Judgement Related Quotes

I think one can tell a lot about a person from the way he chooses to let the stub of his cigarette burn out...

I am a strong women... I have been through... Bullying, Abuse, Heartache, Discrimination, Hate, Sexuality Judgement. I have been called... Ugly, Selfish, Heartless, Emotionless, A Freak. But all of that made me into what I am today. I am... Beautiful, Kind, Loving, ...Adorable?, Selfless, Strong. I have... Wonderful Friends, Loving Boyfriends, Caring Relatives. And this is who I am...this is what all the bad and good have turned me into..and I love it..thank you.

The snag in this business of falling in love, aged relative, is that the parties of the first part so often get mixed up with the wrong parties of the second part, robbed of their cooler judgement by the party of the second part's glamour. Put it like this: the male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

The fact that a good and virtuous decision is context-sensitive does not imply that it is right only relative to, or inside, a limited context, any more than the fact that a good navigational judgement is sensitive to particular weather conditions shows that it is correct only in a local or relational sense. It is right absolutely, objectively, anywhere in the human world, to attend to the particular features of one's context; and the person who so attends and who chooses accordingly is making, according to Aris­totle, the humanly correct decision, period.

The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. That is why, in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth. At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected. The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance.

Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer

If ever you would have a blessed issue of this evil day, so as to stand in judgement before the great God, rest not till thou hast got into a covenant-relation with Christ.

It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.

Authentic relationships always require vulnerability and always the type of vulnerability that at times may feel deeply uncomfortable. Being known and seeking to know others truly. There's a cost in that but that is why there's a value. Authentic relating is the ability to be with other people and not use a mask to protect yourself. It requires a great deal of courage to be able to present one's weakness and one's strengths without diminishing either one for fear of judgement. Although authentic relating is generally associated with intimate relationships of best friends, family and lovers, authentic relating can also be done with people we only meet once or twice. It is about us being true to ourselves ... through the attitude of our heart, our words and our actions. Authentic relating requires people who are brutally honest with themselves and each other. It requires a huge amount of self-awareness, laying down of pride and stripping bare. It also requires a good level of self-esteem, to feel confident to be vulnerable. What does authentic relating mean for you?

The cognitive point here is that we generally make sense of confusing things by judging them against various preconceptions. When confronted with a new proposition we don’t start thinking about it with a blank sheet in front of us; instead, we place the proposition somewhere in relation to our pre-existing structure of beliefs and attitudes, this makes liked much easier, because we can reduce even a complicated judgement to a simple binary one – does it conform to my existing views or not?

The essence of things is not altered by their external relations, and that which, abstracting from these, alone constitutes the absolute worth of man is also that by which he must be judged, whoever the judge may be, and even by the Supreme Being.

Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world! By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior. The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.

But Georg was not inclined to write of his commercial success to his friend, and were he to do so now, it would appear especially peculiar. So Georg always confined himself to relating the trivial matters that randomly arise from a disorganized memory on a reflective Sunday.

The Musalman, remaining faithful to his religion, has not progressed; he has remained stationary in a world of swiftly moving modern forces. It is, indeed, one of the salient features of Islam that it immobilizes in their native barbarism, the races whom it enslaves. It is fixed in a crystallization, inert and impenetrable. It is unchangeable; and political, social or economic changes have no repercussion upon it. " Having been taught that outside Islam there can be no safety; outside its law no truth and outside its spiritual message there is no happiness, the Muslim has become incapable of conceiving any other condition than his own, any other mode of thought than the Islamic thought. He firmly believes that he has arrived at an unequalled pitch of perfection; that he is the sole possessor of true faith, of the true doctrine, the true wisdom ; that he alone is in possession of the truth—no relative truth subject to revision, but absolute truth. " The religious law of the Muslims has had the effect of imparting to the very diverse individuals of whom the world is composed, a unity of thought, of feeling, of ideas, of judgement.

He reviewed his friends marriages - the supposedly happy ones - and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgement, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

A number of ethical, aesthetic, psychiatric or forensic classfications that are produced by the "institutional sciences",not to mention those produced and inculcated by the educational system, are similarly subordinated to social functions, although they derive their specific efficacy from their apparent neutrality. They are produced in accordance with the specific logic, and in the specific language, of relatively autonomous fields, and they combine a real dependence on the classificatory schemes of the dominant habitus (and ultimately on the social structures of which these are the product) with an apparent independence.

