatic promises of rewards as a sort of heavenly bribe for righteous conduct here. He knew that the man who fearlessly stands for the right, regardless of the threat of punishment or the promise of reward, was the real man. Rather was he willing to accept eternal sleep, in returning to the elements from whence he came, for in his lexicon change was life. Here he was content to mingle as a part of the whole, as the raindrop from the sea performs its sacred service in watering the land to which it is assigned, that two blades may grow instead of one, and then, its mission ended, goes back to the ocean from whence it came. With such service, with such a life as gardener to the lilies of the field, in his return to the bosoms of infinity, he has not lost himself. There he has found himself, is a part of the cosmic sea of eternal force, eternal energy. And thus he lived and always will live. Thomas Edison, who believes very much as Burbank, once discussed with me immortality. He pointed to the electric light, his invention, saying: 'There lives Tom Edison.' So Luther Burbank lives. He lives forever in the myriad fields of strengthened grain, in the new forms of fruits and flowers, plants, vines, and trees, and above all, the newly watered gardens of the human mind, from whence shall spring human freedom that shall drive out false and brutal gods. The gods are toppling from their thrones. They go before the laughter and the joy of the new childhood of the race, unshackled and unafraid.

UKIP SHIPPING FORECAST by Nicholas Pegg After a UKIP councillor claimed widespread flooding in the UK was God’s punishment for allowing same-sex marriage, author/performer Nicholas Pegg wrote his own version of the Shipping Forecast. His recording went viral, receiving 250,000 hits in four days. ‘And now the shipping forecast issued by UKIP on Sunday the 19 January 2014 at 1200 UTC. There are warnings of gays in Viking, Forties, Cromarty, Southeast Iceland and Bongo Bongo land. The general synopsis at midday: Low intelligence expected, becoming Little England by midnight tonight. And now the area forecasts for the next 24 hours. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: south easterly gay seven to severe gay nine, occasionally bisexual. Showers – gay. Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher: women veering southerly 4 or 5, losing their identity and becoming sluts. Rain – moderate or gay. German blight, immigration veering north – figures variable, becoming psychotic. Showers – gay. Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth: benefit tourism 98%, becoming variable – later slight, or imaginary. Showers – gay. Biscay, Trafalgar: warm, lingering nationalism. Kiss me Hardy, later becoming heterosexual – good. FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: right or extreme right, veering racist 4 or 5, increasing to 5 to 7. Homophobic outburst – back-peddling westerly and becoming untenable. Showers – gay. Fair Isle, Faeroes, South East Iceland: powerbase decreasing, variable – becoming unelectable. Good. And that concludes the forecast.

I have this special license burning a hole in my pocket, so I was thinking we might go find a vicar and use it. Pinter and Freddy can be witnesses.” He looked anxiously at her. “What do you think?” “Don’t you want your family present when we marry? I thought you lordly sorts had to have grand weddings.” “Is that what you want?” In truth, she’d never been one to dream of her wedding day as a brilliant spectacle. Clandestine weddings were always what captured her imagination, complete with a dangerous, brooding fellow and mysterious goings-on. In this instance, she had both. He said, “Let me put it this way: we can spend an untold number of days sneaking around just to steal a kiss, being chaperoned every minute while my sisters and Gran plan the wedding of the century. Or we can marry today and share a bed at the inn tonight like a respectable husband and wife. I’m not keep on waiting, but then, I never am when it comes to you. So what is your opinion in the matter?” She couldn’t resist teasing him a little. “I think you just want to punish your grandmother for her sly tactics by depriving her of the weddings.” He smiled. “Perhaps a little. And God knows my friends are never going to let me live this down. I’m not looking forward to hours of their torment at a wedding breakfast.” He stopped in a little copse where they would be hidden from the street. “But if you want a big wedding, I can endure it.” His expression was solemn as he took her hands in his. “I can endure anything, as long as you marry me. And keep loving me for the rest of your life.” Staring into his earnest face, she felt something flip over in her chest. She stretched up to brush his mouth with hers, and he pulled her in for a long, ardent kiss. “Well?” he said huskily when he was done. “If I had any sense of decency, I would give you a chance to consult with a lawyer about settlements and such, especially since you’ll be coming into some money. But-“ “-you have no sense of decency, I know,” she teased. She tapped her finger against her chin. “Or was that morals you claimed not to have? I can’t remember.” “Watch it, minx,” he warned with a lift of his brow. “If you intend to taunt me for every foolish statement I’ve made in my life, you’ll force me to play Rockton and lock you up in my dark, forbidding manor while I have my wicked way with you.” “That sounds perfectly awful,” she said, gazing at the man she loved. “How soon can we start?

