We have been educated into believing someone else's concept of the deity, and someone else's standard of beauty. You have the right to practice any religion and politics in a way that best suits your freedom, your dignity, and your understanding. And once you do that, you don't apologize.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of personal belief systems and individual freedom.
John Henrik Clarke's quote reflects on how societal norms can shape our understanding of spirituality and aesthetics. It encourages individuals to embrace their own perspectives on religion and beauty, advocating for personal freedom, dignity, and authenticity without the need for apologies to others. This speaks to the importance of individual agency in defining one's own truth in a world filled with external expectations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of individual beliefs in a diverse society.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.
Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and_x000D_ yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science_x000D_ and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and_x000D_ infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy,_x000D_ of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a_x000D_ zero – and an infinity.
To correct the evils, great and small, which spring from want of sympathy and from positive enmity among strangers, as nations or as individuals, is one of the highest functions of civilization.
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.
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