Mere Chance: A Relentless, Deadly Maze of Life

Hunter S. Thompson

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There are those times in life when an unexpected encounter occurs Set during the aftermath of World War II and the emergence of the Cold War to , Mere Chance is a riveting, action thriller involving an ongoing struggle between the unsuspecting Bryan Ashford, formerly assigned to the Manhattan Project, and the ruthless, deadly Angelo Martino, a powerful Mafia leader. Intermixed with Bryan's quest for corporate success and the behind the scenes manipulation of Martino is political intrigue at the highest levels, espionage, tragedy, revenge, and death along with Ashford's personal relationships including with his devoted wife and another woman, a famous movie actress.

We will send you an SMS containing a verification code. Please double check your mobile number and click on "Send Verification Code". He died for his own sins — there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others. As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction — whether, in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of — that is quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem of the psychology of the Saviour.

My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss. The histories of saints present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents , seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start — it is simply learned idling.

Nietzsche here refers to it. What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and however much overladen with extraneous characters — that is, in spite of the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends.

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It is not a question of mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus , has contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining the type of Jesus: But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: Every one is the child of God — Jesus claims nothing for himself alone — as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man.

Imagine making Jesus a hero! In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here. We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object.

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The instinctive hatred of reality: The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling: These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism.

I was the first to recognize him. I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by the history, the destiny , of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda.

The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist — all these merely presented chances to misunderstand it. Finally, let us not underrate the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary.

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I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: The physiologists, at all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics 6 an opportunity to speak in parables.

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Kant became an idiot. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others. The force of illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. Upon discharge from the U. More by David G. Christian morality is refuted by its fors: Man could not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught him His will.

It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya, 7 and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse 8 — and in neither case would it have made any difference to him. He speaks only of inner things: Denial is precisely the thing that is impossible to him. Such a doctrine cannot contradict: The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life , the special evangelical way of life.

He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life — and so was his death. He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God — not even prayer. If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness —.

David G. Bancroft (Author of Mere Chance)

His wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty — more, he invites it. And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil. On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One — to love him. Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: Quite to the contrary, the whole history of Christianity — from the death on the cross onward — is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism.

With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous — it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum , and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer.

A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church — the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy — contempt of man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: The man of today — I am suffocated by his foul breath! Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times.

Our age knows better. What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent — it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins. All the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are — as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is — as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation. Every one knows this, but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly anti-Christian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion-table?

A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people — and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian! Whom, then, does Christianity deny? To this day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even necessary: Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state of being.

States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true — as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity.

In fact, there are no Christians. In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: That even here, in psychologicis , there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place — and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!

At the moment when their disgust leaves them — and us! Therefore, let us not underestimate the Christians: It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only — it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance.

Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example , of his teachings in the most public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death — though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.

On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge , that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins.

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At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: And not as a mere privilege! Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent conception, in this way: Paul even preached it as a reward. One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing. What , indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred!

Above all, the Saviour: The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels — nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history — he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings.

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Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity. The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death — nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour — what he needed was the death on the cross, and something more.

To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself — this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means. What was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct — henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion.

So to live that life no longer has any meaning: Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph — it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals — for the pathos of distance.

Our politics is sick with this lack of courage! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the Saviour. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery.

The Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again — he is threefold the Jew. The underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities — this is not only tradition, it is inheritance: The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best ages with one exception, perhaps hardly human — , have permitted themselves to be deceived.

The gospels have been read as a book of innocence. I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes. In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be capable of — still more, which they must have in order to remain on top — they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail.

Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity into a duty: Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction: Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose! In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen: The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: Christian morality is refuted by its fors: With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? An error , to put it mildly. A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in certain cases. It compares itself to the prophets. If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy ; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. This frightful impostor then proceeds: For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

Not many wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea , and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge. That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament.

The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. Neither has a pleasant smell.

In it humanity does not even make the first step upward — the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception.

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Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a criterion of values.

Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously — that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less — what did it matter? We deny that God is God. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: Against boredom even gods struggle in vain. He creates man — man is entertaining. But then he notices that man is also bored. In the act he brought boredom to an end — and also many other things!

Woman was the second mistake of God. Ergo , she is also to blame for science. It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge. The old God was seized by mortal terror.

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Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike — it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific! Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality. For a long while this was the capital problem. Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought — and all thoughts are bad thoughts! Nevertheless — how terrible! War — among other things, a great disturber of science! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests , prospers in spite of war.

At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest. Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer. And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest. What is needed is a Saviour. On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches! My voice reaches even the deaf. But this is as far as we may go.

Bancroft is the founder and owner of [ He is also the author of the novel "Mere Chance," a story about a guy who returns home after WWII to make his way in the competitive world of electronics. Upon discharge from the U. Army Air Corps and his involvement in the top secret Manhattan Project, former Lieutenant Bryan Ashford, along with his best friend Craig Desmond, a former Marine injured during the war, set out to become business partners in the growing world of electronic pinball machines. Before they know it, the two business partners are caught up in the gripping claws of the powerful and mean-spirited Angelo Martino, a Mafia boss who will stop at nothing to destroy anyone who gets in his way.

Throw in a beautiful Hollywood actress, the constant threat of fear and death by intimidation, and political intrigue that involves the highest levels of government. Mere Chance is one of those books that once you start, you won't want to do anything but find out what happens next. Behind the intelligent plot, it's got intrigue, love, sex, violence, and a modern-day struggle between good and evil. I don't bother reviewing anything that doesn't impress me, and this impressed me. Interesting, little details and a fast pace make this a gem of a read.

A relentless, deadly maze of life," by David G. Bancroft's new book, "Mere Chance" offers what other authors only promise and fail to deliver. An explosively thrilling story set in factual context that Americans and those who love America will learn from and appreciate. Truman made in Get to Know Us. Delivery and Returns see our delivery rates and policies thinking of returning an item?