Purity Culture Quotes

..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together.

A conscious human is driven by their conscience, not popular opinion.

When women's sexuality is imagined to be passive or "dirty," it also means that men's sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men's minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we're encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that's detrimental to both men and women.

If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

Everyone who loves pro basketball assumes it's a little fixed. We all think the annual draft lottery is probably rigged, we all accept that the league aggressively wants big market teams to advance deep into the playoffs, and we all concede that certain marquee players are going to get preferential treatment for no valid reason. The outcomes of games aren't predeteremined or scripted but there are definitely dark forces who play with our reality. There are faceless puppet masters who pull strings and manipulate the purity of justice. It's not necessarily a full-on conspiracy, but it's certainly not fair. And that's why the NBA remains the only game that matters: Pro basketball is exactly like life.

The nationalist regrets the change; an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from beings so. Attempting to be more human, individually, leads to having more, egotistical, a form of dehumanization.

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that—by some criteria—a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgment implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

it became very fashionable very quickly to perform cultural purity for others, and that fashion became dogma, and dogma became law, and tada! Here we are.

We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself. ...Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropriates our mild forms of xenophobia into its own virulent project. Difference among peoples is something that we negotiate in our everyday interactions, asking questions and being better informed of our mutual realities. To transform difference into the body is an act of bad faith, a denial of our shared nakedness.

He could tell a storm was coming, he smelt it in the air and saw it in the way the clouds moved. He relished the rain to come; it had a purity about it as if it could wash away all his doubts, all his intentions and quell his sense of guilt when hard choices had to be made.

I should address the word “forgiveness.” It’s got a bad rap. It’s become patronizing, whitewashed, upper-middle-class, a suburban kind of word in our culture that is used more often to vilify than to redeem. It’s #blessed for the twenty-first century. I hate this because to the divine, it’s radical. This word sticks in my craw the way the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” does. When someone says, “I’ll pray for you,” I feel like they’re saying, “From my platform of purity, I’ll pray for your iniquity.” When they say, “I forgive you,” they’re saying, “From my position of righteousness, I will accept you even though you’re wrong and inadequate.

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing.

Cultural purity is an oxymoron (Saunders just quoted this).

Both parties can consent to one-sided sex, but that should not be the bar set for a healthy relationship. Just because it's not rape doesn't mean it isn't dehumanizing.

Sacred sexuality is a dance of offering rather than demanding. A dance of giving and receiving, one with the other, and back again.

Lovemaking is the ultimate Namaste.

In our multi-ethnic, relativist world it is difficult to understand the importance placed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on concepts like ethnic, racial or cultural ‘purity’;

Why is the superficial, legalistic approach of purity culture often so ineffective in curbing toxic masculinity in Christian men? Because it deals in a truncated, false gospel. Rules and regulations for sexual behavior don't make men new. Rather, the renewal of our minds and bodies by the Holy Spirit is the solution to the broken masculinity that plagues our culture and churches.

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

Ask THEM the question—the people, the human beings who were treated as litter by evangelical leaders and institutions on a crusade for religious, social, and political power, a quest that wrecked their souls and their sanity. Spend three days with those wounded, joyful thrivers, those who were kicked out, fled, crawled out, or backed slowly out the rear door. Those who are hanging around the edges for dear life, those deconstructing and reconstructing their lives, those who are still haunted by nightmares of heresy trials, purity culture, and rapture fears. Go ask them if there’s any good in evangelicalism.

The cultural obsession with purity originates in the evolutionary struggle to avoid pollution. All animals are torn between the need to try new food and the fear of being poisoned. Evolution therefore equipped animals with both curiosity and the capacity to feel disgust on coming into contact with something toxic or otherwise dangerous. Politicians and prophets have learned how to manipulate these disgust mechanisms.

Evolution, if it is nothing else, is endless modification, change without reason or end. Notions of preserving racial purity in the twenty-first century, or of maintaining biologically static environments, in which all new arrivals are classified as “invasive” or “foreign” and are to be expunged, or are not permitted entry to start with, are untenable. The obvious ethical issues aside, these arguments deny the flow of time. Landscapes are figuratively, not actually, timeless. And ours is an age of unprecedented cultural exchange, of emigration and immigration. Reactionary resentment around issues of race and culture has no future but warfare.

There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure, even these being extremely rare. What is normal is crossed races, in which, together with a disharmony of physical features (when eye and mouth do not correspond with one another, for example), there must always go a disharmony of habits and value-concepts. (Livingstone¹¹³ heard someone say: 'God created white and black men but the Devil Created the half-breeds.') Crossed races always mean at the same time crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are usually more evil, crueller, more restless. Purity is the final result of countless adaptations, absorptions and secretions, and progress towards purity is evidenced in the fact that the energy available to a race is increasingly restricted to individual selected functions, while previously it was applied to too many and often contradictory things: such a restriction will always seem to be an impoverishment and should be assessed with consideration and caution. In the end, however, if the process of purification is successful, all that energy formerly expended in the struggle of the dissonant qualities with one another will stand at the command of the total organism: which is why races that have become pure have always also become stronger and more beautiful. The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture.

