james baldwin

"...to betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no more moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous- dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect; that confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses."

"Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world- which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white- owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us- very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will- that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp on reality. ****People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and ****anyone who insists on returning to a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

from Notes of a Native Son...

-let's really try hard not to breed dogmas (haha) or systems of morality, I want only to entertain...thus, to be flexible and...i think it is normal (whatever that is) to question what sort of beliefs one is taking on, because even if we later reject them we may still be bound to them in some ineffable way
being careful!
cheers