Violated Image Quotes

The strange thing; her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes - like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.

Special Circumstances had always been the Contact section’s moral espionage weapon, the very cutting edge of the Culture’s interfering diplomatic policy, the elite of the elite, in a society which abhorred elitism. Even before the war, its standing and its image within the Culture had been ambiguous. It was glamorous but dangerous, possessed of an aura of roguish sexiness - there was no other word for it - which implied predation, seduction and even violation…No other part of the Culture more exactly represented what the society as a whole really stood for, or was more militant in the application of he Culture’s fundamental beliefs. Yet no other part embodied less of the society’s day-to-day character.

Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God’s image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God’s glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, “Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). He is saying, “If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.

what is the expression which the age demands? the age demands no expression whatever. we have seen photographs of bereaved asian mothers. we are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. there is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. do not even try. you will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. we have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. you are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. this should make you very quiet. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. everyone knows you are in pain. you cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. you have nothing to teach them. you are not more beautiful than they are. you are not wiser. do not shout at them. do not force a dry entry. that is bad sex. if you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. and remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. what is our need? to be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. the bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. they have also destroyed the stage. did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? there is no more stage. there are no more footlights. you are among the people. then be modest. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. be by yourself. be in your own room. do not put yourself on. do not act out words. never act out words. never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. if you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. if ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material. this is an interior landscape. it is inside. it is private. respect the privacy of the material. these pieces were written in silence. the courage of the play is to speak them. the discipline of the play is not to violate them. let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. be good whores. the poem is not a slogan. it cannot advertise you. it cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. you are students of discipline. do not act out the words. the words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. the poem is nothing but information. it is the constitution of the inner country. if you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. you are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. think of the words as science, not as art. they are a report. you are speaking before a meeting of the explorers' club of the national geographic society. these people know all the risks of mountain climbing. they honour you by taking this for granted. if you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. do not work the audience for gasps ans sighs. if you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. it will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. avoid the flourish. do not be afraid to be weak. do not be ashamed to be tired. you look good when you're tired. you look like you could go on forever. now come into my arms. you are the image of my beauty.

You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine.” “I’m afraid so.” “Why again exactly, now?” “I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.” “Why?” “Why? I guess to give my life some sort of meaning, Lyle.” “And how would this do this again?” “Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?” “You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.” “I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?” “The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.” “Lyle, don’t they?” “LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.” “Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.” “LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?” “Okey-dokey.” “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” “Maybe I ought to be getting back.” “LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.” “Animal?” “You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.” “This is good news?” “It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.” “The burning doesn’t go away?” “What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull toward yourself.” “Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?” “LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.” “So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.” “You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

Society gives the image of sexual violators as weird, ugly, anti-social, alcoholics. Society gives the impression that violators kidnap children are out of their homes and take them to some wooded area and abandon them after the violation. Society gives the impression that everyone hates people who violate children. If all of these myths were true, healing would not be as challenging as it is. Half of our healing is about the actual abuse. The other half is about how survivors fit into society in the face of the myths that people hold in order to make themselves feel safe. The truth is that 80% of childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by family members. Yet we rarely hear the word “incest”. The word is too ugly and the truth is too scary. Think about what would happen if we ran a campaign to end incest instead of childhood sexual abuse. The number one place that children should know they are safe is in their homes. As it stands, as long as violators keep sexual abuse within the family, the chances of repercussion by anyone is pretty low. Wives won’t leave violating husbands, mothers won’t kick their violating children out of the home, and violating grandparents still get invited to holiday dinners. It is time to start cleaning house. If we stop incest first, then we will strengthen our cause against all sexual abuse.

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

Baháʼí writings describe racism as 'an outrageous violation of the dignity of human beings'. 'Numerous points of partnership and agreement exist between the two races [i.e. black and white]; whereas the one point of distinction is that of colour. Shall this, the least of all distinctions be allowed to separate you as races and individuals?' ('Abdu'l Bahá) 'Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land...' (Baháʼu'lláh)

To be formed and shaped by the Incarnate: That is what it means to be truly human. All efforts to be more than human, to be superhuman, all efforts to grow beyond one's humanity, all heroism, all attempts at being demigods are discarded here, for all of it is untrue. The real human being is neither an object of contempt nor of apotheosis, but rather God's love. The multiplicity of God's creative wealth is not violated here by false uniformity, by coercion of human beings under an ideal, under a type, a particular image. Real human beings are allowed in freedom to be the creatures of their creator. Being formed in the image of the Incarnate means being permitted to be the human being one really is. There is no more pretense, hypocrisy, cramped coercion to be something other than what one is, something better, something more ideal. God loves real human beings. God became a real human being.

But the private life of a black woman, to say nothing of the private life of a black man, cannot really be considered at all. To consider this forbidden privacy is to violate white privacy -- by destroying the white dream of the blacks; to make black privacy a black and private matter makes white privacy real, for the first time: which is, indeed, and with a vengeance, to endanger the stewardship of Rhodesia. The situation of the white heroine must never violate the white self-image. Her situation must always transcend the inexorability of the social setting, so that her innocence may be preserved: Grace Kelly, when she shoots to kill at the end of 'High Noon,' for example, does not become a murderess. But the situation of the black heroine, to say nothing of the black hero, must always be left at society's mercy: in order to justify white history and in order to indicate the essential validity of the black condition.

