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People who refuse to look at and acknowledge pain hate life. Life is not reducible to pain, but neither is it reducible to its absence. We are not the better because we indulge in pain, but neither are we because we avoid it. We are better because we understand it, but we cannot understand it unless we engage it.
Yes, everything we encounter and experience in our life, for better or worse, becomes a part of us. Are you going to choose how you make it part of your life?
We do not need to play GTA 4 in order to understand human dignity---I don't---but to say that doing so already makes such an understanding impossible is cowardly, life-hating bullshit. It's like saying that homosexual marriage de-sanctifies heterosexual marriage. It's also like saying you cannot love your enemy. If you are not strong enough to respect what you claim to hate, then there is no hope of respecting what you claim to love.