We often demand of people what only God can give us — encouragement, affirmation, strength, motivation — and we end up wringing others dry. It's okay to expect some things from people, so long as you know they're just human beings who thirst like you. They need an Infinite Well as much as you do. If you drink deeply of Him first, you'll be less controlled (and controlling) by your expectations, and you'll actually seek others not to squeeze from them but to encourage them by your overflow.

Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftists class struggle. The themes that appeal to fascists in one cultural tradition may seem simply silly to another. The foggy Norse myths that stirred Norwegians or Germans sounded ridiculous in Italy, where Fascism appealed rather to a sun-drenched classical Romanita.

Gay male and lesbian culture is obsessed with purity of identity as the only basis for figuring out who you can trust or dance with. -Pat Califia

Before thinking about relationships, we're designed to have relational intimacy with God.

If we talk about sexual purity apart from the gospel, we will create chaste Pharisees instead of imperfect disciples. Obedience is a response to grace, not a ladder to heaven.

A woman who 'acts like a man' - who is bold and assertive, and refuses to defer to male authority - is threatening to a system that makes women responsible for men's feelings.

We live in a culture that sells sex, promotes sex, and degrades sex, yet God calls His daughters to live as light in this darkness.

This is not a matter of compromises or adaptations. The power of a new Middle Ages is needed. A change, interior as well as exterior, of barbaric purity is required. Philosophy, “culture”, everyday politics: no more of all that. It is not a matter of shifting to the other side of this bed of agony. It is a matter of finally waking up, and standing on one’s feet.

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known as Untouchables. They had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living in humiliating and disgusting ways, such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material. Even members of the lowest caste avoided mingling with them, eating with them, touching them and certainly marrying them. In modern India, matters of marriage and work are still heavily influenced by the caste system, despite all attempts by the democratic government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing polluting in caste mixing.3 Purity

You are intensely desirable to the one who matters most; God, the throbbing center of love which holds the universe together. All other desires are watery reflections of that pure potency.

Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically “empowered” or “feminist.” I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting women is a radical act.

Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically 'empowered' or 'feminist.' I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting women is a radical act.

Touch is not empty; it contains all the elements of the universe, and the full force of both yourself and the Spirit which inhabits you. Remember this when you are making love, in holy moments of sexual union.

God desires for us to have intimacy with them and with each other. God wants consummation that is replete with love and depth of knowing; true intimacy, which penetrates deeper than the texture of a thigh or the color of a nipple.

The cultural authenticity of cloth arises not from the purity of its origins but from the ways in which individuals and groups turn textiles to their own purposes. Consumers, not producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles.

What America needs is character - a character, bright enough to shine over a whole community - a character burning with love, passion and purity - a character free from all sorts of sectarianism, be it religious, political or atheistic.

Pope Pius X said. “If we were to lose Mary,” the pope explained, “the world would wholly decay. Virtue would disappear, especially holy purity and virginity, connubial love and fidelity. The mystical river through which God’s graces flow to us would dry up. The brightest star would disappear from heaven, and darkness would take its place.”23 Sadly, we need not look too far to see what a culture that has lost Mary looks like and why it is so essential that we bring her back into our hearts and homes.

birch – hope butterflies – change, transformation, inner growth cypress – mourning daisies – innocence, purity dragonflies – ancestors fireflies – life, sexuality hummingbirds – hope and beauty, the sun in disguise, infinity in the flight of their wings phoenix – rebirth poppies – remembrance raven – in some cultures death, in some cultures a bringer of light associated with Creation rose (red) – romantic love rose (yellow) – friendship sage – powerful cleansing sweetgrass – a grandmother medicine sycamore – hidden treasure

The pseudoscience of eugenics and racial purity was more robust in the United States than in Europe, further solidifying the ideology of white supremacy. For Indigenous peoples, this was manifest in development of US government policy measuring “blood quantum” in order to qualify for Indigenousness, replacing culture (especially language) and self-identification. While African Americans were classified as such by the measure of “one drop of blood,” Indigenous people were increasingly called to prove their degree of ancestry as a significant fraction.

Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself.

Innocence and purity have become a symbol of stupidity, but that’s nowadays. We live in a culture where the person with the most experience wins. It’s sick. Everyone knows which way modernism is going, you create a form by breaking up a form, in an endless regression; just let it continue, and for as long as it does, experience will have the upper hand. The unique feature of our times, the pure or independent act, is, as you know, to renounce, not to accept. Accepting is too easy. There’s nothing to be achieved by it. That’s more or less where I place you. Almost saint-like, in other words.

In the collision between the remoteness and purity of the rainforest realms and the crassness of consumer culture, the difference is so extreme that for the most part there has been no authentic or practical method for this medicine system as traditionally practiced to integrate and adapt to the changing times.

However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda’s life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser’s staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods’ dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements.