The other thing that’s happened with writing is that I’m not afraid it will go away. Up until a couple of years ago, I feared that sitting down with paper and pencil revealed too much desire and that for such ambition I would be punished. My vocabulary would contract anorexia, ideas would be born autistic, even titles would not come to flirt with me anymore. I suppose this was tied to that internal judge, the serpent who eats her own tail. She insinuates you’re not good enough; you believe her and try less, ratifying her assessment; so you try even less; and on and on. This snake survives on your dying. Finally, now, the elided words of my wisest writing teacher, the poet David Wojahn, make sense. “Be ambitious,” he said, “for the work.” Not for the in-dwelling editor. That bitch was impossible to please anyway.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Instruction of the Mayor of the city, the Vizier Ptahhotep, under the Majesty of King Isesi, who lives for all eternity. The mayor of the city, the vizier Ptahhotep, said: O king, my lord! Age is here, old age arrived. Feebleness came, weakness grows, Childtike one sleeps all day. Eyes are dim, ears deaf. Strength is waning through weariness, The mouth, silenced, speaks not, The heart, void, recalls not the past, The bones ache throughout. Good has become evil, all taste is gone, What age does to people is evil in everything. The nose, clogged, breathes not, Painful are standing and sitting. May this servant be ordered to make a staff of old age, So as to teil him the words of those who heard, The ways of the ancestors, Who have listened to the gods. May such be done for you. So that strife may be banned from the people, And the Two Shores may serve you! Said the majesty of this god: Instruct him then in the sayings of the past, May he become a model for the children of the great, May obedience enter him, And the devotion of him who speaks to him, No one is born wise. Beginning of the formulations of excellent discourse spoken by the Prince, Count, God's Father, God's beloved, Eldest Son of the King, of his body, Mayor of the city and Vizier, Ptahhotep, in instructing the ignorant in knowledge and in the standard of excellent discourse, as profit for him who will hear, as woe to him who would neglect them. He spoke to his son: Don’t be proud of your knowledge. Consult the ignorant and the wise; The limits of art are not reached, No artist’s skills are perfect; Good speech is more hidden than greenstone, Yet may be found among maids at the grindstones. If you meet a disputant in action, A powerful man, superior to you. Fold your arms, bend your back, To flout him will not make him agree with you. Make little of the evil speech By not opposing him while he's in action; He will be called an ignoramus, Your self-control will match his pile (of words). If you meet a disputant in action Who is your equal, on your level, You will make your worth exceed his by silence, While he is speaking evilly, There will be much talk by the hearers. Your name will be good in the mind of the magistrates. If you meet a disputant in action, A poor man, not your equal. Do not attack him because he is weak, Let him alone, he will confute himself. Do not answer him to relieve your heart, Do not vent yourself against your opponent, Wretched is he who injures a poor man, One will wish to do what you desire. You will beat him through the magistrates’ reproof. If you are a man who leads, Who controls the affairs of the many, Seek out every beneficent deed, That your conduct may be blameless. Great is justice, lasting in effect, Unchallenged since the time of Osiris. One punishes the transgressor of laws, Though the greedy overlooks this; Baseness may seize riches, Yet crime never lands its wares; In the end it is justice that lasts, Man says: “It is my father's ground.” Do not scheme against people, God punishes accordingly: If a man says: “I shall live by it,” He will lack bread for his mouth. If a man says: “I shall be rich' He will have to say: “My cleverness has snared me.” If he says: “I will snare for myself,” He will be unable to say: “I snared for my profit.” If a man says: "I will rob someone,” He will end being given to a stranger. People’s schemes do not prevail, God’s command is what prevails; Live then in the midst of peace, What they give comes by itself.

As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.” They walked swiftly down the halls--Arin’s halls--and when Kestrel stole sidelong looks at him he still seemed stunned and dizzy. Kestrel had been seasick before, at the beginning of her sailing lessons, and she wondered if this was how Arin felt, surrounded by his home--like when the eyes can pinpoint the horizon but the stomach cannot. Their silence broke when the carriage door closed them in. “You are mad.” Arin’s voice was furious, desperate. “It was my book. My doing. You had no right to interfere. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?” “Arin.” Fear trembled through her as she finally realized what she had done. She strove to sound calm. “A duel is simply a ritual.” “It’s not yours to fight.” “You know you cannot. Irex would never accept, and if you drew a blade on him, every Valorian in the vicinity would cut you down. Irex won’t kill me.” He gave her a cynical look. “Do you deny that he is the superior fighter?” “So he will draw first blood. He will be satisfied, and we will both walk away with honor.” “He said something about a death-price.” That was the law’s penalty for a duel to the death. The victor paid a high sum to the dead duelist’s family. Kestrel dismissed this. “It will cost Irex more than gold to kill General Trajan’s daughter.” Arin dropped his face into his hands. He began to swear, to recite every insult against the Valorian’s the Herrani had invented, to curse them by every god. “Really, Arin.” His hands fell away. “You, too. What a stupid thing for you to do. Why did you do that? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” She thought of his claim that Enai could never have loved her, or if she had, it was a forced love. “You might not think of me as your friend,” Kestrel told Arin, “but I think of you as mine.

In the land of Uz, there lived a man, righteous and God-fearing, and he had great wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children feasted, and he loved them very much and prayed for them. 'It may be that my sons have sinned in their feasting.' Now the devil came before the Lord together with the sons of God, and said to the Lord that he had gone up and down the earth and under the earth. 'And hast thou considered my servant Job?' God asked of him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to his great and holy servant. And the devil laughed at God's words. 'Give him over to me and Thou wilt see that Thy servant will murmur against Thee and curse Thy name.' And God gave up the just man He loved so, to the devil. And the devil smote his children and his cattle and scattered his wealth, all of a sudden like a thunderbolt from heaven. And Job rent his mantel and fell down upon the ground and cried aloud, 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and ever.' Fathers and teachers, forgive my tears now, for all my childhood rises up again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then, with the breast of a little child of eight, and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and gladness. The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction, and His servant crying out: 'Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish me,' and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: 'Let my prayer rise up before Thee,' and again incense from the priest's censer and the kneeling and the prayer. Ever since then - only yesterday I took it up - I've never been able to read that sacred tale without tears. And how much that is great, mysterious and unfathomable there is in it! Afterwards I heard the words of mockery and blame, proud words, 'How could God give up the most loved of His saints for the diversion of the devil, take from him his children, smite him with sore boils so that he cleansed the corruption from his sores with a pot-sherd - and for no object except to board to the devil! 'See what My saint can suffer for My Sake.' ' But the greatness of it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery - that the passing earthly show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished. The Creator, just as on the first days of creation He ended each day with praise: 'That is good that I have created,' looks upon Job and again praises His creation. And Job, praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was ordained. Good heavens, what a book it is, and what lessons there are in it! What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with it to man! It is like a mold cast of the world and man and human nature, everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what mysteries are solved and revealed! God raises Job again, gives him wealth again. Many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them. But how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with those new ones, however dear the new ones might be? But he could, he could. It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising such each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving!

My friend Dr. Rod Rosenbladt told me the story of how he’d wrecked his car when he was sixteen years old after he and his friends had been drinking. Following the accident, Rod called his dad, and the first thing his dad asked him was, “Are you all right?” Rod said yes. Then he confessed to his father that he was drunk. Rod was naturally terrified about how his father might respond. Later that night after Rod had made it home, he wept and wept in his father’s study. He was embarrassed, ashamed. At the end of the ordeal, his father asked him this question: “How about tomorrow we go and get you a new car?” Rod now says that he became a Christian in that moment. God’s grace became real to him in that moment of forgiveness and mercy. Now nearly seventy, Rod has since spent his life as a spokesman for the theology of grace. Rod’s father’s grace didn’t turn Rod into a drunk—it made him love his father and the Lord he served. Now let me ask you: What would you like to say to Rod’s dad? Rod says that every time he tells that story in public, there are always people in the audience who get angry. They say, “Your dad let you get away with that? He didn’t punish you at all? What a great opportunity for your dad to teach you responsibility!” Rod always chuckles when he hears that response and says, “Do you think I didn’t know what I had done? Do you think it wasn’t the most painful moment of my whole life up to that point? I was ashamed; I was scared. My father spoke grace to me in a moment when I knew I deserved wrath … and I came alive.” Isn’t that the nature of grace? We know that we deserve punishment and then, when we receive mercy instead, we discover grace. Romans 5:8 reads, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God gives forgiveness and imputes righteousness to us even though we are sinful and while we were His enemies (vv. 6, 8, 10). Our offenses are infinitely greater than a sixteen-year-old getting drunk and wrecking his car, yet God’s grace is greater still.

On true penance and the holy life. Many people think that they are achieving great things in external works such as fasting, going barefoot and other such practices which are called penances. But true penance, and the best kind of penance, is that whereby we can improve ourselves greatly and in the highest measure, and this consists in turning entirely away from all that is not God or of God in ourselves and in all creatures, and in turning fully and completely towards our beloved God in an unshakeable love so that our devotion and desire for him become great. In whatever kind of good work you possess this the more, the more righteous you are, and the more there is of this, the truer the penance and the more it expunges sin and all its punishment. Indeed, in a short space of time you could turn so firmly away from all sin with such revulsion, turning just as firmly to God, that had you committed all the sins since Adam and all those which are still to be, you would be forgiven each and every one together with their punishment and, were you then to die, you would be brought before the face of God. This is true penance, and it is based especially and consummately on the precious suffering in the perfect penance of our Lord Jesus. Christ The more we share13 in this, the more all sin falls away from us, together with the punishment for sin. In all that we do and at all times we should accustom ourselves to sharing in the life and work of our Lord Jesus Christ, in all that he did and chose not to do, in all that he suffered and experienced, and we should be always mindful of him as he was of us. This form of penance is a mind raised above all things into God, and you should freely practise those kinds of works in which you find that you can and do possess this the most. If any external work hampers you in this, whether it be fasting, keeping vigil, reading or whatever else, you should freely let it go without worrying that you might thereby be neglecting your penance. For God does not notice the nature of the works but only the love, the devotion and the spirit which is in them. For he is not so much concerned with our works as with the spirit with which we perform them all and that we should love him in all things. They for whom God is not enough are greedy. The reward for all your works should be that they are known to God and that you seek God in them. Let this always be enough for you. The more purely and simply you seek him, the more effectively all your works will atone for your sins. You could also call to mind the fact that God was a universal redeemer of the world, and that I owe him far greater thanks therefore than if he had redeemed me alone. And so you too should be the universal redeemer of all that you have spoiled in yourself through sin, and you should commend yourself altogether to him with all that you have done, for you have spoiled through sin all that is yours: heart, senses, body, soul, faculties, and whatever else there is in you and about you. All is sick and spoiled. Flee to him then in whom there is no fault but rather all goodness, so that he may be a universal redeemer for all the corruption both of your life within and your life in the world.

