Open Letter To Satanists
Context: I've watched closely and I believe most people who turn from God do so for one of two basic reasons. One, they mistake some aspect of religion as God (like Anton LaVey did). Or two, they are unable to overcome their need to understand what can not be understood. I honestly don't think it's easy to turn from God if we see Him as He really is. Every Satanist I've ever encountered has fallen into one of those two categories. They either have a warped, distorted perception of God, based on what they were taught by some idiot, or they don’t believe in the goodness or even the existence of God because of the injustice of the world. The first is a problem of perception. The second is a problem of pride. Both are hard to get past.
Love and Death (1975)
“Honestly, it’s so easy to get what you want from people if they think you’re a psycho.”
Source: Twenties Girl
Wheaton, Illinois http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/wheaton-illinois-sep1590-backup-copy.html (September 15, 1990)
In Concert
1 October 1849; Amiel is here actually quoting Meister Eckhart, not Angelus Silesius as he supposed.
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell — all these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him, or as Angelus, I think, said, "the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me."
“It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.”
Referring to losing her virginity to ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake.
Diane Sawyer interview http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2003_11_23/story_1024.asp, 60 Minutes (23 November 2003)
Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 28
To Reach Eternity (1989)
Context: I'm going to ask you something. If I do get killed, and I honestly don't see how I can help it, I want you to write that book we were thinking about when I enlisted. If I get it, it's a cinch I won't be able to do it, and it would make me feel a whole lot better to know that if not my name and hand, at least, the thot of me would be passed on and not forgotten entirely. You know, sort of put into the book the promise that I had and the things I might have written so at least the knowledge of talent wasted won't be lost... If I get it, no one will ever know to what heights I might have gone as a writer. Maybe if you wrote about the promise that was there, all wouldn't be lost.
(J. Hudson Taylor. Separation and Service: Or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. London: Morgan & Scott, n.d., 10).