Whose sleeve do I have to grip, to tell my story to? It used to be Bet. Now, sleeveless. And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance, 'feasting' on her energy, and giving nothing back. Well, maybe. We had most excellent days. We were the king and queen of coffee in the morning, in the dark of winter, in the early morning sun of summer that came right in our windows, right in, to wake us. Ah, yes, small matters. Small matters, that we call sanity, or the cloth that makes sanity. Talking to her in those times made - no, God preserve me from sentimentality. Those days are over. Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.

Mill sets out several related arguments for protecting freedom of speech, not just from oppressive government intervention, but also from social pressures. Underlying them all are the assumptions that (a) truth is valuable, and (b) no matter how certain someone is that they know the truth, their judgement is still fallible: they might still be wrong.

It seemed so easy for so many people to divide war from peace, to confine their definitions to the unambivalent. Marching soldiers, pitched battles and slaughter. Locked armouries, treaties, fêtes and city gates opened wide. But Fiddler knew that suffering thrived in both realms of existence – he’d witnessed too many faces of the poor, ancient crones and babes in a mother’s arms, figures lying motionless on the roadside or in the gutters of streets – where the sewage flowed unceasing like rivers gathering their spent souls. And he had come to a conviction, lodged like an iron nail in his heart, and with its burning, searing realization, he could no longer look upon things the way he used to, he could no longer walk and see what he saw with a neatly partitioned mind, replete with its host of judgements – that critical act of moral relativity – this is less, that is more. The truth in his heart was this: he no longer believed in peace. It did not exist except as an ideal to which endless lofty words paid service, a litany offering up the delusion that the absence of overt violence was sufficient in itself, was proof that one was better than the other. There was no dichotomy between war and peace – no true opposition except in their particular expressions of a ubiquitous inequity. Suffering was all-pervasive. Children starved at the feet of wealthy lords no matter how secure and unchallenged their rule.

Dwarf things. Small things. Little things in relation to the norm. Insignificant things. Things with different dimensions. Curiously, the stories I like the most are made up of trivialities. Details. Trifles. These days, people look to what's big. The big picture, big sales figures, success. Bright lights, interviews, breaking news. Whatever's famous. Importance judged by fame. Maybe small things are subversive. Living on a modest scale compared to the norm. Maybe the dwarf is the hero of our time.

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.

You said everyone imagines they’re exceptions and they’ll surely arrange an early and merciful exit before submitting to the intolerable. And then they do submit to the intolerable. That’s because, in order to retain agency over your own end of life, you have to be willing to give up some small portion of it that’s not particularly rubbish. Otherwise, you go downhill, doctors and relatives take over, and you’re apt to lose the very part of yourself that make judgements and takes action. We have a narrow window in which to exercise control.

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.

One of the distinctive features of Christian Mindfulness is that it does have moral content.  In other words, the moral content is not relativistic.  It is based on an imitation of the character of Christ and the ways of God as revealed in Christian Scripture.  Christian Mindfulness which is non-judgemental in its quality seeks to avoid harsh, critical and condemning approaches to self and to others.  The accusing and condemning tongue can be destructive.  Mindful awareness creates space where we can step back and step away from judgementalism.  The new environment in which we are invited to relate to ourselves and others is one of kindness.

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or, if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.

A consensual order is one in which the decisions on which our relations with others depend are, discounting emergencies, freely taken. Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.

The life of man is a story; an adventure story; and in our vision the same is true even of the story of God. The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realisation both of mythology and philosophy. It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stories; only it is a true story. It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life. But above all, it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories. That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies—except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass several tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it. Now this deep and democratic and dramatic instinct is derided and dismissed in all the other philosophies. For all the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another. From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

Some of his authors were so mulishly stubborn about altering their own work, one would think he had suggested changing text in the Bible. Amanda was easy to work with, and she did not harbor great pretensions about herself or her writing. In fact, she was relatively modest about her talents, to the extent of appearing surprised and uncomfortable when he praised her. The plot of 'Unfinished Lady' centered on a young woman who tried to live strictly according to society's rules, yet couldn't make herself accept the rigid confinement of what was considered proper. She made fatal errors in her private life- gambling, taking a lover outside of marriage, having a child out of wedlock- all due to her desire to obtain the elusive happiness she secretly longed for. Eventually she came to a sordid end, dying of venereal disease, although it was clear that society's harsh judgements had caused her demise fully as much as disease. What fascinated Jack was that Amanda, as the author, had refused to take a position on the heroine's behavior, neither applauding nor condemning it. Clearly she had sympathy for the character, and Jack suspected that the heroine's inner rebelliousness reflected some of Amanda's own feelings.

