For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.
Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of nonresistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in selfsuffering.
Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.
And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.
But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?
In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.
Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.