The principle of conscious life is: 'Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu.' But the principle of the unconscious is the autonomy of the psyche itself, reflecting in the play of its images not the world but itself, even though it utilizes the illustrative possibilities offered by the sensible world in order to make its images clear. The sensory datum, however, is not the causa efficiens of this; rather, it is autonomously selected and exploited by the psyche, with the result that the rationality of the cosmos is constantly being violated in the most distressing manner. But the sensible world has an equally devastating effect on the deeper psychic processes when it breaks into them as a causa efficiens. If reason is not to be outraged on the one hand and the creative play of images not violently suppressed on the other, a circumspect and farsighted synthetic procedure is required in order to accomplish the paradoxical union of irreconcilables.

Statues of Saints CHALLENGE “The Catholic use of statues of saints is idolatry.” DEFENSE Idolatry involves worshipping a statue as a god. That's not what Catholics do with statues. Statues of saints do not represent gods. They represent human beings or angels united with God in heaven. Even the least learned practicing Catholics are aware that statues of saints are not gods, and neither are the saints they represent. If you point to a statue of the Virgin Mary and ask, “Is this a goddess?” or “Is the Virgin Mary a goddess?” you should receive the answer “no” in both cases. If this is the case for the Virgin Mary, the same will be true of any saint. As long as one is not confusing a statue with a god, it is not an idol, and the commandment against idolatry is not violated. This was true in the Bible. At various points, God commanded the Israelites to make statues and images for religious use. For example, in the book of Numbers the Israelites were suffering from a plague of poisonous snakes, and God commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole so that those bitten by the snakes could gaze upon the bronze serpent and live (Num. 21:6–9). The act of looking at a statue has no natural power to heal, so this was a religious use. It was only when, centuries later, people began to regard the statue as a god that it was being used as an idol and so was destroyed (2 Kings 18:4). God also commanded that his temple, which represented heaven, be filled with images of the inhabitants of heaven. Thus he originally ordered that craftsmen work images of cherubim (a kind of angel) into curtains of the Tent of Meeting (Exod. 26:1). Later, carvings of cherubim were made on the walls and doors of the temple (1 Kings 6:29–35). Statues were also made. The lid of the Ark of the Covenant included two statues of cherubim that spread their wings toward each other (Exod. 25:18–20), and the temple included giant, fifteen-foot tall statues of cherubim in the holy of holies (1 Kings 6:23–28). Since the Ascension of Christ, the saints have joined the angels in heaven (CCC 1023), making images of them in church appropriate as well.

This is a very common thing among male groups of friends. There is a person who's always taking heat from everyone else for various reasons. Not that I'm defending this behavior though, fuck no, I hate it when guys are like this; it's barbaric and stupid. Unfortunately I think it's like an unconscious thing that just comes natural to guys when we're in groups. We take the piss out of each other all the time, prodding until we know the limits of each other and crossing the lines once in a while to test the boundaries. Some guys who're overly-nice or don't fully understand this dynamic get completely shit on by it. If you keep excusing small actions by others that violate your boundaries, they'll just keep pushing and pushing, giving less and less respect until they know how far they're allowed to go. Having people knowing your limits and making sure to not cross them equates to respect, which is what we're after. This doesn't mean you should to tell them all to fuck off now; that wouldn't work anymore because you've allowed them this far into your territory. It'd seem like an overreaction from you, which makes sense, right? "We were just joking around yesterday about the same things, he seemed cool with it, but now he's all pissed for some reason, this guys a whack..." The key thing to note if you want to avoid this in the future is to either find "nicer" friends, or to let people know when they cross a boundary. This may sound huge and dramatic, but it's honestly a really simple thing. "Haha great job idiot you messed up" ----> "Fuck you man haha" Simple as that; he/they poked at you and by throwing it back at him, you let him know you're not just going to take it. If they do something that crosses your boundary, you respond appropriately; a big cross, like outright disrespecting you, means a big reaction, like telling the guy off. Does this mean you can't be nice anymore? Nope, not at all. You can still be a nice guy; most interactions with others don't involve all this boundary bullshit - and that's when the niceness in your personality can shine through. Beyond that, it's also a personal image/confidence thing. If you truly respect yourself, how would you let anyone get away with the things they say/do to you? What if this was your little sister? Would you let others treat her the same way? If not, then why would you let them treat you this way?

The only genuinely photographic subjects are those which are violated, taken by surprise, discovered or exposed despite themselves, those which should never have been represented because they have neither self-image nor selfconsciousness. The savage - like the savage part of us - has no reflection. He is savagely foreign to himself. The most seductive women are the most selfestranged (Marilyn). Good photography does not represent anything: rather, it captures this non-representability, the otherness of that which is foreign to itself (to desire, to self-consciousness), the radical exoticism of the object. Objects, like primitives, are way ahead of us in the photogenic stakes: they are free a priori of psychology and introspection, and hence retain all their seductive power before the camera. Photography records the state of the world in our absence. The lens explores this absence; and it does so even in bodies and faces laden with emotion, with pathos. Consequently, the best photographs are photographs of beings for which the other does not exist, or no longer exists (primitives, the poor, objects). Only the non-human is photogenic. Only when this precondition is met does a kind of reciprocal wonder come into play - and hence a collusiveness on our part vis-a-vis the world, and a collusiveness on the part of the world with respect to us.

