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Silversoul said:
"But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?" -- Mark Twain

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never thought of that.

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Lakefingers said:
Which text does that Twain quote come from?

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Lakefingers said:
Which text does that Twain quote come from?

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RationalEgo said:
I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man\'s freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man\'s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.-- Ayn Rand

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Freedom said:

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Investigate the various repugnant aspects of the body, beginning with the fact that the body is a conglomeration of all sorts of things. In other words, it's a burial ground, a national cemetery, filled with the corpses of cattle, pigs, ducks, chickens, sour, sweet, greasy, salty, gathered and aged in the stomach, filtered and distilled into blood, pus, decomposing and putrid, oozing throughout the body and coming out its various openings: this body, which all of us in the human race care for without ceasing — bathing it, scrubbing it, masking its smell — and even then its filth keeps displaying itself as ear wax, eye secretions, nasal drip, tooth tartar, skin-scruff and sweat, always oozing out, filthy in every way. What it comes from is filthy, where it stays is filthy (i.e., in a cemetery of fresh corpses, or even worse — we've probably buried hundreds of different kinds of corpses within ourselves).

        ----- From Frames of Reference by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo

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deCypher said:

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RationalEgo said:
I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man\'s freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man\'s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.-- Ayn Rand

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One could argue that one's own desires could also imprison the self.  Addiction would the paramount example of this.

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deCypher said:
No, but this does not invalidate my point that my freedom can be taken away by my own choices and desires and NOT solely by other men.

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RationalEgo said:

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deCypher said:

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RationalEgo said:
I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.-- Ayn Rand

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One could argue that one's own desires could also imprison the self.  Addiction would the paramount example of this.

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What the hell does that have to do with freedom? You should be free to kill yourself if you want, its your choice.

Ask yourself this question: Is heroin addiction in ones own rational long term self-interest?

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