Political Calculations: Cataloging Laws

"Therefore, all there is left to do is to discover these laws and man will no longer be responsible for his acts.  Life will be really easy for him then.  All human acts will be listed in something like logarithm tables, say up to the number 108,000, and transferred  to a time-table.  Or, better still, catalogues will appear, designed to help us in the way our dictionaries and encyclopedias do.  They will carry detailed calculations and exact forecasts of everything to come, so that no adventure and no action will remain possible in this world."

Dostoyevski, Notes from Underground (1864), Chapter VII.

Liberty is there for the taking — take it!

Liberty is there for the taking — take it!  Why would you wonder if you can do what God has given you to do?  No one but yourself can keep you from being free.  Of course, if you are not born from above, then you are all messed up and wouldn't know freedom from bondage, even if someone told you.  It is looking at things all the wrong way.  I sometimes imagine that we are all in heaven, but most of us don't know it, and so, until these people wake up, they don't have any idea of what it is all about.  They want something different.  I think there will not be anything different until you learn how to live here.  When you die if you are not then prepared to live then you cannot, and there is only one fate for such people.  They are not going to like it, but trying to live in heaven without the spiritual body is like skating down Death Hill without any skates, or hang-gliding without a glider:  It simply can't happen.

Take Liberty

I am convinced that the simplest way to get liberty is to take it."

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)  Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Chicago, 1929), p. 29.