Sexual climax has many similarities to the omega/alpha concept. At orgasm there is an intensity of focus so extreme that all other awareness disappears. In that moment we cease to be anything other than the experience itself. Our beings are consumed so that all our senses fall away and we have little or no control over what is happening.

It is ironic that while environmental activists are busy reifying a notion of nature based on purity, with all its problematic implications, the enterprise of bioengineering is making it crystal clear that the nature-culture dualism is a construction, a point that feminists and other social critics have been trying to get across for some time.

[Grover} Cleveland, this product of good conscience and self-help, with his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, was a taxpayer's dream, the ideal bourgeois statesmen for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician might have sold them for a price. He was the flower of American political culture in the Gilded Age.

Language is a shared and sharing part of a culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

It’s not surprising that in a culture dominated by such messages, many people believe that humility will only lead to being crushed under the wheels of capitalism or subsumed by some malevolent force that abhors weakness. Our anxious age erodes our ability to be open and show our hearts to each other. It severs our ability to connect to the purity and magic that we carry around inside us already, without anything to buy, without anything new to become, without any way to conquer and win the shiny luxurious lives we’re told we deserve. So instead of passionately embracing the things we love the most, and in so doing reveal our fragility and self-hatred and sweetness and darkness and fear and everything that makes us whole, we present a fractured, tough, protected self to the world.

But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and

The main point is not pursuing sexual purity but recog- nizing our impurity and our desperate need for Christ. So many of us walked right past the gospel on our way to a purity conference. Our parents and youth leaders were so concerned about our budding sexuality, scrambling for direction and wis- dom, that some of us ended up signing abstinence pledges before falling on our knees in repentance. We wore purity rings as badges of honor, forgetting that it is Jesus who cleanses us from all unrighteousness.

I'm sure you're thinking, "Is she honestly trying to claim she was indoctrinated into the patriarchy due to JC (son of God) and JC (Chasez) being in cahoots to love-bomb us via Scripture and/or song, causing us to believe these unrealistic highly respectful wholesome men need to save us, thus grooming us to be deferential and 'save' ourselves for them?" Yes, yes, I am. I'm not sure it's working, but these are the things I think about in my spare time. Is this conspiracy more or less believable than blue balls? I digress.

They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robertson, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons. The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity,

Religion has torn a lot of people to pieces. Whenever it has embarked on a quest for purity, crusaded for certainty, strived for survival, religion has done so at a great cost, asking so many humans to ignore their conscience, to pretend to believe things they don't really believe, to squeeze into ill-fitting gender roles and cultural norms, to snuff out desires and squander talents, to live one way during the week and another on Sunday morning, to sacrifice sons and daughters on the altar of conformity, to feign certainty, to fake happiness, to strive for perfection, to look the other way in the presence of injustice - indeed, to renounce some aspect of their very humanity.

The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan—didn’t self-esteem finally depend on just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the final time, that notions of purity—of race or of culture—could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American’s self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we’d inherited. It would have to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw’s story and Mr. Marshall’s story, in Ruby’s story and Rafiq’s; in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.

Yet I couldn't connect this racial purity with the warmth of the toothless, lined Bedouin women who showed me such affection in the hospital. I thought about the Bedouin patients I had attended in Riyadh and what they had taught me of acceptance. Surely these Bedouin were the purest Saudis of all, Daughters of Arabia, borne of tribal forebears who had roamed Arabia before the slick of oil wealth suffocated their culture, washing them up like half-dead seagulls into the new urban metropolis of modern Saudi Arabia. I decided it had to be wealth which made the stark difference. All I had to do was think back to the “real” Saudis I had met in Riyadh, so different than the women sharing this tent with me.

Money speaks the language of capitalism, not love. Ego speaks the language of self, not others. Power speaks the language of control, not freedom. Desire speaks the language of yearning, not contentment. Ambition speaks the language of passion, not virtue. Comfort speaks the language of pleasure, not strength. Morality speaks the language of laws, not compassion. Truth speaks the language of reality, not purity. Tradition speaks the language of yesterday, not tomorrow. Culture speaks the language of behavior, not reason. Justice speaks the language of integrity, not mercy. Religion speaks the language of rules, not faith. Race speaks the language of division, not unity. Politics speaks the language of votes, not emancipation.

God’s sexual ethic is first meant to reveal our sin as “utterly sinful” (Romans 7:13) and to devastate us into acknowledging our need for a Savior. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount reveals us all as sexual sinners: the virgins, the serial adulterers, the porn addicts. We all fall short of God’s command to see one another as brothers and sisters in all purity. The main point is not pursuing sexual purity but recognizing our impurity and our desperate need for Christ. So many of us walked right past the gospel on our way to a purity conference. Our parents and youth leaders were so concerned about our budding sexuality, scrambling for direction and wisdom, that some of us ended up signing abstinence pledges before falling on our knees in repentance.

