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I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history.
Jacques Ellul
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The gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors. … When Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings—the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success.
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The biblical view is not just apolitical but antipolitical in the sense that it refuses to confer any value on political power, or in the sense that it regards political power as idolatrous.
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Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity.
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Jesus told his disciples they were a little flock. All his comparisons tend to show that the disciples will necessarily be small in number and weak: the leaven in the dough, the salt in the soup, the sheep among wolves, and many other metaphors. Jesus does not seem to have had a vision of a triumphant and triumphal church encircling the globe. He always depicts for us a secret force that modifies things from within.
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Everything, right now is the notion that comes from the presence of images, which in effect get us used to seeing all in a single glance.
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Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge.
Jacques Ellul
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... there is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.
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The problem is not merely that of the transformation of Christianity into a state religion but of the diffusion of this faith that has stopped being a faith and has become a collective ideology, a kind of manifestation of thought that collects all the commonplaces, the legends, the miracles, the prophecies, the apocalypses, the thaumaturgies, and formulates for the people a facile, moralistic, and constructive set of beliefs.
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Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire's efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.
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Images produce an intellectual process different from the ancient one or the one developed by classical education. It goes without saying that this process is not completely new; of course, since sight existed, and since people themselves chose their images, they also thought by means of images and entered into this kind of thinking. But this was limited and not frequent, because images were not dominant. The new factor in our day comes from the effect of visual reproduction's triumph over all else, which involves us in the domination of one form of thought. This supremacy is new, even though we are not dealing with a completely new form of thought.
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The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place.
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It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state's Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order
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The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.
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I can very well say without hesitation that all those who have political power, even if they use it well have acquired it by demonic mediation and even if they are not conscious of it, they are worshippers of diabolos.
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Salvation is universal because the love of God encompasses all. If God is God and if God is love, nothing is outside the love of God. A place like hell is thus inconceivable.
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No technique is possible when men are free. … Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. … The individual must be fashioned by techniques … in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.
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Thought based on images can be neither abstract nor critical. … again in this case intellectuals have worked out theories to justify the inevitable. For unconsciously, they could not avoid being subjected to the enormous weight of billions of images (just like other people). Yet consciously, they were well aware that maintaining the demands of critical and independent thought involves a complete break with the rest of humankind. This would make it impossible for them to play their role as genuine intellectuals. They must think like everyone else if they expect to be at all believed by the masses. Thus their conscious and unconscious minds agree in taking them down the path of thought that involves images, evidence, and emotivity.
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Certainly everywhere in the church there are examples of the rich who give up all things, who become poor for God. They did exist. But in doing this, they either chose the hermit life and withdrew from the life of the church, or they were canonized and held up as miraculous instances of sanctity, that is, they were excluded from the concrete life of the church, set outside the church as saints whom, of course, there was no question of ordinary people ever imitating.
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It is frightening to see how easily the church accepts all this. Hardly had it achieved peace before it itself began to persecute. … It commenced the persecution of heretics, and primarily, of course, those who contested the truth and validity of this alliance of empire and church.
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Having analyzed these traits, we can now advance a definition of propaganda — not an exhaustive definition, unique and exclusive of all others, but at least a partial one: Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.
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There is one act par excellence which profanes money by going directly against the law of money, an act for which money is not made. That act is giving.
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There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence.
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Whereas the good news had first been published for its own sake with no concern for success, now ineluctably success brought, as always, a desire for it. … They were not aware of what was happening, namely, that society was inverting Christianity instead of being subverted by it.
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In one of the temptations Satan offers to give Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, that is, the kingdoms and the related political power. …
Jacques Ellul
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Jacques Ellul
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Born:
January 6, 1912
Died:
May 19, 1994
(aged 82)
Bio:
Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist.
Known for:
The technological society (1964)
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)
The Meaning of the City (1970)
The subversion of Christianity
The presence of the Kingdom (1948)
Most used words:
power
god
propaganda
church
man
political
state
society
modern
people
technique
images
jesus
social
christianity
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