Dep't of Energy Making It Harder to FOIA Bush-Era Docs

Temptation is nothing more than accepting and giving into some possibility that suddenly makes itself available in an irresistible way—thus whatever it is and for whatever the reason, it seduces us or if you prefer it leads us into temptation. This seductive force from a paranoid religious standpoint needs no more sensuality than dropping various sized stones from a leaning tower and deducing from the observations of this mundane event some form of a universal concept which because it is counter to the eternal perfection of Church dogma must be condemned as heretical and for which the guilty must be made to repent or be burned at the stake.

In this sense the idea of faith is no different from anything else—for example to pray to not be led into temptation is in its essence a contradiction in terms (because you are tempted to prayer because you hope the prayers will be answered) and yet to not pray to avoid being led into temptation is to lack faith—faith is apparently the belief that because we assume a certain view of the world, this view makes the whole world intelligible and harmonizes it with the will of God. The problem is that this “faith” does not guarantee that all is well because it does not coincide with the experience of the world (instead it is supposed to coincide with the word of God and thus our senses are in contradiction with the holy words)—one’s faith can be strong and yet it does not in any way protect the faithful from the phenomenon of this world. The faithful can get into their car and have an accident in which they die—forcing the issue of whether they were not faithful enough, or was it because they had an unfaithful thought—this timid state of existence where all events must be correlated to the strength or weakness of one’s faith has already shown itself to be incapable of satisfying the social structure of society in relation to the world we live in—faith breaks down not because people are not “faithful” but because that to which they are “faithful towards” is incompatible with the way the world works and becomes no longer believable. Still this collective breakdown in faith forces itself to the foreground in a brutal way and as a reaction to this obvious fact the fanaticism of religion asserts itself via the structures of power it has created which have enabled it to rule and control—yet in order to maintain these structures the religion must disavow its teaching (it must assert its power by punishing the doubters but in a way that contradicts the teaching of the faith—the faith itself must “sin”), which in turn further increases doubt—hence the temptation of faith.

Terrorism is like temptation—we can guard ourselves so strongly against it that our means to protection becomes the very meaning of terrorism.