One of my favorite Soviet composers; Myaskovsky

The Old Testament being very coquettish; Lot and his daughters

Free Will

My favorite explanation of free will in literature is done through the words of John Steinbeck's Chinese character of Lee in the great classic East of Eden.  In this soliloquyby Lee he explains to Samuel and Adam that in the old testament there are phrases such as 'Thou shalt' and 'Do thou' but the greatest is 'Thou mayest rule over sin'

"Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience.  And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt'.   Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be.  But 'Thou mayest'! Why that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice."

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.  Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always.  Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels.  Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink.  Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others.  Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shap.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept.  One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larken 1976

Einstein's view on Morality

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously.  I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.  My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.  I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem - the most important of all human problems."

- Albert Einstein (1947)

Satan's vision to Theodor

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.  Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!  Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prive their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angles painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crime, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

The Mysterious Stranger - Mark Twain (1916).

A great illustration of Nietzsche's philosophy of absolute freedom