Chris Hedges On Religion
Posted: June 12, 2010 Filed under: Political | Tags: Quotes, Religion, Secularism Leave a comment »After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche
I do not attend church. The cloying, feel-your-pain language of the average clergy member makes me run for the door. The debates in most churches—whether revolving around homosexuality or biblical interpretation—are a waste of energy. I have no desire to belong to any organization, religious or otherwise, which discriminates, nor will I spend my time trying to convince someone that the raw anti-Semitism in the Gospel of John might not be the word of God. It makes no difference to me if Jesus existed or not. There is no historical evidence that he did. Fairy tales about heaven and hell, angels, miracles, saints, divine intervention and God’s beneficent plan for us are repeatedly mocked in the brutality and indiscriminate killing in war zones. The Bible works only as metaphor.
But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.
There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions. The essential teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma, hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion. These teachings helped create the concept of the individual. The belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that can defy the clamor of the nation is one of the gifts of religious thought. This call for individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz on Sadequain
Posted: April 20, 2010 Filed under: Art | Tags: Men, Pakistan, Poetry, Quotes, Urdu Leave a comment »
aaj tak surkh-o-siyah sadiyoñ ké saaye talay // aadam-o-havaa ki aulaad pé kiya guzri hai
“Retrospectively, he began quietly enough painting living things as appearances, but even then, in selection and treatment, he was more of a commentator than a mere naturalist? From things phenomena, he chose only those, which were alive and trying to ‘kick’ however, ineffectually. And in his social community the only living ones are those who toil like, the camel, the ox who is the hewer of wood and the drawer of water, the famished cactus, or the root under the stone. And to paint the figure together with its suffering obviously dictated a distortion of visual appearance, a juxtaposition of the conceptual and the material.
In the process, he also evolved a new social and emotional credo of the essential unity of material things, all caught in the agonizing toils of an evolutionary process of struggle goading them upwards. And now, since his return from Paris, Sadequain has once more reverted to direct social comment to depict a loveless and macabre world a world of the scare-crow acting as the Lord of blood-thirsty crows, of the harridan decked out as a beauty queen, a world of trapped tongues and cob-webbed hearts, of debased flesh and servile manners. Filtering across this world we see a Christ-like Figure perhaps meant to be autobiographical, his body covered with thorns, his head encircled by the crown of atrophied oblivion. This bitter vision of reality may not be the whole truth but it is certainly a part of it and if some of those immediately confronted with the hypocrisy and the heartlessness of a particular environment fail to own the hope beyond the despair, the failure is not entirely theirs.”
- Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Full text of the letter and the rest of Sadequain’s paintings on Faiz’s shayrs can be found here
What the Foucault?
Posted: March 2, 2010 Filed under: Academia | Tags: Foucault, Marx, Quotes, The Left Leave a comment »“I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein?”
Foucault, Michel 1980: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (ed. C. Gordon). Brighton: Harvester.
