I believe in a “horizontal” kind of approach to spirituality where closeness is established not with some sort of supreme, distant being, but with tangible entities around me, as equals. I don't really like the idea of disguising suffering and hardship as contributing to some ultimate goal or looking to the promise of some other, future reality to accept things happening now. Resistance — “the refusal to accept the world's evil, the commitment to act against it” — appeals to me.

The tone and strange dialogs remind me of Hofstadter.

“If we cannot trust to an essential worth that persists regardless of our measurable social accomplishments, if we cannot find a way to connect to others that does not depend on achievement, if we do not escape our slavery to an endless need for recognition, if we cannot rest in the sense that what we have done is enough, if we cannot see that trying to accomplish in the social world can be a very dangerous business, especially given the society we live in, if our actions in the public realm do not spring from a moral and spiritual center rather than a conventional ego of accomplishment, if we don't realize that society creates effects out of our actions that we ourselves don't choose — if all these things remain the way they are, then how can we not, even against our will, contribute to the damage around us?”

“For me, a spiritual view will be authentic only if it can celebrate its peacefulness not only despite personal disappointment, but also as it faces the full range of the world's moral horrors.”