indifference

Which do you prefer, she says. Sex or Violence?I try to smile. What's the difference, really.

You need fire, conviction, to write. You can't write out of indifference.

I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple.

No one knows if I'm dying to laugh or to crySo my verse hasthis almost imperceptible thrillLife is sad, the world is crazy!Not worth killing yourself for itNot for anyoneFor no loveLife goes on, indifferently!

Each time a person passes by you and you say 'hello', imagine that person turning into a candle. The more positivity, love and light you reflect, the more light is mirrored your way. Sharing beautiful hellos is the quickest way to earn spiritual brownie points. You should start seeing hellos as small declarations of faith. Every time you say hello to a stranger, your heart acknowledges over and over again that we are all family.

A mind that establishes indifference is the mind that builds failure.

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

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

Pleasure and pain are on the same side of the coin of human experience. The opposite is indifference or numbness.

Some scars don't hurt. Some scars are numb. Some scars rid you of the capacity to feel anything ever again.

Segregation is a word of the past. Unity is the key to a peaceful future.

With belles no longer did he fall in love,but dangled after them just anyhow;when they refused, he solaced in a twinkle;when they betrayed, was glad to rest.He would seek them without intoxication,while he left them without regret,hardly remembering their love and spite.Exactly thus does an indifferent guestdrive up for evening whist:sits down; then, once the game is over,he drives off from the place,at home falls peacefully asleep,and in the morning does not know himself where he will drive to in the evening.

There was always a screen behind which one could hide_ a superior who in turn had his superior_ orders, instructions, duties, commands_ and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called_ there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.

My hours are filled with fantasy and indifference. In day and night dreams, I think of my heaven with you. All the time in between, I carelessly spend in hell without you.

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time.