The Naked Truth When the gift-giving meaning of the body is obscured, distorted, or misrepresented, art becomes a lie. This is what happens in pornography. The body—which was created to be a free gift from one person to another—is depersonalized and reduced to an object for lust. This concern for human dignity goes against the grain of “naturalism” in art. The so-called naturalists demand the right to reproduce “everything that is human.” What others call pornography, they defend as a realistic depiction of humanity. But in the end, it is precisely this—the whole truth about man—that is lost when privacy is violated and the body is reduced to an object for lust. In order to speak of true realism in art, the full truth about man as created in the image of God must be considered. In this respect, the principles governing interpersonal relations still apply within the realm of art. The naked human body has a “language.” It expresses the spirit. When given in trust and love, the body is the basis of a communion of persons. Because the naked human body has such importance, it must be depicted with great care to preserve its meaning in art. Only within certain boundaries can the truth about the body be preserved. In film, photography, and mass media, there is a dangerous tendency to separate the body from the person. Reproduced on paper or on screen, the naked body can cease to communicate the person. It often becomes, instead, an anonymous object. Because the glory and beauty of the human body is at stake, we cannot remain indifferent to culture. We do not oppose pornography out of a narrow, puritanical idea of morality. Nor do we oppose it out of a Manichaean fear or hatred of the body, as is often asserted. The exact opposite is true. We oppose pornography out of respect for the dignity of the body.

According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

During this same period of his life Bohm also continued to refine his alternative approach to quantum physics. As he looked more carefully into the meaning of the quantum potential he discovered it had a number of features that implied an even more radical departure from orthodox thinking. One was the importance of wholeness. Classical science had always viewed the state of a system as a whole as merely the result of the interaction of its parts. However, the quantum potential stood this view on its ear and indicated that the behavior of the parts was actually organized by the whole. This not only took Bohr's assertion that subatomic particles are not independent "things, " but are part of an indivisible system one step further, but even suggested that wholeness was in some ways the more primary reality. It also explained how electrons in plasmas (and other specialized states such as superconductivity) could behave like interconnected wholes. As Bohm states, such "electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people. " Once again he notes that "such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine. "6 An even more surprising feature of the quantum potential was its implications for the nature of location. At the level of our everyday lives things have very specific locations, but Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the subquantum level, the level in which the quantum potential operated, location ceased to exist All points in space became equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "nonlocality. " The nonlocal aspect of the quantum potential enabled Bohm to explain the connection between twin particles without violating special relativity's ban against anything traveling faster than the speed of light. To illustrate how, he offers the following analogy: Imagine a fish swimming in an aquarium. Imagine also that you have never seen a fish or an aquarium before and your only knowledge about them comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other at its side. When you look at the two television monitors you might mistakenly assume that the fish on the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch you will eventually realize there is a relationship between the two fish. When one turns, the other makes a slightly different but corresponding turn. When one faces the front, the other faces the side, and so on. If you are unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might wrongly conclude that the fish are instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is not the case. No communication is taking place because at a deeper level of reality, the reality of the aquarium, the two fish are actually one and the same. This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between particles such as the two photons emitted when a positronium atom decays (see fig. 8).

According to the book of Genesis, “God created man in his own image.” According to Aristotle, “men create the gods after their own image.” As should be clear by now, Aristotle seems to have been onto something, especially when it comes to the minds of gods. So, in theory, some of the more basic features of the human mind should be fairly standard equipment in gods, especially the gods of “primitive” religions. That seems to be the case, and one of these features deserves special consideration: the part of the human mind shaped by the evolutionary dynamic known as “reciprocal altruism.” In light of this dynamic, much about the origin of religion, and for that matter much about contemporary religion, makes a new kind of sense. Thanks to reciprocal altruism, people are “designed” to settle into mutually beneficial relationships with other people, people whom they can count on for things ranging from food to valuable gossip to social support, and who in turn can count on them. We enter these alliances almost without thinking about it, because our genetically based emotions draw us in. We feel gratitude for a favor received, along with a sense of obligation, which may lead us to return the favor. We feel growing trust of and affection for people who prove reliable reciprocators (aka “friends”), which keeps us entwined in beneficial relationships. This is what feelings like gratitude and trust are for—the reason they’re part of human nature. But of course, not everyone merits our trust. Some people accept our gifts of food and never reciprocate, or try to steal our mates, or exhibit disrespect in some other fashion. And if we let people thus take advantage of us day after day, the losses add up. In the environment of our evolution, these losses could have made the difference between surviving and not surviving, between prolifically procreating and barely procreating. So natural selection gave us emotions that lead us to punish the untrustworthy—people who violate our expectations of exchange, people who seem to lack the respect that a mutually beneficial relationship demands. They fill us with outrage, with moral indignation, and that outrage—working as “designed” —impels us to punish them in one way or another, whether by actually harming them or just by withholding future altruism. That will teach them! (Perhaps more important, it will also teach anyone else who is watching, and in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, pretty much everyone in your social universe was watching.) This is the social context in which the human mind evolved: a world full of neighbors who, to varying degrees, are watching you for signs of betrayal or disrespect or dishonesty—and who, should they see strong evidence of such things, will punish you. In such a social universe, when misfortune comes your way, when someone hits you or ridicules you or suddenly gives you the cold shoulder, there’s a good chance it’s because they feel you’ve violated the rules of exchange. Maybe you’ve failed to do them some favor they think they were due, or maybe you’ve shown them disrespect by doing something that annoys them. Surely it is no coincidence that this generic explanation of why misfortune might emanate from a human being is also the generic explanation of why misfortune emanates from gods. In hunter-gatherer religions—and lots of other religions—when bad things happen, the root cause is almost always that people in one sense or another fail to respect the gods. They either fail to give gods their due (fail, say, to make adequate sacrifices to ancestral spirits), or they do things that annoy gods (like, say, making a noise while cicadas are singing). And the way to make amends to the aggrieved gods is exactly the way you’d make amends to aggrieved people: either give them something (hence ritual sacrifice), or correct future behavior so that it doesn’t annoy them (quit making noises while cicadas are singing).

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Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God's image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God's glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, "Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 16:25). He is saying, "If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.

For a long time the horror that these images elicited remained buried inside him. A morbid reality he was constantly feeding and yet he was unable to express. As though unable to fully believe or understand what they depicted. It was only when the channel 4 documentary came out in 2011, accusing the government of war crimes and genocide, when later that year the UN published its report, giving an estimate of how many civilians had died that he was finally able to speak about what had happened. To accept that the images he had become obsessed with were not some strange perverted creation of his subconscious life but they represented things that had really happened in the country he was from. Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war. As though he had been hesitating to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor violated stateless people were the ones alleging it. As though he was unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the panel of foreign authority experts, legitimised by a documentary, narrated by a clean shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.

Then a lawyer said, "But what of our Laws, master?" And he answered: You delight in laying down laws, Yet you delight more in breaking them. Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter. But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore, And when you dest them the ocean laughs with you. Verily the ocean laughs always with the innocent. But what of those to whom life is not an ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-towers, But to whom life is a rock, and the law a chisel with which they would carve it in their own likeness? What of the cripple who hates dancers? What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the forest stray and vagrant things? What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin, and calls all others naked and shameless? And of him who comes early to the wedding feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers? What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun? They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws. And what is the sun to them but a caster of shadows? And what is it to acknowledge the laws but to stoop down and trace their shadows upon the earth? But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you? You who travel with the wind, what weather vane shall direct your course? What man's law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door? What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's iron chains? And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man's path? People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

If you cannot adhere to your oath and the state constitution, it is better to resign than to comply and embrace unlawful attempts by third-party elements. Be sure to be a patriotic hero of the nation, standing up against the traitors who violate and damage the constitution and image of the state.

It was at Hermon in the land of Bashan, “the place of the Serpent,” that the two hundred rebels set up their supernatural fortress in the bowels of the mountain. From here, they engaged in their primeval plans of usurping Yahweh’s authority, corrupting his creation, and violating his image. They proclaimed themselves gods over the people and began to mate with human women. Their offspring were the Nephilim, giants of old, demigods who would be considered the first of the Seed of the Serpent, Nachash. Yahweh had most of the rebel Watchers bound into the earth, and drowned the land to stop the cancerous growth of this diabolical seed along with mankind’s violence and idolatry. He saved Noah and his family to start over with a purely human bloodline from which to bring forth a new Seed, a messiah king, who would destroy the power of the Serpent and his Seed forever. Yahweh allotted the nations of sinful mankind and their territories to the rebellious Watcher gods. But he kept for himself the nation of Israel and claimed the land of Canaan as his allotted territory.

L’état humain — ou tout autre état « central » analogue — est comme entouré d’un cercle de feu : il n’y a là qu’un choix, ou bien échapper au « courant des formes » par le haut, en direction de Dieu, ou bien sortir de l’humanité par le bas, à travers le feu, lequel est comme la sanction de la trahison de ceux qui n’ont pas réalisé le sens divin de la condition humaine; si « la condition humaine est difficile à atteindre», comme l’estiment les Asiates « transmigrationnistes », elle est également difficile à quitter, pour la même raison de position centrale et de majesté théomorphe. Les hommes vont au feu parce qu’ils sont des dieux, et ils en sortent parce qu’ils ne sont que des créatures; Dieu seul pourrait aller éternellement en enfer s’il pouvait pécher. Ou encore : l’état humain est tout près du Soleil divin, s’il est possible de parler ici de « proximité »; le feu est la rançon éventuelle — à rebours — de cette situation privilégiée; on peut mesurer celle-ci à l’intensité et à l’inextin-guibilité du feu. Il faut conclure de la gravité de l’enfer à la grandeur de l’homme, et non pas, inversement, de l’apparente innocence de l’homme à l’injustice supposée de l’enfer. [...] Bien des hommes de notre temps tiennent en somme le langage suivant : « Dieu existe ou il n ’existe pas ; s’il existe et s’il est ce qu’on dit, il reconnaîtra que nous sommes bons et que nous ne méritons aucun châtiment » ; c’est-a-dire qu’ils veulent bien croire à son existence s’il est conforme à ce qu’ils s’imaginent et s’il reconnaît la valeur qu’ils s’attribuent à eux-mêmes. C’est oublier, d’une part, que nous ne pouvons connaître les mesures avec lesquelles l’Absolu nous juge, et d’autre part, que le « feu » d’outre-tombe n’est rien d ’autre, en définitive, que notre propre intellect qui s’actualise à l'encontre de notre fausseté, ou en d’autres termes, qu’il est la vérité immanente qui éclate au grand jour. A la mort, l’homme est confronté avec l’espace inouï d’une réalité, non plus fragmentaire, mais totale, puis avec la norme de ce qu’il a prétendu être, puisque cette norme fait partie du Réel ; l’homme se condamne donc lui-même, ce sont — d’après le Koran — ses membres mêmes qui l’accusent ; ses violations, une fois le mensonge dépassé, le transforment en flammes ; la nature déséquilibrée et faussée, avec toute sa vaine assurance, est une tunique de Nessus. L’homme ne brûle pas que pour ses péchés; il brûle pour sa majesté d’image de Dieu. C’est le parti pris d’ériger la déchéance en norme et l’ignorance en gage d’impunité que le Koran stigmatise avec véhémence — on pourrait presque dire : par anticipation — en confrontant l’assurance de ses contradicteur avec les affres de la fin du monde (1). En résumé, tout le problème de la culpabilité se réduit au rapport de la cause à l’effet. Que l’homme soit loin d'être bon, l’histoire ancienne et récente le prouve surabondamment, l’homme n’a pas l’innocence de l’animal, il a conscience de son imperfection, puisqu’il en possède la notion ; donc il est responsable. Ce qu’on appelle en terminologie morale la faute de l’homme et le châtiment de Dieu, n’est rien d ’autre, en soi, que le heurt du déséquilibre humain avec l’Equilibre immanent ; cette notion est capitale.[...] (1) C'est la même un des thèmes les plus instamment répétés de ce livre sacré, qui marque parfois son caractère d'ultime message par une éloquence presque désespérée.