John Wanamaker, founder of the stores that bear his name, once confessed: “I learned thirty years ago that it is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.” Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally had to blunder through this old world for a third of a century before it even began to dawn upon me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be. Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.

Minny came ever day to make sure I was breathing, feed me food to keep me living. All I know is, I ain't saying it. And I know she ain't saying what she want a say either and it's a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation. "Mama, it would really be so terrible if I never met a husband?" Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else. I stare at her, wishing the ceiling fan would fly from its post, crash down on both of us. I feel tears come up in my eyes, cause three years just ain't long enough. A hundred years ain't gone be long enough. Eugenia, just because this is a hospital doesn't mean I'm an invalid" "you kind. you smart. you important." See, I think if God had intended for white people and colored people to be this close together for so much of the day, he would've made us color-blind. Every time a Negro complained about the cost of living didn't mean she was begging for money. But the truth is, I don't care about voting. I don't care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, if, in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver. when you little, you only get to ask two questions, what's your name and how old you is, so you better get em right. Mister Jonny knows about me. Miss Celia Knows Mister Jony know about me. But Mister Jonny doesn't know that Miss Celia knows he knows. "Yes ma'am. I tell her." In about a hundred years. How an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful. Lots of folks think if you talk back to your husband, you crossed the line. And that justifies punishment. She can take the most complicated things in life and wrap them up so small and simple, they'll fit right in your pocket. "Don't you let him cheapen you. If Stuart doesn't know how intelligent and kind I raised you to be, he can march straight on back to State Street. Frankly, I don't care much for Stuart. He doesn't know how lucky he was to have you." You tell her we love her, like she's our own family. "You a beautiful person, Minny." Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me unless she is their mother too. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism

A challenge.” He tsked. “I’ll let you take it back. Just this one.” “I cannot take it back.” At that, Irex drew his dagger and imitated Kestrel’s gesture. They stood still, then sheathed their blades. “I’ll even let you choose the weapons,” Irex said. “Needles. Now it is to you to choose the time and place.” “My grounds. Tomorrow, two hours from sunset. That will give me time to gather the death-price.” This gave Kestrel pause. But she nodded, and finally turned to Arin. He looked nauseated. He sagged in the senators’ grip. It seemed they weren’t restraining him, but holding him up. “You can let go,” Kestrel told the senators, and when they did, she ordered Arin to follow her. As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.” They walked swiftly down the halls--Arin’s halls--and when Kestrel stole sidelong looks at him he still seemed stunned and dizzy. Kestrel had been seasick before, at the beginning of her sailing lessons, and she wondered if this was how Arin felt, surrounded by his home--like when the eyes can pinpoint the horizon but the stomach cannot. Their silence broke when the carriage door closed them in. “You are mad.” Arin’s voice was furious, desperate. “It was my book. My doing. You had no right to interfere. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?” “Arin.” Fear trembled through her as she finally realized what she had done. She strove to sound calm. “A duel is simply a ritual.” “It’s not yours to fight.” “You know you cannot. Irex would never accept, and if you drew a blade on him, every Valorian in the vicinity would cut you down. Irex won’t kill me.” He gave her a cynical look. “Do you deny that he is the superior fighter?” “So he will draw first blood. He will be satisfied, and we will both walk away with honor.” “He said something about a death-price.” That was the law’s penalty for a duel to the death. The victor paid a high sum to the dead duelist’s family. Kestrel dismissed this. “It will cost Irex more than gold to kill General Trajan’s daughter.” Arin dropped his face into his hands. He began to swear, to recite every insult against the Valorian’s the Herrani had invented, to curse them by every god. “Really, Arin.” His hands fell away. “You, too. What a stupid thing for you to do. Why did you do that? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” She thought of his claim that Enai could never have loved her, or if she had, it was a forced love. “You might not think of me as your friend,” Kestrel told Arin, “but I think of you as mine.