As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that white America's love-hate relationship with black modes of communication can only be interpreted within a framework that considers language a primary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it's about more than a mothafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized allows us to make several observations. First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like all cultures is "a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors, expectations and routines." Language practices, in their varying sociocultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range of the community's speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethnographic search and analysis. Second the community's beliefs and ideas about language- it's language ideologies- should be the primary point of departure for investigation and interpretation.

Forgive me I hope you are feeling better. I am, thank you. Will you not sit down? In vain I have struggled. It will not do! My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. In declaring myself thus I'm fully aware that I will be going expressly against the wishes of my family, my friends, and, I hardly need add, my own better judgement. The relative situation of our families is such that any alliance between us must be regarded as a highly reprehensible connection. Indeed as a rational man I cannot but regard it as such myself, but it cannot be helped. Almost from the earliest moments of our acquaintance I have come to feel for you a passionate admiration and regard, which despite of my struggles, has overcome every rational objection. And I beg you, most fervently, to relieve my suffering and consent to be my wife. In such cases as these, I believe the established mode is to express a sense of obligation. But I cannot. I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I'm sorry to cause pain to anyone, but it was most unconsciously done, and, I hope, will be of short duration. And this is all the reply I am to expect? I might wonder why, with so little effort at civility, I am rejected. And I might wonder why, with so evident a desire to offend and insult me you chose to tell me that you like me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character! Was this not some excuse for incivility if I was uncivil? I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. Do you think any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has been the means of ruining the happiness of a most beloved sister? Can you deny that you have done it? I have no wish to deny it. I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, and I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself. But it's not merely that on which my dislike of you is founded. Long before it had taken place, my dislike of you was decided when I heard Mr Wickham's story of your dealings with him. How can you defend yourself on that subject? You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns! And of your infliction! You have reduced him to his present state of poverty, and yet you can treat his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule! And this is your opinion of me? My faults by this calculation are heavy indeed, but perhaps these offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by the honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design on you, had I concealed my struggles and flattered you. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly below my own? You are mistaken, Mr Darcy. The mode of your declaration merely spared me any concern I might have felt in refusing you had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner. You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it. From the very beginning, your manners impressed me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. I had known you a month before I felt you were the last man in the world whom I could ever marry! You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your feelings and now have only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Please forgive me for having taken up your time and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness. Forgive me. I hope you are feeling better. I am, thank you. Will you no

It is in full unity with Himself that He is also – and especially and above all – in Christ, that he becomes a creature, man, flesh, that He enters into our being in contradiction, that He takes upon Himself its consequences. If we think that this is impossible it is because our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human – far too human. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and perverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea about God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to constitute them in the light of the fact that He does this. We may believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be the “Wholly Other.” But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ. We cannot make them the standard by which to measure what God can or cannot do, or the basis of the judgement that in doing this He brings Himself into self-contradiction. By doing this God proves to us that He can do it, that to do it is within His nature. And He Himself to be more great and rich and sovereign than we had ever imagined. And our ideas of His nature must be guided by this, and not vice versa.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

When we finished we sat quietly and watched the endless view. I was slowly realizing that this was one of the Seer’s qualities that I appreciated the most. To be present without words, without expectations and without any judgement. These were the times when I felt that he could communicate his thoughts and visions through his presence alone. Looking out became looking in. It was an undramatic kind of transmission, which would move you almost imperceptibly and silently. At these moments I felt my body relax completely. Each fibre, each muscle and every single cell found its correct place. An empathetic vigilance grew from this relaxed condition, a vigilance, which saw people and things as they were on their own merit. This was not about acceptance any more, since there was nothing to accept. Everything was as it was. It was a long-forgotten language. He showed me how almost all communication between people, the spoken and the written word, is nothing but our desperate attempts to cling to illusory personalities and identities tainted by prejudices, fear and vanity. A language which did not allow any room for listening, which focused on itself, which was excluding and only lived due to its attack and defence system was, according to him, a poor and inhumane one. Although the users of this language were usually very good at repartee and were able to write infinitely, they were really only good at maintaining and communicating limitations without end. It was this maintenance of limitations which was one of the main reasons that the great paradigm change, which all were waiting for, did not happen. He did not judge. He simply looked at and worked for the release of limitations wherever he met them. Not until the dissolution of all mental noise would it be possible to practise the transmission of stillness as a transforming kind of communication between people. It was not possible to enter this condition with a limited attention. The road to the transpersonal and the related level might seem difficult, because it demanded an obligation which included the complete human being. It was not enough to be just a little bit pregnant. You either were or you were not. And the paradoxical difference between the one and the other was the simple fact that the sleeping person decided to open his eyes, to wake up and become conscious of his wakeful condition. The fact that such a seemingly simple decision could appear so difficult lay in the fact that it entailed the release of more or less everything that you have ever learned and gained, and which you erroneously have interpreted as a true realization. He presented all these considerations to me on the mountain. In one single thought, without words, without judgement.

Unconditional Love - Love Without Condition I love you as you are, as you seek to find your own special way to relate to the world. I honour your choices to learn in the way you feel is right for you. I know it is important that you are the person you want to be and not someone that I or others think you "should" be. I realise that I cannot know what is best for you, although perhaps sometimes I think I do. I have not been where you have been, viewing life from the angle you have. I do not know what you have chosen to learn, how you have chosen to learn it, with whom or in what time period. I have not walked life looking through your eyes, so how can I know what you need. I allow you to be in the world without a thought or word of judgement from me about the deeds you undertake. I see no error in the things you say and do. In this place where I am, I see that there are many ways to perceive and experience the different facets of our world. I allow without reservation the choices you make in each moment. I make no judgement of this, for if I would deny your right to your evolution, then I would deny that right for myself and all others. To those who would choose a way I cannot walk, whilst I may not choose to add my power and my energy to this way, I will never deny you the gift of love that God has bestowed within me, for all creation. As I love you, so I shall be loved. As I sow, so shall I reap. I allow you the Universal right of Free Will to walk your own path, creating steps or to sit awhile if that is what is right for you. I will make no judgement that these steps are large or small, nor light or heavy or that they lead up or down, for this is just my viewpoint. I may see you do nothing and judge it to be unworthy and yet it may be that you bring great healing as you stand blessed by the Light of God. I cannot always see the higher picture of Divine Order. For it is the inalienable right of all life to choose their own evolution and with great Love I acknowledge your right to determine your future. In humility I bow to the realisation that the way I see as best for me does not have to mean it is also right for you. I know that you are led as I am, following the inner excitement to know your own path. I know that the many races, religions, customs, nationalities and beliefs within our world bring us great richness and allow us the benefit and teachings of such diverseness. I know we each learn in our own unique way in order to bring that Love and Wisdom back to the whole. I know that if there were only one way to do something, there would need only be one person. I will not only love you if you behave in a way I think you should, or believe in those things I believe in. I understand you are truly my brother and my sister, though you may have been born in a different place and believe in another God than I. The love I feel is for all of God's world. I know that every living thing is a part of God and I feel a Love deep within for every person, animal, tree and flower, every bird, river and ocean and for all the creatures in all the world. I live my life in loving service, being the best me I can, becoming wiser in the perfection of Divine Truth, becoming happier in the joy of ... Unconditional Love

Consciousness is there in animal life. Beyond animal instincts, humans also have inherent recognition of good and evil in their conscience. Belief in deterministic justice and rewards in afterlife fulfils our aspiration to have true and fair reward for every small act of goodness and evil in afterlife. Every moment of a nurse and that of a cured or dead patient is not meaningless if one believes and prepare for afterlife by achieving excellence in morals. Imam Ghazali wrote that wealth is useful till we die, relatives till we are put in grave and only good deeds will be the currency on judgement day. If we have good deeds to take in next life, then we can have everlasting happiness that is not infected and affected by any Corona Virus.

