Another discussion among friends on the matter of abortion, politics, women’s rights.  I need to hear the words of others to get a wide angle view of our condition presently.  I took away from the discussion wonderment, how evangelicals once disposed to treat others kindly, practicing their personal piety privately, have become indifferent to women’s health, becoming self-appointed moral police for the entire country, These unbearable sycophants of Fox News and of pastors who pose as oracles of God are not the people I once knew.

Nietzsche wrote:

Art

We must discover
the hero no less than the fool
in our passion for knowledge;
we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly,
or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom.

Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings
–really, more weights than human beings
–nothing does us as much good as a dunce cap:
we need it in relation to ourselves
–we need all exuberant,
     floating,
          dancing,
               mocking,
                    childish,
                         and blissful art
lest we lose
the freedom above things
that our ideal demands of us.
It would mean a relapse for us,
with our irritable honesty,
to get involved entirely in morality and,
for the sake of the over-severe demands
that we make on ourselves in these matters,
to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows.

We should be able also to stand above morality
–and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness
of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment,
but also to float above it
and play.

How then could we possibly dispense with art
–and with the fool? …

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 2, Section 107 by Friedrich Nietzsche