“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest.”
~ Denis Diderot ~
Digitally enhanced image created from a photo taken in New York City in April 1992.
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imagine
Categories: Photography, Poetry
Tags: Death, Despots, Digital Imagery, Egomaniacs, Freedom, Ignorance, Imagine, Intolerance, John Lennon, Life, Music, New York City, Perspective, Photography, Poetry, Religion, Tyrants, War
3 Comments
I remember Elie Wiesel saying (in a lecture at Lynchburg College in 1989 or 1990) that he could not give up faith in mankind because there was no alternative for him. It seems to me, that apart from the existence of some “all knowing omnipotent power”–i.e., God–there is no other alternative than believing in the innate goodness of man. But that would be an even greater illusion. All the history of humankind teaches us that there must be a Creator God who is sovereign over all of history. It also testifies to the fact that humankind is not innately good, or bad, but flawed and capable of both good and evil with a tendency to choose evil. The Enlightenment intellectuals tried to get rid of God, but couldn’t. They tried to turn him into a clockmaker, but that idea did not survive the test of time.
I always have and always will see this issue from a different perspective. History has shown us that man created god in his own image, flawed. There is no better validation of this than the bible itself, which portrays a god who possesses all of humanity’s failings and flaws: a god who is intolerant, violent, jealous, who hates, takes revenge, wages war…the idea of a peaceful loving deity didn’t seriously surface in anybody’s theological teachings until they dreamed up the concept of Jesus. And look how humanity through the church has twisted that philosophy over the last two thousand years: holy wars, the Spanish Inquisition, burning “heretics” at the stake, witch trials, “Praise the lord and pass the ammunition,” god is on my side…Too bad the Enlightenment intellectuals didn’t succeed in turning god into a clock maker. It would have been a far more productive profession than the one humanity ended up putting him in…
“The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” ~ Sigmund Freud