The text below describes very well the psychological basis of both religion (including Christianity) and socialism. Both are directed against human life and pride, the motor that drives it.
He shrugged. "In my tongue, Ja'La dh Jin means 'the game of life.' Is not life a struggle — a brutal contest? A contest of men, and of sexes? Life, like Ja'La, is a brutal struggle."
Kahlan knew that life could be brutal, but that such brutality did not define life or its purpose, and that the sexes were not rivals, but meant to share together in the work and joys of life.
"To those like you it is," she said. "That's one difference between you and me. I use violence only as a last resort, only when it's necessary to defend my life — my right to exist. You use brutality as a tool of fulfilling your desires, even your ordinary desires, because, except by force, you have nothing worthwhile to offer to exchange for what you want or need — and that includes women. You take, you do not earn.
"I'm better than that. You don't value life or anything in it. I do. That's why you must crush anything good — because it puts the lie to your nothing of a life, shows by contrast how you do nothing but waste your existence.
"That's why you and those like you hate those like me — because I'm better than you and you know it."
"Such a belief is the mark of a sinner. To consider your own life meaningful is a crime against the Creator as well as your fellow man."
When she only glared at him, he arched an eyebrow with an admonishing look as he leaned a little closer. He held up a thick finger — adorned with a plundered gold ring — before her face to mark an important point, as if lecturing a selfish, headstrong child who was within an inch of getting a well-deserved thrashing.
"The Fellowship of Order teaches us that to be better than someone is to be worse than everyone."
Kahlan could only stare at such a vulgar ideology. That pious statement of hollow conviction gave her a sudden, true insight into the abyss of his savage nature, and the vindictive character of the Order itself. It was a concept that had abandoned the distant foundation upon which it had been built — that all life equally had the right to exist for its own sake — in order to justify taking life for the Order's own contrived notion of the common good.
Within that simple-sounding framework of an irrational tenet, he had just unwittingly revealed everything.
It explained the depravity of his whole cause and the determinant emotions driving the nature of those monstrous men massed outside, ready to kill anyone who would not submit to their creed. It was a dogma that shrank from civilization, praised savagery as a way of existence, and required constant brutality to crush any noble idea and the man who had it. It was a movement that drew to it thieves who wanted to think themselves righteous, murderers who wanted holy absolution for the blood of innocent victims that drenched their souls.
It assigned any achievement not to the one who had created it, but instead to those who had not earned it and did not deserve it, precisely because they did not earn it and did not deserve it. It valued thievery, not accomplishment.
It was anathema to individuality.
At the same time, it was a frighteningly sad admission of a rotting core of weakness in the face of life, an inability to exist on any level except that of a primitive beast, always cowering in fear that someone else would be better. It was not simply a rejection of all that was good, a resentment of accomplishment — it was, in fact, far worse. It was an expression of a gnawing hatred for anything good, grown out of an inner unwillingness to strive for anything worthwhile.
Like all irrational beliefs, it was also unworkable. To live, those beliefs had to be ignored to accomplish goals of domination, which in themselves were a violation of the belief for which they were fighting. There were no equals among those of the Order, the torchbearers of enforced equality. Whether a Ja'La player, the most professional of the soldiers, or an emperor, the best were not simply needed but sought after and highly valued, and so as a body they harbored an inner hatred of their failure to live up to their own teachings and a fear that they would be unmasked for it. As punishment for their inability to fulfill their sanctified beliefs through adherence to those teachings, they instead turned to the self-flagellation of proclaiming how unworthy all men were and vented their self-hatred on scapegoats: they blamed the victims.
In the end, the belief was nothing more than fabricated divinity — unthinking nonsense repeated in a mantra in an attempt to give it credibility, to make it sound sacred.
(Phantom by Terry Goodkind)
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