faustandfurious:

faustandfurious:

faustandfurious:

faustandfurious:

People will say they aren’t religious, and then be wholly committed to some lifestyle/self-help cult that takes more time, money and effort than attending any kind of religious service once a week ever will.

It’s just. Interesting. How lifestyle, fashion and self-development are specifically marketed as the Solution to your worries and troubles and search for meaning, perfectly designed to fill the niche left behind by organised religion in increasingly secularised Western societies.

And this is why it’s so important for brands to build a Story around their products. Because they’re not just selling you an item with material utility. They are hoping to sell you an identity. They are trying to imbue ultimately meaningless things with a sense of deeper meaning, because the marketing isn’t really speaking to our rational side which tells us which things we need to perform our everyday tasks. It is speaking to our emotional side, our dreams and ambitions, our desire to make sense of the world and our place in it.

You see this a lot with marketing of literature too. The publishers aren’t content with selling you books. They want you to buy into an identity as a reader, as a bookworm, as a nerd. They talk about the smell of new books and the guilty pleasure compulsive buying of too many books and the pros and cons of paperbacks versus hardcovers and the “things only a book nerd will understand”. And not to harp on about BookTok and Bookstagram, but these two communities play right into that, by being concerned with Reader Identity and the asthetics and lifestyle of consuming stories, rather than literature as a tool for sharing human experience and knowledge and broadening your horizons and an at times subversive art form.

I think nothing is more emblematic of the above than book bloggers reviewing the Communist Manifesto on Amazon-owned Goodreads

rosarying:

“If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things saved by love.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

jonpertwee:

Tumblr isn’t social media, it’s a habit. Like smoking. We’re all gathering by the dumpster in the cold, reblogging posts.

apocryphics:

Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

letlovemeetlove:

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

— bell hooks (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

ache-of-saint-vick:

You have been visited by the spirit of 2020. Peace and health will be yours in the coming year but only if you reblog this in the next 46 seconds

mulletlove:

perhaps love and kindness are practices rather than feelings or states of being

jurakan:

“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy?’ Should we not reply, ‘With submission, Sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know.’–‘Even so, Sir.’

“I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life involved it. But I don’t think suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less than I or more. ‘No nonsense about merit.’ The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

“My favorite image on this matter comes from the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am ‘coming round’ a voice will say, ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be Purgatory.”

-C.S. Lewis

yidquotes:

… Although we can’t always control the broader calculus of our “broken world", we can author our own personal decisions in response the surrounding chaos. We never abdicate the ability to maintain the “moral line” and make decisions of “conscience” even if the surrounding world doesn’t accommodate those decisions. For reasons which often lie beyond human comprehension, G-d sometimes allows evil to flourish. It is difficult to decipher this mystery and we often struggle to understand Divine logic in a bleak world of rampaging evil. Despite these ‘unknowns’ and the frustration it sometimes causes we are empowered to maintain our own religious and moral convictions even if we can’t calculate how these values will impact an uninviting world.

Rabbi Moshe Taragin