The world celebrates money, the universe celebrates generosity. The world celebrates position, the universe celebrates humility. The world celebrates titles, the universe celebrates dignity. The world celebrates fame, the universe celebrates modesty. The world celebrates success, the universe celebrates mastery. The world celebrates wealth, the universe celebrates charity. The world celebrates strength, the universe celebrates industry. The world celebrates might, the universe celebrates adaptability. The world celebrates power, the universe celebrates energy. The world celebrates lust, the universe celebrates chastity. The world celebrates ambition, the universe celebrates agility. The world celebrates passion, the universe celebrates efficiency. The world celebrates education, the universe celebrates ingenuity. The world celebrates scholars, the universe celebrates sagacity. The world celebrates talent, the universe celebrates creativity. The world celebrates culture, the universe celebrates civility. The world celebrates class, the universe celebrates equality. The world celebrates tradition, the universe celebrates individuality. The world celebrates gender, the universe celebrates impartiality. The world celebrates race, the universe celebrates humanity. The world celebrates tradition, the universe celebrates spirituality. The world celebrates religion, the universe celebrates divinity. The world celebrates pleasure, the universe celebrates purity. The world celebrates darkness, the universe celebrates piety. The world celebrates time, the universe celebrates continuity. The world celebrates chance, the universe celebrates destiny. The world celebrates life, the universe celebrates eternity.

Therefore Socrates says: "You must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness is to be valued." At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of the mind, the period of purity of heart. For the first was brought to a close by the Sophists in their proclaiming the omnipotence of the understanding. But the heart remained worldly-minded, remained a servant of the world, always affected by worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on - the era of culture of the heart. But how is the heart to be cultivated? What the understanding; this one side of the mind, has reached - namely, the capability of playing freely with and over every concern - awaits the heart also; everything worldly must come to grief before it, so that at last family, commonwealth, fatherland, and the like, are given up for the sake of the heart, that is, of blessedness, the heart's blessedness.

The term Aryan connoted the “White” or “Pure Ones,” and referred to moral purity and spiritual status. It did not signify a racial distinction until it was deliberately mistranslated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those who sought to instill a false idea concerning the term Aryan belong to the same order as those concealing the West to East movement of the elements of civilization. They belong to the same species as those proposing eastern Israelites brought culture to Europe and Britain, and who imply that the symbols of the Houses and Kingdoms of Europe (to be seen on heraldry, flags, medallions, coins and regalia) are Jewish in origin. Allegedly, they came to the West between 500 and 600 BC. Actually, they were brought back by those whose ancestry lay in the West. Because of deliberate, pernicious tampering with the meaning of terms, names and titles this simple truth has been expertly obscured by the masters of deception.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested that in order to understand how risk works in the contemporary Western world, one has to substitute the word sin for risk. The concept of sin was used to homogenize Christian cultures, to keep potential rebels and iconoclasts in line, and to separate the pure from the soiled. Now, Douglas argues, risk operates in much the same way. Risk offers a secular cosmology that delineates appropriate behavior, maintains moral order, and prescribes a precise set of values. In the United States, these values include the sanctity of the child, the perfectibility of the child, the sacrificial nature of motherhood, and the responsibility of the individual for maintaining his or her own “wellness.” Risk is a way of policing and reinforcing these values. We chart the lines of social purity and transgression with the chalk of risk, and when disaster strikes, we blame the individual for not hewing closely enough to them.

A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring "Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys "that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not "just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for "pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the "skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: "O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity?

in their struggle to be heard and in the reluctance of their communities to listen. Across cultures, the opposition to contraceptives shares an underlying hostility to women. The judge who convicted Margaret Sanger said that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Really? Why? That judge, who sentenced Sanger to thirty days in a workhouse, was expressing the widespread view that a woman’s sexual activity was immoral if it was separated from her function of bearing children. If a woman acquired contraceptives to avoid bearing children, that was illegal in the United States, thanks to the work of Anthony Comstock. Comstock, who was born in Connecticut and served for the Union in the Civil War, was the creator, in 1873, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and pushed for the laws, later named for him, that made it illegal—among other things—to send information or advertisements on contraceptives, or contraceptives themselves, through the mail. The Comstock Laws also established the new position of Special Agent of the Post Office, who was authorized to carry handcuffs and a gun and arrest violators of the law—a position created for Comstock, who relished his role. He rented a post office box and sent phony appeals to people he suspected. When he got an answer, he would descend on the sender and make an arrest. Some women caught in his trap committed suicide, preferring death to the shame of a public trial. Comstock was a creation of his times and his views were amplified by people in power. The member of Congress who introduced the legislation said during the congressional debate, “The good men of this country … will act with determined energy to protect what they hold most precious in life—the holiness and purity of their firesides.” The bill passed easily, and state legislatures passed their own versions, which were often more stringent. In New York, it was illegal to talk about contraceptives, even for doctors. Of course, no women voted for this legislation, and no women voted for the men who voted for it. Women’s suffrage was decades away.

