“The Satanic Temple is celebrating 10 years of existence with its SatanCon convention in Boston this weekend, but it's not what you probably think. The organization is as much a theater of American satire as it is a place for believers. The temple, not be confused with the Satanic Church, does not formally deify Satan as the personification of evil, but rather it sees him as a literary character, a necessary rebel, while mocking traditional religion and calling out government’s embrace of institutions like the Catholic Church, co-founder Malcolm Jarry said. ‘They believe in a literary representation of Satan,’ Jarry said of the temple’s estimated 700,000 members around the world. ‘It’s a heroic figure who fights against tyrannical authority and for humanity, even if it’s a losing battle.’... The weekend convention at the Boston Marriott Copley Place is sold out, temple organizers say, boasting that it will be the largest satanic gathering in history. The convention, which is scheduled to include the temple's rituals, a marketplace and a wedding chapel, also caps a successful 10 years for the organization, symbolically based in a Victorian house in Salem, Massachusetts, Jarry said.... He described the typical temple member as ‘anyone who is nonconforming’ and those who are ‘marginalized people.’ These satanists support women's shelters, highway cleanup and addiction recovery centers, he said. A big issue for the temple is abortion rights. It recently launched a telehealth clinic in New Mexico that it says provides abortion medication via mail.”

NBC April 25, 2023

“Just as I learned I was pregnant with my first son, I saw the film 1917, a brutal World War I drama. I was struck by a final scene: not the one where the protagonist sprints across a trench, but one showing hundreds of men having their limbs amputated. I must confess I watched 1917 a half dozen times before delivering my son. As morbid as it sounds, I needed to see suffering more extreme than what I would endure so when the time came for my own bravery, I’d remember it was once far, far worse. But... Left and right can’t seem to agree on anything these days, but on the subject of suffering there is near consensus: eradicating it in full is the common goal of government, technology, medicine, and science.... Technology, meanwhile, has waged its own war on suffering, striving to eradicate even the mildest forms of it. Whether by rewriting the rules of ‘harmful’ speech or erasing internet clowns, a handful of companies became the ultimate arbiters of what is deemed safe in our virtual world.... In a culture that has no reverence or tolerance for suffering of any kind, even the smallest forms of it can seem like oppression.... But eradicating suffering in this country—or at least striving to reach that utopian goal—has come with some unforeseen consequences. Among them: a loss for what to replace suffering with. And the results of the multi-decade war on suffering haven’t been all that impressive. Recent headlines show no one’s coping very well these days, with growing depression and hopelessness among teenage girls and the ‘crisis of men,’ who lag behind women in education and the workplace. Though we may not realize it, nearly all of our modern cultural debates and ailments stem from the contemporary belief that suffering is not a natural or essential part of the human condition. The war on suffering has not only robbed us of resilience; it has sold us a mirage that is making us miserable. It is not a coincidence that the modern campaign to eradicate suffering commenced just as religiosity in general and Christianity in particular began to decline at a rapid pace in America. There is no religion that doesn’t embrace suffering as integral to its teaching. Christianity deified it, with adherents wearing a symbol of torture as a symbol of their belief…. With so much focus on comfort and safety, why aren’t we. . . happier?... And resilience in our people, our institutions, and even the physical infrastructure of our cities is increasingly deemed the missing ingredient in all aspects of American life.... We have long been fully invested in eradicating the suffering we deem unconscionable, but more important are the simple questions that define a serious life: For whom will you sacrifice? What will you defend? For what will you choose to suffer?”

Katherine Boyle “Get Serious” on The Free Press March 4, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/get-serious-about-suffering]

“It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies; but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life.”

Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives I

“Should you find a wise critic to point out your faults, follow him as you would a guide to hidden treasure.”

The Dhammapada, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser April 29, 2023

“Tomorrow I will live, the fool does say. Today’s too late, the wise liv’d yesterday.”

“an epigram of Martial” according to Cleveland B. Chase The Young Voltaire (quoted by Voltaire in a letter to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot).

“Elsewhere Chesterton describes Progress as a rut, a false philosophy of fatalism and endless improvement. It is a promise of freedom, but the actual results are servitude – to the regulatory state, to the unforgiving corporation, to the latest fashionable idea, to the materialist mentality that is unwelcoming to and increasingly oppressive to the faith. But the answer is in faith, both immediately and ultimately. Instead of following the fashion and following the world, we are to follow Christ – and all that that entails. Chesterton says, ‘To take up the cross is not a servitude; it is something far more terrible and intimidating: a freedom.’”

“An Introduction to the writings of G.K. Chesterton” by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”

Eric Hoffer, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go

“It is now much discussed among the learned whether art should abolish morality by calling it convention. It might well be discussed among the wise whether art should even abolish convention. But what seems very queer to me is this: that modern art has so often abolished morality without abolishing convention.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 6, 1932, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22).