Look, I’m sorry, Jemma. It took me forever to get there, what with all the flooding and everything. And then I was trying to clean stuff up and…well, I guess the time just got away from me.” I try to pull away, but he tightens his grip. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “Well, you did scare me.” I manage to pull one hand loose, and I use it to whack him in the chest. “Idiot!” “I’m fine, okay? I’m here.” “I wish you weren’t!” I yell, fired up now. “I wish you were lying in a ditch somewhere!” I stumble backward, my heel catching on the porch’s floorboards. “You don’t mean that,” Ryder says, sounding hurt. He’s right; I don’t. But I don’t care if I hurt his feelings. I’m too angry to care. Angry and relieved and pissed off and…and, God, I’m so glad he’s okay. I thump his chest one more time in frustration, and then somehow my lips are on his--hungry and demanding and punishing all at once. I hear him gasp in surprise. His mouth is hot, feverish even, as he kisses me back. The ground seems to tilt beneath my feet. I stagger back toward the door, dragging him with me without breaking the kiss. Ryder’s tongue slips between my lips, skimming over my teeth before plunging inside. And… Oh. My. God. No one’s ever kissed me like this. No one. His hands and his tongue and his scent and his body are pressed against mine…It’s making me light-headed, dizzy. Electricity seems to skitter across my skin, raising gooseflesh in its wake. I cling to him, grabbing fistfuls of his T-shirt as he kisses me harder, deeper. I was meant to do this, I realize. I was made to kiss Ryder Marsden. Everything about it is right, like the last piece of a puzzle falling into place. Somehow, we manage to open the front door and stumble blindly inside, past the mudroom, where we shed our boots and jackets. We pause right there in the front hall, our hands seemingly everywhere at once. I tug at his T-shirt, wanting it off, wanting to feel his skin against my fingertips. His hands skim up my sides beneath my tank top, to the edges of my bra. Shivers rack my entire body, making my knees go weak. Thank God for the wall behind me, because that’s pretty much all that’s holding me up right now. With a groan, he abandons my mouth to trail his lips down my neck, to my shoulders, across my collarbone to the hollow between my breasts. I tangle my fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, clutching him to me--thinking that I should make him stop, terrified that he will. This is insane. I’m insane. But you know what? That’s just fine with me. Because right now, “sane” seems way overrated.

He: "I mean, are you happy and are you fully alive?" I laughed: ''As you can see, you wove witty jokes into the lecture to please your listeners. You heaped up learned expressions to impress them. You were restless and hasty, as if still compelled to snatch up all knowledge. You are not in yourself" Although these words at first seemed laughable to me, they still made an impression on me, and reluctantly I had to / credit the old man, since he was right. Then he said: "Dear Ammonius, I have delightful tidings for you: God has become flesh in his son and has brought us all salvation." ""What are you saying," I called, "you probably mean Osiris, who shall appear in the mortal body?" "No," he replied, "this man lived in Judea and was born from a virgin." I laughed and answered: "I already know about this; a Jewish trader has brought tidings of our virgin queen to Judea, whose image appears on the walls of one of our temples, and reported it as a fairy tale." "No," the old man insisted, "he was the Son of God." "Then you mean Horus the son of Osiris, don't you?" I answered. "No,hewasnotHorus,butarealman,andhewashung from a cross." "Oh, but this must be Seth, surely; whose punishments our old ones have often described." But the old man stood by his conviction and said: "He died and rose up on the third day." "Well, then he must be Osiris," I replied impatiently. "No," he cried, "he is called Jesus the anointed one." ''Ah, you really mean this Jewish God, whom the poor honor at the harbor, and whose unclean mysteries they celebrate in cellars." "He was a man and yet the Son of God," said the old man staring at me intently. "That's nonsense, dear old man," I said, and showed him to the door. But like an echo from distant rock faces the words returned to me: a man and yet the Son of God. It seemed significant to me, and this phrase was what brought me to Christianity. I: "But don't you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation ofyour Egyptian teachings?" A: "If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I'm more likely to agree with you." I: "Yes, but do you then assume that the history of religions is aimed at a final goal?" A: "My father once bought a black slave at the market from the region of the source of the Nile. He came from a country that had heard ofneither Osiris nor the other Gods; he told me many things in a more simple language that said the same as we believed about Osiris and the other Gods. I learned to understand that those uneducated Negroes unknowingly already possessed most of what the religions of the cultured peoples had developed into complete doctrines. Those able to read that language correctly could thus recognize in it not only the pagan doctrines but also the doctrine of Jesus. And it's with this that I now occupy myself I read the gospels and seek their meaning which is yet to come.We know their meaning as it lies before us, but not their hidden meaning which points to the future. It's erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it's always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent." I: "Have you found out the meaning which is yet to come?" A: "No, not yet; it's very difficult, but I hope I'll succeed. Sometimes it seems to me that I need the stimulation of others, but I realize that those are temptations of Satan." I: "Don't you believe that you'd succeed ifyou were nearer men?" A: "maybeyoureright." He looks at me suddenly as if doubtful and suspicious. "But, I love the desert, do you understand? This yellow, sun-glowing desert. Here you can see the countenance of the sun every day; you are alone, you can see glorious Helios-no, that is - pagan-what's wrong with me? I'm confused-you are Satan- I recognize you-give way; adversary!" He jumps up incensed and wants to lunge at me. But I am far away in the twentieth century.

