Work should not be glorified

The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward. The epiteths thrown at homeless beggars, the demonization of those on the dole, the labyrinthine system of bureaucracy set up to receive benefits, the unpaid 'job experience' imposed upon the unemployed, the sadistic penalisation of those who are seen as getting something for free – all reveal the truth that for our societites, remuneration requires work and suffering. Whether for a religious or secular goal, suffering is thought to constitute a necessary rite of passage. People must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital. This thinking has an obvious theological basis – where suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless. This position must be rejected as a holdover from a now-transcended stage of human history. The drive to make suffering meaningful may have had some functional logic in times when poverty, illness and starvation were necessary features of existence. But we should reject this logic today and recognise that we have moved beyond the need to ground meaning in suffering. Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 125

Unproof is the ground of action

"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p.70

God is a brain mutation

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know, and that's what God is. It's what you don't know – the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it's knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it's an essential part of us, like water.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 377

In the rites of the moneychangers

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 109

An entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 91

There is no longer a reason

Metaphysical problems are revealed always to have been genuine problems, since they do admit of a solution. But their resolution depends on one precise and highly constraining condition – that we begin to understand that in reply to those metaphysical questions that ask why the world is thus and not otherwise, the response 'for no reason' is a genuine answer. Instead of laughing or smiling at questions like 'Where do we come from?', 'Why do we exist?', we should ponder instead the remarkable fact that the replies 'From nothing. For nothing' really are answers, thereby realizing that these really were questions – and excellent ones at that. There is no longer a mystery, not because there is no longer a problem, but because there is no longer a reason.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 110

Those nets

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moment I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 220

Fountain of consideration

In my religion there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry and doubt. Life would be sacred, because it is all we have, and death, our common denominator, the fountain of consideration.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 6

Capitalism as a sacrifice-movement

Kapitalismen är ingen religion, utan upplösningen av all religion i en jordisk, självständiggjord offerrörelse: kapitalfetischen.

Robert Kurz, Gelde Ohne Wert, quoted (and translated) on Copyriot http://copyriot.se/2013/08/15/geld-ohne-wert-lasanteckningar-del-20-om-sammanbrottets-horisont/ (03/09/2013)

'I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic,' Brotteaux answered. 'Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.'

Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood (Penguin Books, 1990) p. 80

Människan måste tolkas, det måste inte Gud. Gud är harmoni genom sig själv, människan kan endast nå harmoni genom en kamp (mellan ljus och mörker, samt massa andra dimensioner). För det andra, Gud frammanar Skapelsen, människan är blott ett subjekt som skapar. För det tredje, människan skapar endast territorier (länder, städer, taggtrådsstängsel), inte jorden (Earth, die Welt). Trots allt detta utgör människan “hjälten” i romantiken, som vi ändå måste primärt tänka som tysk. Tyskt territorium, grekiskt jordklot. Denna spänning skapar romantikens imperialism, hanfågeln som markerar sitt revir genom kvitter. Imperiet som kodar toner mot distinktionen territorium – jord. Vår enda väg är “protestantisk” kritik.

 Christopher Kullenberg, 'Barocken och romantiken, mot en teori om den musikaliska fromheten.' at http://christopherkullenberg.se/ (29/10/2012)

True religion concerns itself with the givenness of the timeless. An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity – either past time, in the form of a rigid tradition, or future time, in the form of Progress towards Utopia. And both are Molochs, both demand human sacrifice on an enormous scale. Spanish Catholicism was a typical idolatry of past time. Nationalism, Communism, Fascism, all the social pseudo-religions of the twentieth century, are idolatries of future time.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 285

But Man cannot really become immortal. It is the being of what is negated that passes into the negation and realizes its result. Thus, by (actively) negating the real natural World, Man can create a historical or human ("technical") World, which is just as real, although real in a different way. But death is pure Nothingness, and it subsists only as concept of death (= presence of the absence of life). Now, by negating a concept, one only manages to create another concept. Hence Man who negates his death can only "imagine" himself immortal: he can only believe in his "eternal" life or his "resurrection," but he cannot really live his imaginary "afterlife." But this faith, whose counterpart and origin are the faculty of freely bringing about one's death, also distinguishes Man from animal. Man is not only the sole living being which knows that it must die and which can freely bring about its death: he is also the only one which can aspire to immortality and believe in it more or less firmly.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 256

To believe in God is, therefore, to doubt his existence, his manifestness, his presence. In fact, faith is the spiritual impulse which reveals the profoundest uncertainty about the existence of God (but it is the same with all theological virtues: hope is the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest despair at the real state of things and charity the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest contempt for others).

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.92

If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away. Thus, when people obtain the right to life, the fact is that they are no longer able to live. When nature is recognized as a subject in law, as it is by Michel Serres, we have objectified it to death, and this ecological cover merely asserts our right to go on doing so.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.80