The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In all cases of evils which men deem to have befallen their neighbors by nature or fortune, nobody is wroth with them or reproves or lectures or punishes them, when so afflicted, with a view to their being other than they are; one merely pities them.&nbsp; Who, for instance, is such a fool as to try to do anything of the sort to the ugly, the puny, or the weak?&nbsp; Because, I presume, men know that it is by nature and fortune that people get these things, the graces of life and their opposites … [Likewise] no one punishes a wrong-doer from the mere contemplation or on account of his wrong-doing, unless one takes unreasoning vengeance like a wild beast.&nbsp; But he who undertakes to punish with reason does not avenge himself for the past offence, since he cannot make what was done as though it had not come to pass; he looks rather to the future, and aims at preventing that particular person and others who see him punished from wrong again.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But in the case of injustice it makes a vast deal of difference whether the wrong is done as a result of some impulse of passion, which is usually brief and transient, or whether it is committed willfully with premeditation.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Whatever happens, assume that it was bound to happen, and do not be willing to rail at Nature.&nbsp; That which you cannot reform, it is best to endure.”</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">For me the cognitive basis [of loving your enemy] is the trust in an unrestricted causality: “I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.”&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">This conviction of determinism [which Einstein held to be true] is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves too seriously.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[Merely asking for forgiveness is] a means by which we cheat our consciences, evade our moral responsibilities, and turn our shame into self-congratulation by loading all our infamies on the scourged shoulders of Christ.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But, O, what form of prayer can serve my turn?&nbsp; “Forgive me my foul murder [of Hamlet’s father]”?&nbsp; That cannot be since I am still possessed of those effects for which I did the murder:&nbsp; my crown, mine own ambition, and my queen ... What then? What rests? Try what repentance can.&nbsp; What can it not?&nbsp; Yet what can it, when one cannot repent? ... My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.&nbsp; Words without thoughts never to heaven go.&nbsp;</em></p>