Sphere/Color /Quality/Service on Planet 1: Blue. To do the will of God, illumined faith, capacity to lead people and manifest large amounts of energy. Initiative. All God-ideas born here. Rulers, leaders and executives. 2. Sunshine yellow. Perception, illumination, inspiration. Ideas are perceived and molded into thought patterns and workable form. Teachers, Educators. 3. Pink. Love, compassion, tolerance. Ideas are clothed with life-essence through the feeling nature, enabling future externalization in the world of form. Love is shown as the cohesive force, holding together a manifested form. Peacemakers, Arbitrators. 4. White. Purity. Artistic development. Poets, artists, musicians, painters, architects. 5. Emerald Green. Scientific development. Healing, concentration, consecration, truth. Scientists, engineers, inventors, healers, doctors, nurses. 6. Ruby with golden radiance. Voluntary impersonal service outside the community. Missionaries. Religious leaders. 7. Violet. Ceremonial service. Culture, refinement, diplomacy. Diplomats, gentlemen, ministers, religious leaders.

Throughout the past few millennia there have been great advances in technology which have raised standards of living in many areas of the world. At the same time, we have reduced our standard of life: our quality of air, purity of rivers and oceans, wellness of the land; and we have increased world hunger, extinction of whole species of animals, depletion of natural resources. Improved technology is not leading to greater peace and harmony among nations, between individuals, even within the self. The patriarchal world is out of balance. The worship of the male energy has led to rape of our natural resources and poisoning of our environment. What is missing, particularly in Western culture, is respect for an energy which makes things whole, an energy which honors life. The goddesses provide a clue how we must restructure our world if it is to survive, a clue both to our past and to our future. The fact that there were powerful goddesses disproves the claim that woman has ‘always’ been powerless and secondary, and that this ‘second rank’ is thus a natural phenomenon. This frees us to move into a balancing.

American cultural historians long thought that as male and female spheres became separated with the rise of industrialism, men practiced aggressive values in the commercial marketplace while women, confined to the home, took on qualities such as passivity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. To be sure, as Ann Douglas and Barbara Welter show, the ideal of the angelic, submissive housewife was purveyed in many novels and advice manuals. But partly in response to the forces driving women to domesticity and debility, more vigorous roles for women were defined. Nina Baym and others have noted the sturdiness often exhibited by the heroines of domestic novels, and Jane P. Tompkins stresses the power and cultural work achieved by popular writers like Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frances B. Cogan shows that to counteract signs of sickliness and passivity among women, antebellum health advisers and popular writers held up the ideal of the tough, active woman—what Cogan calls the Real Woman. In health literature, this movement flowered in works like Dr. Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics for Men, Women and Children (1863). In popular fiction, it gave rise to spirited heroines with the physical capabilities of men. For

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. Castes were not immune to change. In fact, as time went by, large castes were divided into sub-castes. Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally ‘birth’). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person’s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners. Usually a person can marry only within his or her caste, and the resulting children inherit that status. Whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognised as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society. Groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were, literally, outcasts – in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

In the outer layers of young stars life nearly always appears not only in the normal manner but also in the form of parasites, minute independent organisms of fire, often no bigger than a cloud in the terrestrial air, but sometimes as large as the Earth itself. These "salamanders" either feed upon the welling energies of the star in the same manner as the star's own organic tissues feed, or simply prey upon those tissues themselves. Here as elsewhere the laws of biological evolution come into force, and in time there may appear races of intelligent flame-like beings. Even when the salamandrian life does not reach this level, its effect on the star's tissues may become evident to the star as a disease of its skin and sense organs, or even of its deeper tissues. It then experiences emotions not wholly unlike human fright and shame, and anxiously and most humanly guards its secret from the telepathic reach of its fellows. The salamandrian races have never been able to gain mastery over their fiery worlds. Many of them succumb, soon or late, either to some natural disaster or to internecine strife or to the self-cleansing activities of their mighty host. Many others survive, but in a relatively harmless state, troubling their stars only with a mild irritation, and a faint shade of insincerity in all their dealings with one another. In the public culture of the stars the salamandrian pest was completely ignored. Each star believed itself to be the only sufferer and the only sinner in the galaxy. One indirect effect the pest did have on stellar thought. It introduced the idea of purity. Each star prized the perfection of the stellar community all the more by reason of its own secret experience of impurity.

Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist. While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. "Look at their faces!" says Kamimura. "They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle." He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandana and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for. "Sixty years," she says flatly. This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter- feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen. Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering. The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence.

The purity message nestles neatly into the larger “us” versus “them” messaging I was raised with in the church. Those on the “positive” side of the binary are said to have access to God, Heaven, the community, and a happy life as one of “us.” Those on the “negative” side of the binary are said to be isolated from God, alone, and headed for Hell, a place of suffering reserved explicitly for “them.” Though one’s place on that binary is technically supposed to be determined by one’s belief system, let’s face it—you can’t see into another person’s heart and know whether she really believes these things or has just memorized a bunch of talking points. So if you want to assess who’s really a Christian and who’s not—and lots of people do—you need a proxy, some externally measurable quality that is deemed representative of the person’s internal commitment... ...Growing up, I heard a lot of talk about how evangelical Christians were better people than secular or other religious people (funnily enough, I now hear the exact same self-congratulatory messages from secular liberal people). But the truth was, I couldn’t always tell the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian. I saw both lie, both steal, both love, and both unselfishly give to others. But one tangible thing we could point to as evangelicals was that we didn’t have sex before marriage. There was that. There was always that. (10-11) “Don’t just be pure in body; you need to be pure in spirit . . .” Everything was just so intertwined with each other. It almost seemed like if you weren’t being physically impure, you were being spiritually and emotionally impure. Being “pure” became this really heavy, heavy weight to bear all the time. It almost made me go crazy questioning, “Well, is this impure? . . . Is this wrong? . . . Is this okay? . . . Is this going on?” (Holly) (12)

After Us, the Salamanders!, The Future belongs to the Newts, Newts Mean Cultural Revolution. Even if they don't have their own art (they explained) at least they are not burdened with idiotic ideals, dried up traditions and all the rigid and boring things taught in schools and given the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and culture in any of its forms. The word culture is senile and it makes us sick. Human art has been with us for too long and is worn-out and if the newts have never fallen for it we will make a new art for them. We, the young, will blaze the path for a new world of salamandrism: we wish to be the first newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow! And so the young poetic movement of salamandrism was born, triton - or tritone - music was composed and pelagic painting, inspired by the shape world of jellyfish, fish and corals, made its appearance. There were also the water regulating structures made by the newts themselves which were discovered as a new source of beauty and dignity. We've had enough of nature, the slogans went; bring on the smooth, concrete shores instead of the old and ragged cliffs! Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be outlined with clean straight lines and re-shaped into conic sections and rhombuses; the old geological must be replaced with a world of geometry. In short, there was once again a new trend that was to be the thing of the future, a new aesthetic sensation and new cultural manifestoes; anyone who failed to join in with the rise of salamandrism before it was too late felt bitterly that he had missed his time, and he would take his revenge by making calls for the purity of mankind, a return to the values of the people and nature and other reactionary slogans. A concert of tritone music was booed off the stage in Vienna, at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris a pelagic painting called Capriccio en Bleu was slashed by an unidentified perpetrator; salamandrism was simply victorious, and its rise was unstoppable.

Henceforth we find woman no longer a slave of man and tool of lust, but the pride and joy of her husband, the fond mother training her children to virtue and godliness, the ornament and treasure of the family, the faithful sister, the zealous servant of the congregation in every work of Christian charity, the sister of mercy, the martyr with superhuman courage, the guardian angel of peace, the example of purity, humility, gentleness, patience, love, and fidelity unto death. Such women were unknown before. The heathen Libanius, the enthusiastic eulogist of old Grecian culture, pronounced an involuntary eulogy on Christianity when he exclaimed, as he looked at the mother of Chrysostom: "What women the Christians have!

White Lilies" Flowers rare and sweet I sent, whose delicate white Should, grouping at her corsage, interlace Their purity with her corrupted grace, With the full throat and mouth of my delight. Evil design! To see the pale flowers slight The beauty of the worn and powdered face, Mingling their costly virtue with the trace Of ancient loves that live in time's despite. How soon they died, poor blossoms! at her throat Ere of the last valse died the last sad note No more than love of her meant to endure, For all the savour of her lips, the spice Of her frail spirit steeped in cultured vice, Gracefully bad and delicately impure!

The actual Hebrew verb “create” (bara) also focuses our attention in this direction. In the Bible, only God can perform this action of bringing something into existence. What is even more intriguing is that the objects of this verb point consistently toward its connection to functional existence rather than material existence; e.g., God “creates” fire, cloud, destruction, calamity, darkness, righteousness and purity. This is much like the ancient Near Eastern way of thinking that it was more important to determine who controlled functions rather than who/what gave something its physical form. In the ancient world something was created when it was given a function. In the ancient world, the cosmos is less like a machine, more like a kingdom. ◆

Creation and Existence If creation is the act of bringing something into existence, we must ask what constituted existence in the ancient world. In our culture, we consider existence to be either material (i.e., having molecules/taking up space and extending to energy and subatomic particles) or experiential (e.g., abstractions such as love or time). Those definitions, however, are culturally determined. By contrast, in the ancient world something existed when it had a function—a role to play. In Mesopotamia one way to accomplish this was to name something, because a name designated a thing’s function or role. Thus, in the Babylonian creation account, bringing the cosmos into existence begins “When on high no name was given in heaven, nor below was the netherworld called by name . . . When no gods at all had been brought forth, none called by names, none destinies ordained, then were the gods formed.” In Egyptian accounts existence was associated with something having been differentiated. The god Atum is conceptualized as the primordial monad—the singularity embodying all the potential of the cosmos, from whom all things were separated and thereby created. The Genesis account includes both of these concepts as God separates and names. The actual Hebrew verb “create” (bara) also focuses our attention in this direction. In the Bible, only God can perform this action of bringing something into existence. What is even more intriguing is that the objects of this verb point consistently toward its connection to functional existence rather than material existence; e.g., God “creates” fire, cloud, destruction, calamity, darkness, righteousness and purity. This is much like the ancient Near Eastern way of thinking that it was more important to determine who controlled functions rather than who/what gave something its physical form. In the ancient world something was created when it was given a function. In the ancient world, the cosmos is less like a machine, more like a kingdom. ◆

In Mesopotamia one way to accomplish this was to name something, because a name designated a thing’s function or role. Thus, in the Babylonian creation account, bringing the cosmos into existence begins “When on high no name was given in heaven, nor below was the netherworld called by name . . . When no gods at all had been brought forth, none called by names, none destinies ordained, then were the gods formed.” In Egyptian accounts existence was associated with something having been differentiated. The god Atum is conceptualized as the primordial monad—the singularity embodying all the potential of the cosmos, from whom all things were separated and thereby created. The Genesis account includes both of these concepts as God separates and names. The actual Hebrew verb “create” (bara) also focuses our attention in this direction. In the Bible, only God can perform this action of bringing something into existence. What is even more intriguing is that the objects of this verb point consistently toward its connection to functional existence rather than material existence; e.g., God “creates” fire, cloud, destruction, calamity, darkness, righteousness and purity. This is much like the ancient Near Eastern way of thinking that it was more important to determine who controlled functions rather than who/what gave something its physical form. In the ancient world something was created when it was given a function. In the ancient world, the cosmos is less like a machine, more like a kingdom. ◆

Purity culture often functions by shaming us for seeking knowledge about our own bodies. Studying even the scientific elements of sexual intercourse can feel like a rebellion. Knowing yourself, even just medically or scientifically, is a step away from the ignorance that purity teachings often instill. Knowledge is power, especially here—knowing how your body and your partner’s work together can help you both be confident. One of the best ways to develop a healthy sexual ethic for yourself is to know your anatomy, to know how different kinds of sex work, and to be prepared to enter sexual encounters safely. Having this information can help you to be confident, both in saying yes and in saying no. The

Money speaks the language of captilism, not love. Ego speaks the language of self, not others. Power speaks the language of control, not freedom. Desire speaks the language of yearning, not contentment. Ambition speaks the language of passion, not virtue. Comfort speaks the language of pleasure, not strength. Morality speaks the language of laws, not compassion. Truth speaks the language of reality, not purity. Tradition speaks the language of yesturday, not tomorrow. Culture speaks the language of behavior, not reason. Justice speaks the language of integrity, not mercy. Religion speaks the language of rules, not faith. Race speaks the language of division, not unity. Politics speaks the language of votes, not emancipation.

Joseph Joffe aptly differentiated between these two concepts in a lecture on anti-Americanism at Stanford University: “To attack particular policies—say, the refusal to sign on to Kyoto, the Complete Test Ban or the Landmine Ban—is not anti-American. These issues are amenable to rational discourse.. . . To argue that the U.S. defied international law by going to war against Iraq may be true or false. It is certainly not anti-American.”3 What, then, is the “real thing,” the real anti-Americanism? In his analysis, Joffe groups anti-Americanism with other forms of “anti-isms” that—for him—must satisfy the following five conditions: 1. Stereotypization (that is, statements of the type: “This is what they are all like.”) 2. Denigration (the ascription of a collective moral or cultural inferiority to the target group) 3. Omnipotence (e.g., “They control the media, the economy, the world.”) 4. Conspiracy (e.g., “This is what they want to do to us surreptitiously and stealthily—sully our racial purity, destroy our traditional, better, and morally superior ways.”) 5. Obsession (a constant preoccupation with the perceived and feared evil and powerful ways of the hated group)

Unfortunately, the struggle can degenerate from the affirmation of a language and/or culture to the point of tradition at all costs, especially that of the individual, i.e., tradition at the expense of existence, where art becomes simply heritage, from there the path spirals downwards into “blood and soil” politics, the “purity” of the language into the “purity” of the race, and so on.

In recent years, the term “woke” has been widely used to describe those who’ve attained doctrinal purity in regard to the social justice movement. While that movement is secular, it seems to fulfill many of the psycho-spiritual appetites once served by religion.

Ethnic diversity was not traditionally valued in Japanese Zen or in Japanese culture; in fact, so-called racial purity was idealized.

For a long time, the Jesus that has been portrayed in the American Church – a soft, blue-eyed, long-haired, white guy who pets baby sheep in his spare time and never gets angry – often looks vastly different than the Jesus in the bible. The same Jesus who fed sheep, flipped tables. The same God who created the earth in seven days, is the same God who flooded it in one. The same God who parted the Red Sea, is the same God who used it to drown His enemies. The same God who rained down bread from heaven to provide, is the same God who rained down fire from heaven to destroy. The same Jesus who died as a lamb, is the same Jesus who is returning as a Lion.

