Nelson: ‘I fear you’? This is what Valentine’s Day means to you?
Bart: This is what it means to everyone. How can you be forced to say ‘I love you’? People only give Valentines because they’re scared of what would happen if they didn’t.
– The Simpsons (2013) Season 25, Episode 11; “Specs and the City” [No. 541]
Knowledge Guild 
‘I fear you’? This is what I mean to you?
This is how everyone feels. How can you be forced to say ‘I love you’? People only say it because they’re scared of what would happen if they didn’t.
“So when I say religion poisons everything, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another. We must be afraid, we must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of sadomasochism” – Christopher Hitchens
There are many contradictions when God is imagined as an entity external to the human. But when God is envisioned as an abstract “self” internal to the human, the contradictions are resolved. So, yes, we can’t be good without the “Big Brother permission”, but if the Big Brother is simply our own consciousness rather than an obscure entity somewhere in Heaven, it does not sound as perverted anymore.
I wonder, do we have ‘happy day’ yet? Weird stuff for scheduling. :mrgreen: