Towards Evil

In case you were wondering, I had my blood pressure taken during a trustee meeting Wednesday night by an RN using the Church's cuff and stethoscope.:)

As we see the current administration move us towards socialism, the "war on terror" is called over, sin is legitimized, and as Christian morals and values are outlawed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address, "A World Split Apart" makes for good reading.  Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer, dissident, and activist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for exposing to the world the Soviet Union's crimes, gulag, and forced labor camp system.  Two of his best known books are, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and The Gulag Archipelago.

Here are some of his quotes that I like.

“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.' ” 

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones." 

“This it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.” 

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.” 

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart” 

“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.” 

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.” 

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.” 

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.” 

“Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. ” 

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” 

“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.” 

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.” 

“That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life” 

“The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”

“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.” 

“It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.” 

“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.” 

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Genesis 6:5

And he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the Lord.
2 Chronicles 12:14