I’m planning on doing a fairly large brain dump of my recent readings and thoughts that started earlier this summer, but for now I found these quotes online to be fairly interesting:
From an article from Catholic.org about Pope Benedict’s message to the 20th Interreligious Meeting of Prayer for Peace in Assisi right now:
Violence is not caused by faith itself, the pope said, but “by the cultural limits with which it is lived and with which it develops in time.â€
I find this thought intriguing: that violence comes about due to the fact that culture keeps us from living our faith. But at the same time this idea seems rudimentary because of course it is our culture that does not promote a faith that radically opposes violence. Although faith should be enough to overcome these limits to live out the peaceful ideals that religions are founded upon. I think that culture is partially to blame and is a cop-out at the same time. A number of radical people will always live out their peaceful faith, but I guess in order for a peaceful revolution to come culture needs to be perturbed to make it more socially acceptable for more to do so.
I found the following from an article on Anarchy in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume I Copyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton Company (found online in a number of places including newadvent.org) quite amusing:
Thus far the anarchists seem to have no central organization