/lit/ - Literature

>No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order, in the structure of which the word “providence” or “dispensation” denotes the form of causality. This is the final meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. Religion is metaphysic and nothing else - Credo quia absurdum - and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic - that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. “My kingdom is not of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.

>Tolstoi, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social reformer, and in his metaphysical impotence - like the whole civilized West, which can only think about distributing, never renouncing - elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was poor, but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social ameliorations - of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?

its hilarious to watch Asians try to claim some kind of "oppressed" status in Western nations.