explain the divine plan, by which the demands of divine justice are satisfied, and the punishment due to sin averted from the guilty, and laid upon the innocent; that, by bearing our sins, he might make atonement to the wrath of a justly offended God; and so—" "Now, my dear madam, permit me to ask what right we, the subjects of a Supreme Authority, have to inquire into the reasons of his doings? It seems to me—I should be sorry to offend any one, but it seems to me quite as presumptuous as the present arrogance of the lower classes in interfering with government, and demanding a right to give their opinion, forsooth, as to the laws by which they shall be governed; as if they were capable of understanding the principles by which kings rule, and governors decree justice.—I believe I quote Scripture." "Are we, then, to remain in utter ignorance of the divine character?" "What business have we with the divine character? Or how could we understand it? It seems to me we have enough to do with our own. Do I inquire into the character of my sovereign? All we have to do is, to listen to what we are told by those who are educated for such studies, whom the Church approves, and who are appointed to take care of the souls committed to their charge; to teach them to respect their superiors, and to lead honest, hard-working lives.

You are very quiet,” Archer remarked as they walked together to the refreshment table. They’d just finished a game of whist and when Rose begged off from a second round, Grey’s brother did the same. “My apologies,” she replied. “I do not mean to be rude.” “My brother doesn’t deserve to take up so much room in that lovely head of yours.” She might have been insulted by his disparaging Grey, or his familiarity with her, had she not been so surprised by the remark itself. “You are impertinent, sir.” He grinned-a grin so much more roguish than Grey’s. “One of my more charming traits. I did not mean offense, dear lady. Only that thinking about him will do you no good. The man is bent on punishing himself for the rest of his life.” Rose accepted the plate he offered her. “Thank you. Why would he wish to punish himself?” “Because he’s an ar…idiot. Sandwich?” He held up a cucumber sandwich caught in silver tongs. “Please. I’m not certain I wish to discuss your brother with you, Lord Archer.” “Not even if I can help you win him?” Rose’s heart froze-no, it simply stopped. Her entire body went numb. She would have dropped her plate had Archer not swept it from her hand into his own. “What makes you think I wish to win him?” He flashed her a coy glance. “Please, lady Rose. I’ve not made a career out of studying your sex to fall for your false innocence now.” Oh dear God. Had Grey told him? “I’ve seen the way you look at him, and I’ve had to put with hearing about you for the last four years-no offense.” Rose arched a brow as he piled food upon her plate. “None taken. I wasn’t aware that I looked at your brother in a manner different from how I might look upon anyone else.” “Mm.” He popped a small cake into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “That’s just it. You try too hard to treat him like everyone else. It’s obvious you care for him, and not just as the man who saved your life.” “Saved my life? How very dramatic.” He gave her a very serious look as he handed her the laden plate. “Where do you suppose you’d be right now if Grey hadn’t taken you in? Certainly not here, with such good food and charming company.” Point taken. And now she felt simply awful for the way she had spoken to Grey earlier. She was such a cow. “You shame me, sir.” And worse, he’d made tears come to her eyes. Staring at her food-such a wonderful array he’d picked for her-she blinked them away. He steered her toward a window seat where they sat in plain view of the room, but at least with a modicum of privacy. “My apologies, my lady. I did not mean to offend you with my plain and thoughtless words.” “Plain, perhaps. Thoughtless, I highly doubt it.” She managed a small smile. “I don’t think you do anything without thinking first.” Archer laughed, looking so much like Grey it hurt to look at him. “Were that but true.

What do you think, then, Mrs. Elton, my dear madam, that a clergyman ought to preach?" "I think, Mr. Arnold, that he ought to preach salvation by faith in the merits of the Saviour." "Oh! of course, of course. We shall not differ about that. Everybody believes that." "I doubt it very much.—He ought, in order that men may believe, to explain the divine plan, by which the demands of divine justice are satisfied, and the punishment due to sin averted from the guilty, and laid upon the innocent; that, by bearing our sins, he might make atonement to the wrath of a justly offended God; and so—" "Now, my dear madam, permit me to ask what right we, the subjects of a Supreme Authority, have to inquire into the reasons of his doings? It seems to me—I should be sorry to offend any one, but it seems to me quite as presumptuous as the present arrogance of the lower classes in interfering with government, and demanding a right to give their opinion, forsooth, as to the laws by which they shall be governed; as if they were capable of understanding the principles by which kings rule, and governors decree justice.—I believe I quote Scripture." "Are we, then, to remain in utter ignorance of the divine character?" "What business have we with the divine character? Or how could we understand it? It seems to me we have enough to do with our own. Do I inquire into the character of my sovereign? All we have to do is, to listen to what we are told by those who are educated for such studies, whom the Church approves, and who are appointed to take care of the souls committed to their charge; to teach them to respect their superiors, and to lead honest, hard-working lives.

There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she remarked, setting the periodical aside for a moment. “And that is?” She tucked her skirts around her legs, denying him further glimpses of her ankles. “Would you by chance know what gamahuching is?” Grey would have thought himself far beyond the age of blushing, but the heat in his cheeks was unmistakable. “Good lord, Rose.” His voice was little more than a rasp. “That is hardly something a young woman brings up in casual conversation.” Oh, but he could show her what gamahuching was. He’d be all too happy to crawl between those trim ankles and climb upward until he found the slit in her drawers… Rose shrugged. “I suppose it might be offensive to someone of your age, but women aren’t as sheltered as they once were, Grey. If you won’t provide a definition, I’m sure Mr. Maxwell will when I see him tonight.” And with that threat tossed out between them, the little baggage returned her attention to her naughty reading. His age? What did she think he was, an ancient? Or was she merely trying to bait him? Tease him? Well, two could play at that game. And he refused to think of Kellan Maxwell, the bastard, educating her on such matters. “I believe you’ve mistaken me if you think I find gamahuching offensive,” he replied smoothly, easing himself down onto the blanket beside her. “I have quite the opposite view.” Beneath the high collar of her day gown, Rose’s throat worked as she swallowed. “Oh?” “Yes.” He braced one hand flat against the blanket near her hip, leaning closer as though they were co-conspirators. “But I’m afraid the notion might seem distasteful to a lady of your inexperience and sheltered upbringing.” Doe eyes narrowed. “If I am not appalled by the practice of frigging, why would anything else done between two adults in the course of making love offend me?” Christ, she had the sexual vocabulary of a whore and the naivete of a virgin. There were so many things that people could do to each other that very well could offend her-hell, some even offended him. As for frigging, that just made him think of his fingers deep inside her wet heat, her own delicate hand around his cock, which of course was rearing its head like an attention-seeking puppy. He forced a casual shrug. Let her think he wasn’t the least bit affected by the conversation. Hopefully she wouldn’t look at his crotch. “Gamahuching is the act of giving pleasure to a woman with one’s mouth and tongue.” Finally his beautiful innocent seductress blushed. She glanced down at the magazine in her hands, obviously reimagining some of what she had read. “Oh.” Then, her gaze came back to his. “Thank you.” Thank God she hadn’t asked if it was pleasurable because Grey wasn’t sure his control could have withstood that. Still, glutton for punishment that he was, he held her gaze. “Anything else you would like to ask me?” Rose shifted on the blanket. Embarrassed or aroused? “No, I think that’s all I wanted to know.” “Be careful, Rose,” he advised as he slowly rose to his feet once more. He had to keep his hands in front of him to disguise the hardness in his trousers. Damn thing didn’t show any sign of standing down either. “Such reading may lead to further curiosity, which can lead to rash behavior. I would hate to see you compromise yourself, or give your affection to the wrong man.” She met his gaze evenly, with a strange light in her eyes that unsettled him. “Have you stopped to consider Grey, that I may have done that already?” And since that remark rendered him so completely speechless, he turned on his heel and walked away.

Depression: What depressed person doesn’t think of himself or herself as a miserable, unredeemable failure? Anger: As in “STAY AWAY or you will see me, and what you see won’t be pretty.” Look for the paradoxical combination of self-loathing and arrogant judgment. Men are specialists at this.       Anorexia: The deep logic of anorexia is that you are unworthy and deserve nothing, so you give yourself nothing. If you give yourself nothing, perhaps you will disappear, or at least less of you will be seen.       Fear and withdrawal: You might as well avoid other people since you feel like you don’t belong with them. You don’t want to be seen.       Exhibitionism: The person who is the life of the party acts shameless in the hope that such a thing is possible.      Addiction: This will both cause shame and cure it, at least temporarily.       Cutting: This seems like the perfect treatment. It punishes you for being “bad,” and the blood makes you feel punished and therefore cleansed. Of course cutting silences shame for only an hour or so, but at least that’s something.       Fears of being exposed: Among the socially or financially successful can lurk a persistent sense that they are only one misstep from being found out and humiliated.       Suicide: Sadly, some people who expect to be exposed and humiliated feel as if they have no alternative but suicide. Many others who live with shame wish they could take their lives, but they are too afraid of what death might bring.       Doubts that God could ever love you: Who could love something so gross?       “I can’t forgive myself”: You might be saying, “I believe God has forgiven me, but something is still wrong. I still feel dirty.”       “I’m just a failure”: Who hasn’t thought that? Of course, families remain the hotbed for shame.

