Daily Fragments: Bill Clinton, Black Jesus, and Spiders on Mars

Daily fragments for October 4, 2012:

Quotations

JOHN C. GOODMAN: “If we just allowed low-income people to obtain health care in the same way we allow them to obtain food, we would make health care immediately accessible to millions of people.” – John C. Goodman.

BUBBA: “If you live in a shame-based society where you think nothing good’s gonna happen, the temptation is to wait for somebody to say something you’d find offensive and you can lash out against it. But free people absorb destructive things and refuse to be destroyed…You cannot live in a shame-based world.”

WINDOW ON RACE: “…changing racial conceptions and images of Christ have been used as political weapons, often in the cause of White supremacy. A radical departure from this tradition is the image of a black African-American Christ found in a stained glass window in the Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s a wonderful portrait, based on the text of the sheep and the goats – what you do the least of these, you do to me.”

TEDDY ROOSEVELT: “The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing.” (Quoted by The Anchoress)

BAD CATHOLIC: “Between being told that Christianity is a system of oppression, a complex way to justify burning with hatred over the existence of gay people, and a general failure of the human intellect, I begin to suspect that few people know why Christians exist at all. This is my attempt to explain why I am a Christian.”

CONSEQUENCES: “When I read or argue with anyone uncharitably, I am training uncharity in myself. It doesn’t matter if the thinker is dead (or even fictional!). It doesn’t matter if the ideas really are too dumb to engage (why am I reading them anyway in this case?). What matters is that I’ve just worn the rut that leads me to be unkind, prideful, etc a little deeper.”