It disgusted Joshua. Not the plague so much as the spiritual and moral corruption that it pointed toward. These Canaanite gods of depravity inspired the debasement of every aspect of Yahweh’s image in man. They bred sexual perversions that violated all sacred separations: Fornication, Incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality; they provoked fetishes with excrement like vomit and fecal matter; and they defaced the body with occultic tattoos and mutilations. And they mocked the atonement of redemption with their human sacrifices. Israel had become a festering cesspool of evil. The only thing that made Joshua feel any better was knowing that he was to be the instrument for Yahweh’s cleansing. Sin was a cancerous tumor. It had to be gouged out, not merely from those who hated Yahweh, but also from Yahweh’s own people.

Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a court date in Iran. A judge there has ordered him to answer complaints from individuals who say Facebook-owned applications Instagram and WhatsApp violate their privacy, according to the semiofficial ISNA news agency. Zuckerberg is unlikely to appear. Facebook is banned in Iran, and the U.S.

Who knows not to what monstrous gods, my friend, The mad inhabitants of Egypt tend? The river-fish, cat, ibis some enshrine; Some think the crocodile alone divine; Others where Thebes’ vast ruins strew the ground, And shattered Memnon yields a magic sound, Set up a glittering brute of uncouth shape And bow before the image of an ape! Thousands regard the hound with holy fear; No one Diana. And ’tis dangerous here To violate an onion or to stain The sanctity of leeks with tooth profane. Oh, holy nation! Sacrosanct abodes Where every garden propagates its gods! They spare the fleecy tribe andthink it ill The blood of lambkins or of kids to spill; But human flesh – oh that is lawful fare, And you may eat it without scandal there.

Those who vandalised and violated your body have borne generations of children who, today, worship the likeness of your body.

Wherever the violation occurs and no matter who the perpetrator is (or what they intended), it results in a wound because it was an action against our dignity as men and women made in the image and likeness of God.

Most things in the world aren’t dangerous in their own right. It’s when people take those things, use them to further their own agenda, warp them to serve themselves rather than others, that turns something good, decent, or neutral into a devastating force. The entire world was a ticking time bomb. The digital world wasn’t all bad. It was neutral, really. But it also fueled polarization, discontent, and angst. It made things accessible that you used to have to find in dusty tomes, or had to research in libraries or at universities. You don’t need to travel the world to consult an expert any more. A bastardized version of almost any expertise was posted online for all the world to use and abuse. What should have united people, giving us access to information to understand other people, cultures, and worldviews, has instead become bent by the human pathology— the disease of narcissism— to do the opposite. We used the digital sphere to close our minds to anything that challenged our assumptions. People found it easier to congregate among the like- minded. It’s reached a point of absurdity. Rather than consider views that challenge one’s perspective of the world, people search out those who will ratify and confirm their biases. As such, rather than bringing people together, or debating their ideas in the public square, people on either extreme of any situation only grow more polarized, stretching the civilized world like a criminal on a medieval rack. All because everyone’s too damn blind to consider their own error, how they might be wrong, or to critically reconsider their own insecurities and fears. Understanding the other has never been more possible due to the accessibility of information. Anyone who genuinely wants to understand alternate lifestyles or views can do so quite easily— but no one wants to. Because when our idols fail, when our false- gods betray us, it leaves us grasping at straws. Even those like my father, who use religion to serve their own insecurities, and reforge their deity into an idol in their own image— worship at the altar of the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I. That’s always been the state of the world, in truth. Whatever we fear, love, or trust the most. That’s our god. And most people trust “number one” above all else, they prioritize themself over all others, and since they’ve become gods unto themselves, anyone who disagrees with them is no longer viewed as a dignified person with a right to their own opinions and choices. If their opinion contradicted and violated my divine me, then anyone who disagrees with me is by definition a heretic. And the world has only ever had one way of dealing with those they deem heretics. One thing I’ve learned more than anything else over the last century and a half of my existence is that being wrong isn’t a bad thing. We can’t grow at all if we can’t admit our error. We will never advance if we don’t grant ourselves permission to be wrong— if we aren’t thankful for being disproven, that we might evolve, adapt, and grow in our wisdom. That’s what’s crazy about the world. It’s spinning out of control, ready to tear itself apart. All it would take is a simple recognition that it’s okay to be wrong, that it’s a necessary part of life, and a realization that we can all learn something from anyone and everyone else. But we’ve all become zealots in the religion of self. We’re all staunch defenders of our personal dogma. The problem is that we all nod along to those insights— so long as they convict everyone else. While the god of “self” is weak, an idol no more trustworthy than gods of wood or stone, it doesn’t die easily. Who was I to think I could save the world ever? All I’d ever done was delay the inevitable. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t keep trying… I wouldn’t keep fighting. Because when we stop fighting for others we end up stuck in that damned religion of me. And I was never very religious. Why change now?

Sometimes it felt as if he telling his own story, and he realized that mixed up with the tragedy of Khaster were images and feelings from when the Magravandians had sacked home. When he related Tayven’s violation, he spoke in the first person. Yet it was so different.

When someone violates you sexually, it does not simply haunt and aggrieve you; it alters the very shape of your soul. And altered I was. Contrary to the mythology surrounding the unflinching nature of African-American women, we, too, experience trauma. Black women—our essence, our emotional intricacies, the indignities we carry in our bones—are the most deeply misunderstood human beings in history. Those who know nothing about us have had the audacity to try to introduce us to ourselves, in the unsteady strokes of caricature, on stages, in books, and through their distorted reflections of us. The resulting Fun House image, a haphazard depiction sketched beneath the dim light of ignorance, allows ample room for our strength, our rage and tenacity, to stand at center stage. When we express anger, the audience of the world applauds. That expression aligns with their portrait of us. As long as we play our various designated roles—as court jesters and as comic relief, as Aunt Jemimas and as Jezebels, as maids whisking aperitifs into drawing rooms, as shuckin’ and jivin’ half-wits serving up levity—we are worthy of recognition in their meta-narrative. We are obedient Negroes. We are dutiful and thus affirmable. But when we dare tiptoe outside the lines of those typecasts, when we put our full humanity on display, when we threaten the social constructs that keep others in comfortable superiority, we are often dismissed. There is no archetype on file in which a Black woman is simultaneously resolute and trembling, fierce and frightened, dominant and receding. My mother, a woman who, amid abuse, stuffed hope and a way out into the slit of a mattress, is the very face of fortitude. I am an heir to her remarkable grit. However, beneath that tough exterior, I’ve also inherited my mother’s tender femininity, that part of her spirit susceptible to bruising and bleeding, the doleful Dosha who sat by the window shelling peanuts, pondering how to carry on. The myth of the Strong Black Woman bears a kernel of truth, but it is only a half-seed. The other half is delicate and ailing, all the more so because it has been denied sunlight.

While thinking of alternatives to the “unsustainable” aspects of civilization may be strictly logical, the mental process of this thinking consists of taking various aspects of reality out of context and violating historicity, the progression of which is civilization. In other words, the ideology of “progress” functions rather as one remembers a dream ⁠— a few salient images are remembered, the rest forgotten.

The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever comes into in his head, insulting others and violating all rules of good manners…) tells a lot about our predicament: what world do we live in in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain—as Alenka Zupančič put it, Trump is not a relic of old moral-majority conservatism, he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations

You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.' 'I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?' 'The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.' 'Lyle don't they?' ... 'LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.' 'Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.' 'LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?' 'Okey-dokey.' 'The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.' "maybe I ought to be getting back.' 'LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Change: namely Micheal Change's enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMong-Chu. No such animal.' 'Animal?' 'You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.' 'The burning doesn't go away?' 'What fire dies when you feed it?' ... 'Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't make me feel very much better at all?' "LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage' 'So I'm stuck in the cage from either side Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.' 'You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right ... there ....' Etc.

I follow Sevro to Cassius’s room. The door is open. I feel anger toward Sevro for violating Cassius’s sanctum, but then I see the cramped room into which Cassius fit his huge life. On one wall his childhood, filled with moving pictures of Eagle Rest, Julian, his father, his brothers, his sisters, even his mother—all curly-haired and smiling. There are a few swordsmanship badges and mementos whose meaning will never now be known. A purple stone with flecks of gold. A chunk of metal the size of an apple. A carved length of wood. A large knife with an eagle-shaped pommel. On another wall hangs a House Mars pendant, surrounded by printed news clippings of my pack. Not just me, but Sevro, Screwface, Clown, Pebble, Virginia, even Pax. They are all happy moments, and it makes me sad that he couldn’t be there to share them with us. On the third wall are images of Lysander, Pytha, and Cassius through the years. But it’s the holoprojector that makes me stare. A loch floats in the air filled with two shivering boys while a wolflike creature slinks around its edges.