But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell. other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore. leave my loneliness unbroken. how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope. And the fever called living is conquered at last. I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream. Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence. It was the dead who groaned within lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now. even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy. hast thou not dragged Diana from her car. I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish. For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death) the intense reply of hers to our intelligence. Then all motion of whatever nature creates most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro. Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky. And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride. And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy. I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me. Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine. Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake. that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow. An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away. As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose impulse upon the ether the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought. Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence. unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.

Psalm 34 * Theme: God pays attention to those who call on him. Whether God offers escape from trouble or help in times of trouble, we can be certain that he always hears and acts on behalf of those who love him. Author: David, after pretending to be insane in order to escape from King Achish (1 Samuel 21:10-15) A psalm of David, regarding the time he pretended to be insane in front of Abimelech, who sent him away.     1I will praise the LORD at all times.         I will constantly speak his praises. +     2I will boast only in the LORD;         let all who are helpless take heart. +     3Come, let us tell of the LORD’s greatness;         let us exalt his name together.     4I prayed to the LORD, and he answered me.         He freed me from all my fears.     5Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy;         no shadow of shame will darken their faces. +     6In my desperation I prayed, and the LORD listened;         he saved me from all my troubles.     7For the angel of the LORD is a guard;         he surrounds and defends all who fear him. +     8Taste and see that the LORD is good.         Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him! +     9Fear the LORD, you his godly people,         for those who fear him will have all they need. +    10Even strong young lions sometimes go hungry,         but those who trust in the LORD will lack no good thing. +    11Come, my children, and listen to me,         and I will teach you to fear the LORD. +    12Does anyone want to live a life         that is long and prosperous? +    13Then keep your tongue from speaking evil         and your lips from telling lies! +    14Turn away from evil and do good.         Search for peace, and work to maintain it. +    15The eyes of the LORD watch over those who do right;         his ears are open to their cries for help. +    16But the LORD turns his face against those who do evil;         he will erase their memory from the earth. +    17The LORD hears his people when they call to him for help.         He rescues them from all their troubles.    18The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;         he rescues those whose spirits are crushed. +    19The righteous person faces many troubles,         but the LORD comes to the rescue each time. +    20For the LORD protects the bones of the righteous;         not one of them is broken!    21Calamity will surely destroy the wicked,         and those who hate the righteous will be punished. +    22But the LORD will redeem those who serve him.         No one who takes refuge in him will be condemned.

Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else. thing, for one chance— Parisa tousled her hair, switching her part from one side to the other. She didn’t have a bad side. —but I’m done being grateful! I’m done trying to make myself suitable for this family, for this God, for this life. I’m done being small, I’ve outgrown the person who needed you to save her, I don’t even know who she is anymore— She pouted at the mirror and started again, pinching her cheeks to see the color come and go. —and I want more, so much more— Lip balm. Mascara. Lips softer, eyes wider, be something different, something else. —I just want to live, Nas! Just let me live! What was the point of reliving the past? She was hunting her invisible nemeses, grappling for power, finding new methods of control. She should be busy, too busy being the most dangerous person in this or any world to think about why she’d been such an easy target for Atlas Blakely, a man in need of weapons just to make a universe that he could stand. But now— Now she was thinking about Nasser, as if it mattered at all what kind of person she’d been over a decade ago. Just an hour of your time, now and then. That’s all I ask. I know, I know, I’m asking a lot more from you inside my head, but that’s not fair—doesn’t it matter what I choose to put in front of you? Someday maybe you’ll understand that there’s a difference between what a person thinks and who they choose to be— A glint caught her eye from her reflection. A brief, unnatural sparkle in the placid lake of her appearance, the consistency of her beauty, the easy grace she always wore. She leaned forward, forgetting her internal monologue, letting it collapse. Someday the view will be different, eshgh, and I hope you see me in a softer light— “Parisa?” Dalton leaned against the frame of the bathroom door. In his left hand was one of her dresses. In his right hand was her phone. “I don’t care if you want to see your husband. Sorry—Nasser. If you want me to call him that, I will. I suppose you’re right, anyway, you’ll need to see him, because if the Society could find evidence of him in your past then the Forum surely can as well, and so can Atlas. And so can anyone else who wants you dead.” Another pause as Dalton set her phone back on the bathroom counter. “I replied to the physicist for you as well. I think you’ll need to find out what he plans to do about the archives, or at least keep track of what Atlas is doing at the house. Atlas is going to win over both the physicists unless you can convince one of them to do it differently. “What is it?” Dalton asked, frowning at her silence. His gaze traced the placement of her fingers, which had been parsing the thickness of her hair. “I—” Parisa was caught somewhere between laughing and crying. “I found a gray hair.” “So?” Laughter, definitely laughter. It escaped her in something of a rueful bray. Unattractive, like a selfish woman. Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else. “Nothing.” Only the future loss of her desirability, the collapse of her personhood. The first glimpse of an empire steadily falling to unseen ruin. The fate she already knew was coming, the punishment she’d always known she deserved. What timing!