“This is worth thinking about. When the moment of execution approaches, the patients are injected with tranquillizers. A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain.” Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, p. 11
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“Religiously fostered appreciation of the Bible attends centrally and explicitly to the goodness of God. Jews and Christians have adored God as the origin of all virtue, a wellspring of justice, wisdom, mercy, patience, strength, and love. But peripherally and implicitly, they have also grown accustomed and then attached, over the centuries, to what we may call God’s anxiety. God is, as I shall try to show…an amalgam of several personalities in one character. Tension among these personalities makes God difficult, but it also makes him compelling, even addictive. While consciously emulating his virtues, the West has unconsciously assimilated the anxiety-inducing tension between his unity and his multiplicity. In the end, despite the longing Westerners sometimes feel for a simpler, less anxious, more “centered” human ideal, the only people whom we find satisfyingly real are people whose identity binds several incompatible subidentities together.” God: A Biography, Jack Miles