At first, He shook us very tenderly but now, His shaking has become violent, because He has not succeeded in awakening us… God is going to shake everything in sight so that He is revealed as the only unshakeable power. -David Wilkerson

How can we follow Jesus and the Samaritan woman in making outsiders into insiders? In John 4, Jesus defied social conventions and the popular understanding of sin and purity and asked an outsider for a drink of water. He put himself in a vulnerable position, acknowledging his own need and opening himself up to criticism and condemnation from his faith community. We can do the same thing with social and ethnic outsiders. I think most of us who grew up in the church learned unconsciously to assume a position of superiority toward outsiders. We are taught that we are the sole possessors of the truth, that we have higher moral standards than the “secular” world, that we are the chosen of God, destined to bring salvation to the masses. But there is hope for those of us who grew up (or still worship) in congregations characterized by closed minds, closed doors, and closed hearts. We can experience transformation as individuals, and then we can begin to change the culture of our churches. We can go about our daily interactions with the awareness that we don’t have the exclusive rights to the truth and that other people might be able to teach us something. We can admit that we are broken people who struggle with failure. Instead of patting ourselves on the back for our church involvement or our superb ethical standards, we can realize that God works through us much more easily when we choose humility over pride and confession over condemnation. We can enter into the kind of dialogue that Jesus and the Samaritan woman had, where outsiders become insiders and we welcome even our so-called enemies into our communities and our hearts.

We’ve all lived too damn long lugging around this puritanical notion that pleasure must be villainized to protect us from ourselves.⁠ Fuck that.⁠ Seriously.⁠ The only question you need to ask is this:⁠ Is everyone involved in full personal safety and enthusiastic consent?⁠ Ask it loudly and repeatedly if you need to.⁠ Yes?⁠ Then you go with your bad, brilliant, beautiful, pleasure-filled self.⁠ Our bodies are here to feel good.⁠ And what makes that happen isn’t for anyone else to decide.⁠ It doesn’t matter whether you’re outside the gender binary, into collars and restraints, love someone with the same parts, desire more than one human, or have a kinky turn on others think is weird.⁠ Monogamous, polyamorous, relationship anarchist, vanilla, kinky—whatever your flavor, it’s valid.⁠ We’ve all wasted way too much damn time in the closet.⁠ End of story.

Purity culture attaches morality to sex to do the same. Beneath it is the assumption that sex will inevitably occur and that everyone desires it. In fact, that assumption is an essential part of purity culture—the idea that we are all “sinners” continually battling sexual urges, and resisting those urges until we are bound in heterosexual marriage “ordained by God” is what makes us pure. It doesn’t seek to hinder people from ever having sex at all; it seeks to control the conditions under which people do have sex.

A nervous and bureaucratic culture is closed-mindedly attaching more importance to the purity of the methodology than to the possible value of the solution,

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If the Greek miracle were to remain a miracle, its proponents must maintain that it happened by a kind of parthenogenesis, not by a fertilization from outside. So the whole Hegelian view of history and civilization, with its emphasis on cultural purity and its disapproval of hybridity, brushed aside the question of possible influences passing between Indian and Greek philosophers. For

The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product,” they didn’t vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn’t make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer.

As a young adult, Naomi became a teacher to help inspire children; to aid the creativity and channelled passions of their fertile minds. Now, the kids would read these Protocols; that 11yr old boy would be joined by an army of thousands, countless thousands, even millions. How long until the twisted poison of language could scar purity, and forever pervert the children of Britain into a hateful, vengeful, violent clique of racists? *Jewish life was life unworthy of life.* How could she have ever ignored and belittled this work? So maleficient was its content, to perniciously penetrate the conscious fears of all European nations – and presumably the rest of the world – to transcend cultural differences, and encompass all facets of cultural decay and parasitic operation to insidiously affect the thinking of – and thence bind together –all peoples of Britain, America and Europe to the modern form of anti-Semitism and scientific racial loathing. From the medieval beliefs of sacrifice and well-poisoning to this modern resurrection of ancient fears, with its sinister new ambition and devilish upgrade in scale; Naomi realised with trepidation that once more, her people truly had been chosen.

Now I would like to stress that what we have just seen described is actually much more difficult, and produces much more of a shake-up, than seems to be the case from St Luke’s account. The reason is that we are all actually far more run by our systems of purity, the things which keep us “us” and the other “other”, than we realize. Peter, for instance, was not someone who was in principle a citizen of the world, but just happened to hold to a purity code as a pleasing cultural option. He had been completely brought up within a system, had taken it for granted. The system had given him to be who he was. It hadn’t even occurred to him for quite a long time after hanging out with Jesus, after Jesus had risen from the dead, and after he, Peter, had been performing miracles in Jesus’ name, that all this was going to have unpredictably huge cultural consequences. So what we witness is him being taken to a place at the very limit of his experience. He actually finds himself being asked to do something repulsive.