Byron’s Cain and the Refusal to Worship
Byron transformed the first murderer into a tormented skeptic who questions inherited guilt, unwanted mortality and the justice of worship…
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Byron transformed the first murderer into a tormented skeptic who questions inherited guilt, unwanted mortality and the justice of worship…
Read entryShelley imagined a rebel who defeats tyranny only after renouncing hatred, joining resistance to an ethics that refuses to imitate…
Read entryIn Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire turned Satan into the patron of exiles, inventors, conspirators and the wounded inhabitants of…
Read entryAnatole France imagined angels who discover forbidden philosophy, organize a revolution against Heaven and confront the danger of becoming what…
Read entryCamus defended revolt as an affirmation of dignity and solidarity while warning that revolution becomes tyranny when it grants itself…
Read entryMax Stirner attacked gods, states, morality and humanity itself whenever an abstraction was placed above the living individual.
Read entryThe modern right to conscience emerged from centuries in which disagreement could mean exile, prison, confiscation or death—and from dissidents…
Read entrySpiritual independence begins when the individual claims that conscience, revelation or reason can stand against an institution that declares itself…
Read entryThe adversary is not only an enemy. In philosophy, law, theology and science, an opposing voice can expose contradictions before…
Read entryAcross two millennia, Satan moved from accuser and cosmic enemy to literary rebel, political insult, occult emblem and deliberately adopted…
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