The Experience of Clarity

90 If our dissatisfaction with sufficiency should result in hope, then our hope would be a form of ingratitude.  Conversely, if satisfaction with sufficiency should result in gratitude, then our gratitude would preclude hope. God's creation is either sufficient or insufficient.  If sufficient, any hope is ingratitude.  If insufficient, our hope is extorted by God. God created the world.  God does not deceive.  God, being good, desires our successful outcome.  God being omnipotent, His creation must then be sufficient for us to bring about our own successful outcome. If sufficient, man does not need hope.  A man only hopes to the degree that he doubts the sufficiency of God’s creation.  If he has no doubt, then he does not hope.  The love for and the certainty of the sufficiency of God's creation kills hope. Many claim that the mechanist attempted the murder of their God ... and not that of their hope.   And in actuality, if God's ...

264 Morality : “Concerned with accepted rules and standards of human behavior.” The word, “accepted,” is where every external morality ends, for once we have proven the moral point to ourselves we have nothing more to do with its social “acceptability.” A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

91 Someone who reaches a conviction of hopelessness may only be honest with those same conditions with which the self-deceiver anesthetizes himself with hope.  Usually, however, the hopeless man either has no resources sufficient to his task, believes he has none, or he has not the inner resources to transcend his inherited morality and its condemnation of ambition.  In short, he cannot find within himself the right to appropriate real goals ... self-affirming goals .  To suffer from hopelessness, one must have been incapable of either self-deceit or wicked thoughts. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

265 Amorality: Concerned with testing and measuring the rules and standards of human behavior, as far as is humanly possible, beyond the interests of one’s group and forever holding judgment between peace of mind and the struggle for honesty ... not to mention all of the other conflicting interests dwelling within one’s private laboratory ... “private,” because it is the only laboratory possible. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

92 The Natural Selection of Hope: In a desperate but apparently futile predicament, it is the one who insists upon mechanical efficiency that is the pessimist and the one who cares nothing for it that is the optimist.  And so out of one hundred optimists and an equal number of pessimists, each of the optimists blindly and therefore confidently “ knows what to do.”  In the random scattering of their efforts, each in his stubborn endurance provides a yield for the law of natural selection: one optimist makes it ... while all one hundred pessimists have not so much as lifted a finger, for they have not yet made a distinction between their complacent belief in certainty and their certain ignorance of total conditions ... and dead men telling no tales, the lesson of blind optimism now appears invincible.  Likewise, Hope is often a product of self-deceit: it is a mental escape from an apparently hopeless situation.  It nonetheless has the beneficial function of leavi...

266 Amorality is an attempt not to be “evil,” just as much as it is an attempt to disregard the inherited “good” — yet better understood as the attempt not to be an accident.  Amorality is the attempt at a real self-control.  It is the pursuit and application of those mechanical forces which account for human conduct. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

93 It’s not enough to be cheerful; you also need the flames of hell at your back to really get the respect.  There is nothing more insipid than untested cheerfulness.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism