The Rant Institute

🔵 The following passages are taken from a not very widely known interview with Michel Foucault, containing some of the most crucial statements by him on his stance on morals. "In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us." "We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power." "Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good." "This doesn’t mean that one must live in an indefinite discontinuity. But what I mean is that one must consider all the points...

 “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.” ~Rod Serling, from “Death’s Head Revisited” (1961)

 People are religious to the same degree they feel unsafe. And they feel unsafe to the same degree they are unable to control their environment.

 Have you ever noticed how the immaculate conception of Mary undermines the crucifixion of Jesus?  First, it's important to distinguish the Immaculate Conception of Mary from the Incarnation of Jesus, where Jesus took on human flesh in Mary's womb. Most people confuse the former for the latter.  According to Catholics, the "immaculate conception" of Mary refers to the generative conception of Mary by the sexual relations of her parents. What makes that conception "immaculate" is that, at the moment Mary was conceived through the natural sexual relations of her parents, God decided to preserve Mary's soul from the stain of original sin. Everyone else on the planet, however, who is conceived the same way, is not so lucky. The question is why?  Only Mary, and Mary alone, did God decide to preserve from this stain of original sin from the very first moment of her conception. Why? Well, according to the Catholic Church it's because, in anticipation of...

 Jesus Christ did not suffer for either Judaism or Christianity. Nor did he suffer for his "faith" in any idea of God, or a brand of religion, but for "the sins of the world."  But what do we mean by "the sins of the world"?  For Christians, those "sins" are against their brand-version of the word "God." What offends their brand-version of God is failing to obey rules as defined by their brand-version of a religion called Christianity. Indeed, Jesus was put to death by the leaders and followers of his own religion for failing to conform to their ideas of what he should believe and how he should behave! So why would he come to establish a new religion that he wanted to empower to do the exact same thing, in his name, for the rest of time? The "sins of the world" that Jesus suffered and died for, as such, is all of the suffering that people inflict on each other in the name of their ideas and beliefs, from atheistic Communism to...

 I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use. - Galileo Galilei