Оглавление
Michael Krasny. Spiritual Envy
MORE PRAISE FOR SPIRITUAL ENVY
MICHAEL. KRASNY. SPIRITUAL. ENVY. AN AGNOSTIC’S QUEST. Foreword by Joyce Carol Oates
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1. MY GOD
Chapter 2. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND GOD’S EXISTENCE. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Chapter 3. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND A CODE OF ONE’S OWN
Chapter 4. WHERE IS GOD? More on Codes and God’s Place in Mine
Chapter 5. GOD’S IDENTITY
Chapter 6. THE UNIVERSE AND THE FACE OF GOD
Chapter 7. WHO ARE THE AGNOSTICS?
Chapter 8. THE FORCE THAT IS OR ISN’T, AND COINCIDENCES MINUS ANSWERS
Chapter 9. FROM NOWHERE TO SOMEWHERE. Spiritual Envy
Chapter 10. RESPECT FOR THE FAITHFUL, THE FAITHLESS, AND THE WISHY-WASHY
Chapter 11. ACCURSED TIME
Chapter 12. ESCAPING TIME
Chapter 13. DELIVER US FROM EVIL
Chapter 14. DOING GOOD
Chapter 15. COSMIC JOKING
Chapter 16. SEPARATING THE AGNOSTICS FROM THE HERDS
Chapter 17. PEACE UNTO THEE AND ME, AND AN OLD ELVIS TOP-TEN HIT
Chapter 18. SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Отрывок из книги
“A much-needed cleansing agent for the dogmatic certainty that infects so much of today’s public discourse.”
— Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle
.....
I can offer no good reason why killing (or any other form of meanness) is not permissible, other than the importance of adhering to human-made laws or to one’s own code. The Misfit wished he could have been there to see Jesus raise the dead, and I wish I could know whether God really handed commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. The real challenge of hewing to the particulars of one’s own code is to stand behind it in times that require courage and in moments that put life and death on the line.
In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s character Raskolnikov makes philosophic attempts to be a Nietzschean superman and kill, without conscience, his old landlady. from this, we have come, in the United States, to an age of the Misfit and an age in which the moral weight of murder has diminished. Mass murder and serial killing especially have become a significant part of American life and popular culture, and subjects of philosophical meditations on evil and a world without the moral force of God. In the past few decades, so many infamous figures have been identified with serial killing that someone produced a collection of serial-killer playing cards — featuring the likes of John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, members of the Manson family, and other representatives of mayhem — apparently worth collecting like the traditional bubblegum cards of my youth.
.....