O God, Through the image of a woman crucified on the cross I understand at last, For over half of my life I have been ashamed of the scars I bear. These scars tell an ugly story, a common story, about a girl who is the victim when a man acts out his fantasies, In the warmth, peace, and sunlight of your presence I was able to uncurl the tightly clenched fists, For the first time I felt your suffering presence in that event, I have known you as a vulnerable baby, as a brother, and as a father. Now I know you as a woman. You were there as the violated girl caught in helpless suffering. The chains of shame and fear no longer bind my heart and body. A slow fire of compassion and forgiveness is kindled. My tears fall now For man as well as woman. You, God, can make our violated bodies vessels of love and comfort to such a desperate man. I am honored to carry this womanly power within my body and soul. You were not ashamed of your wounds. You showed them off to Thomas as marks of your ordeal and death. I will no longer hide these wounds of mine. I will bear them gracefully. They tell a resurrection story. (1 Pet. 2:24)

Although Habit 2 applies to many different circumstances and levels of life, the most fundamental application of “begin with the end in mind” is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. Each part of your life—today’s behavior, tomorrow’s behavior, next week’s behavior, next month’s behavior—can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you. By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole. To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction. It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy—very busy—without being very effective. People often find themselves achieving victories that are empty, successes that have come at the expense of things they suddenly realize were far more valuable to them. People from every walk of life—doctors, academicians,

Summing Up • An analysis of the form of moral logic underlying most traditionalist positions shows that what traditionalists find most fundamentally wrong with same-sex intimate relationships is that they violate divinely intended gender complementarity. • But “gender complementarity” is really more like a category under which a variety of forms of moral logic may appear. Some of these more specific forms, such as hierarchy, are not universally embraced among traditionalists as the deep meaning of gender complementarity. • The most widely embraced form of gender complementarity among traditionalists focuses on the anatomical or biological complementarity of male and female. The physical union of male and female in this view represents the overcoming of the incompleteness of the male on his own or the female on her own. • But this hypothesis raises a deeper question: Is anatomical or biological gender complementarity what Scripture assumes and teaches? The central issue here is the interpretation of the creation of woman in Genesis 2. • In response to a variety of traditionalist readings of Genesis 2, this chapter has argued the following countertheses: ° The original ʿadam of Genesis 1: 26–2: 18 is not a binary or sexually undifferentiated being that is divided into male and female in Genesis 2: 21. ° The focus in Genesis 2 is not on the complementarity of male and female but on the similarity of male and female. ° The fact that male and female are both created in the divine image (Gen. 1: 27) is intended to convey the value, dominion, and relationality that is shared by both men and women, but not the idea that the complementarity of the genders is somehow necessary to fully express or embody the divine image. ° The one-flesh union spoken of in Genesis 2: 24 connotes not physical complementarity but a kinship bond. • These countertheses demonstrate that Genesis 2 does not teach a normative form of gender complementarity, based on the biological differences between male and female. Therefore, this form of moral logic cannot be assumed as the basis for the negative treatment of same-sex relationships in biblical texts. Hence we need to look further to discern why Scripture says what it does about same-sex intimate relationships.

Scandal is amplified when a star’s actions violate not only the status quo but the underlying understanding of that star’s image as well: when

A shame culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is perceived to reside in other people, in their ridicule, criticism, or contempt (so that one is shamed in other people's eyes). The feeling of shame actually occurs in oneself, of course, and can occur when one is alone, but it characteristically perceived as something that occurs before an audience, an external judge in whose eyes (and by comparison with whom) one appears weak, failed, foolish, incompetent, ridiculous, rejected, inferior, contemptible — in short, shameful. Thus, shame motivates concealment of those traits in oneself of which one is ashamed, since shame is only intensified by exposure to others. A guilt culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is oneself, one's own internalized conscience and the moral law one imposes on oneself, violation of which leaves one feeling guilty and sinful in one's own eyes. By contrast with shame, the feeling of guilt or sin is actually relieved by exposure, which is why guilt cultures institutionalize the practice of confession of sins. This is understandable, since the person who feels guilty perceives his sin (evil) as being "inside" himself, so to speak, so letting it "out" through confession can feel like draining a moral abscess, bringing a relief of painful pressure. But why would the perceived source of moral sanctions and disapproval affect either the likelihood or the direction of violent impulses? The answer, I believe, is that what the feeling of shame motivates most directly is the wish to eliminate the feeling of shame, since it is a very painful feeling; and since shame is seen as emanating from other people, that can be done most directly by eliminating other people. It is true that one could also eliminate the feeling of shame, at lower cost to oneself and others, by means of achievements of which one could feel proud, and which would elicit approval, admiration, respect and honors from others. But that is not always possible, and when it is not, eliminating others may be seen as the only alternative. What the feeling of guilt motivates, correspondingly, is the wish to eliminate the feeling of guilt, since it is a very painful feeling; and since the feeling of guilt emanates from the self, the only way to eliminate it may be by eliminating the self (as in suicide, or by provoking or passively submitting to martyrdom). Another way to understand why shame motivates anger and violence toward others, and why guilt directs those same feelings and behaviors toward the self, is to remember that in a shame ethic the worse evil is shame, the source of which is perceived as other people (the audience in whose "evil eyes" one is shamed). Therefore evil resides in other people, and to the degree that one feels shame, it is other people who deserve punishment. Punishing others alleviates feelings of shame because it replaces the image of oneself as a weak, passive, helpless, and therefore shameful victim of their punishment (i.e. their shaming) with the contrasting image of oneself as powerful, active, self-reliant, and therefore admirable, and unshameable. In a guilt ethic, by contrast, the worst evil is to be guilty or sinful, and guilt and sin (to the degree that one feels guilty and sinful) are perceived as residing within oneself. Thus, people who feel guilty see themselves as deserving punishment. And receiving punishment, whether from oneself or from others, relieves guilt by expiating it. Indeed, that is the purpose of punishment, both in the criminal law (in which punishment is the means by which the criminal "pays his debt" to society and thus discharges his guilt) and in the religious sacrament of penance (the self-punishment by which the sinner expiates his sins, that is, relieves his guilt-feelings). Thus, whereas punishment intensifies feelings of shame, it relieves feelings of guilt.

The deep happiness that marriage can bring, then, lies on the far side of sacrificial service in the power of the Spirit. That is, you only discover your own happiness after each of you has put the happiness of your spouse ahead of your own, in a sustained way, in response to what Jesus has done for you. Some will ask, “If I put the happiness of my spouse ahead of my own needs—then what do I get out of it?” The answer is—happiness. That is what you get, but a happiness through serving others instead of using them, a happiness that won’t be bad for you. It is the joy that comes from giving joy, from loving another person in a costly way. Today’s culture of the “Me-Marriage” finds this very proposal—of putting the interests of your spouse ahead of your own—oppressive. But that is because it does not look deeply enough into this crucial part of Christian teaching about the nature of reality. What is that teaching? Christianity asserts, to begin with, that God is triune—that is, three persons within one God. And from John 17 and other passages we learn that from all eternity, each person—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has glorified, honored, and loved the other two. So there is an “other-orientation” within the very being of God. When Jesus Christ went to the cross, he was simply acting in character. As C. S. Lewis wrote, when Jesus sacrificed himself for us, he did “in the wild weather of his outlying provinces” that which from all eternity “he had done at home in glory and gladness.” 6 Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God’s image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God’s glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, “Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16: 25). He is saying, “If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.

Arturo made an effort to explain the idea of purity to his mother: 'the colored ink breaks off the paper its purity.' Arturo believed that putting ink on paper invaded the nothing, pure color of the paper. He believed that words should be warehoused in a form other than paper and books. Words to him manifested themselves into pictures and images, and these entities that he saw should be expanded and not locked i words, in sentences, on pages, in books. Ink violates a space; words imprison themselves in themselves.

Sexual abuse is the most obvious, and perhaps the most devastating, attack on body image. The body is never wholly one's own again. In fact, the victim's own body is used as a weapon against her. It is controlled by others and can be made to respond—the ultimate betrayal—against it's owner's will. Its boundaries are violated and intruded upon, creating a lingering confusion between inner and outer. The out-of-body experience of dissociation, initially a form of self-protection that may become a chronic response to fear and anxiety reminiscent of the trauma, adds to the body's sense of impermanence and unreality. An abused child may come to feel totally divorced from her physical self.

You Can Do It. Forge forth and conquer. Build. Cultivate. You were given the ability to choose your path in life--and you were born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your successes are your accomplishments, but they are also the legacy of those who came before you and those who stand with you; your failures are purely your own. Look to your own house before blaming the society that bore you. And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal. There is no greater risk and no greater opportunity than that.

For some years now there has been a constant onslaught of images, lights, and colors that blind man. His interior dwelling is violated by ... unhealthy, provocative images ... that assault purity of heart and infiltrate through the door of sight. / The faculty of sight, which ought to see and contemplate the essential things, is turned aside to what is artificial. ... Our eyelids remain open incessantly, and our eyes are forced to look at a sort of ongoing spectacle. The dictatorship of the image, which plunges our attention into a perpetual whirlpool, detests silence. Man feels obliged to seek ever new realities that give him an appetite to own things; but his eyes are red, haggard, and sick. The artificial spectacles and the screens glowing uninterruptedly try to bewitch the mind and the soul. In the brightly lit prisons of the modern world, man is separated from himself and from God. He is riveted to ephemeral things, farther and farther away from what is essential.

The reality of it hits like a ton of bricks. I’m completely frozen and powerless. Violated. Furious. I grit my teeth so hard I feel like they’re going to crack. I’m going to explode. In my head I keep replaying the image of Mina standing over me, cackling, “She’ll never get chosen now!

Paul’s view of sin is not the breaking of arbitrary divine rules, but that it is subhuman or nonhuman behavior, deeds that are unfitting for humans to perform. This implies that whatever--whether deed, attitude, affection, or motive—violates the structure of humanhood as defined by the imago Dei is sin.

One of the great advances of our generation has been the exposure of child abuse. We have come to see that our prevailing rules for raising children shame and violate their uniqueness and their dignity. Such rules have been a part of our emotional endarkenment. Alice Miller has shown with painful clarity how our current parenting rules have aimed at making the child fit the projected image of the parent. They have also enforced the idealization of parents by the wounded child.

Each element of the female gender stereotype is revealed as, in fact, sexual. Vulnerability means the appearance/reality of easy sexual access; passivity means receptivity and disabled resistance...; softness means pregnability by something hard...Woman's infantilization evokes pedophilia; fixation on dismembered body parts...evokes fetishism; idolization of vapidity, necrophilia. Narcissism insures that woman identifies with that image of herself that man holds up...Masochism means that pleasure in violation becomes her sensuality.

For some years now there has been a constant onslaught of images, lights, and colors that blind man. His interior dwelling is violated by the unhealthy, provocative images of pornography, bestial violence, and all sorts of worldly obscenities that assault purity of heart and infiltrate through the door of sight.