Get Cynical

In reading about the Holocaust, I found it’s much too easy to treat large numbers as remote abstraction. It’s often difficult, for those of us who were not there, to have them feel close and immediate.

So I decided to take a trip to visit the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp myself..

(via Grow a Brain)

The great novels should be read by all. All should be acquainted with the men and women of fiction, with the ideal world. The imagination should be developed, trained and strengthened. Superstition has degraded art and literature. It gave us winged monsters, scenes from heaven and hell, representations of gods and devils, sculptured the absurd and painted the impossible in the name of Art. It gave us the dreams of the insane, the lives of fanatical saints, accounts of miracles and wonders, of cures wrought by the bones of the dead, descriptions of Paradise, purgatory and the eternal dungeon, discourses on baptism, on changing wine and wafers into the blood and flesh of God, on the forgiveness of sins by priests, on fore-ordination and accountability, predestination and free will, on devils, ghosts and goblins, the ministrations of guardian angels, the virtue of belief and the wickedness of doubt. And this was called “sacred literature.”

Robert Green Ingersoll – “Myth and Miracle”(1885)