as well, the chaotic jangle of microscopic particles was christened Brownian motion in his honor. Much effort throughout the nineteenth century went into explaining it, and by the 1860s at least three natural philosophers independently suggested that Brownian motion was caused by the collision of the suspended particles with invisible molecules.* This would turn out to be the correct explanation, but at the time it was speculation, which met fierce objections. A legitimate calculation of Brownian motion, not dissimilar in spirit to the one Einstein would perform in 1905, was attempted in 1900 by one Felix Exner. Unfortunately for Exner, he got the wrong answer. As the story goes, Einstein wrote his paper “blissfully unaware of the detailed history of Brownian motion,” a claim that he himself also made to Conrad Habicht. According to this version, he not only predicted the phenomenon but explained it as well. Maybe. To be sure, Einstein omits any mention of Brownian motion in the title of his paper, remarking only in the first paragraph, “It is possible that the motions to be discussed here are identical with the so-called Brownian molecular motion; however, the data available to me on the latter are so imprecise that I could not form a judgement on the question.” On the other hand: From Maurice Solovine we do know that a few years earlier the Olympians had pounced on and devoured the great

Results of a recent survey of 74 chief executive officers indicate that there may be a link between childhood pet ownership and future career success. Fully 94% of the CEOs, all of them employed within Fortune 500 companies, had possessed a dog, a cat, or both, as youngsters. The respondents asserted that pet ownership had helped them to develop many of the positive character traits that make them good managers today, including responsibility, empathy, respect for other living beings, generosity, and good communication skills. For all we know, more than 94% of children raised in the backgrounds from which chief executives come had pets, in which case the direction of dependency would be negative. Maybe executive success is really related to tooth brushing during childhood. Probably all chief executives brushed their teeth, at least occasionally, and we might imagine the self-discipline thus acquired led to their business success. That seems more reasonable than the speculation that “communication skills” gained through interacting with a childhood pet promote better relationships with other executives and employees.

It is to be noticed, first, that pragmatism places a peculiar strain on our use of language. On the one hand, the pragmatist uses language in a perplexingly extraordinary way, and on the other hand, in a deceptively vague manner. An understandably common reply to the proposal of pragmatism is this: even if a belief or idea does have a useful function (works well), is this not because it is true? Just here it is evident that pragmatism is at variance with the way we use language, for Dewey took 'effective working' to be, not the evidence of truth, but the very nature of truth. Yet there are many thing which are ordinarily taken as true which are so taken irrespective of any pragmatic justification (e.g., that of those who died last year, some had brown eyes), and this is because we ordinarily take truth to be related to something objective, rather than as the valuable functioning of a belief. It seems as though the pragmatist wants us to adopt a very specialized use of key epistemic words, reserving them for those ideas which have the privileged status of being relevant, important, or practical. Such pragmatic reformation of our linguistic habits, however, is of little philosophic value, since traditional epistemic questions can still be asked-although with a new vocabulary; we still wonder whether certain statements or beliefs are 'true' in the old sense, and linguistic renovation will not of itself prevent us from asking. Moreover, when it is reported that such and such a solution to a problem is more useful ('true' new sense) than another proposal, one would be especially interested in asking whether this report is true (old sense). In response, the pragmatist will either be right back into the thick of it respecting traditional epistemological issues or he will prohibit the question (or just ignore it) as being pointless and impractical. But such a reply would be clearly ridiculous, because here we are not asking whether some proposal (e.g., 'Quinine is a specific treatment for malaria') is true or useful, but rather whether a certain conclusion (e.g., 'Quinine is more useful than salt tablets for treating malaria') is veridical. Certainly it is not pointless to ask after the accuracy of the pragmatist's judgements about what works and what does not.

The notion of witchcraft is not only a function of misfortune and of personal relations but also comprises moral judgement.

My own background as a diplomat well into a fifth decade biases me in favour of presenting a clinical picture of the global landscape, its challenges and complications as well as of the implications for India and a suggested course of action. This is what I have done for a living all these years. It is not that we avoid personalities and relationships or underplay their importance. On the contrary, so much of diplomacy is about chemistry and credibility that the human factor is always central to an accurate judgement. But what usually happens is that a vast number of objective and subjective elements are distilled into an integrated picture, which acquires a relatively dispassionate character.

But stripped to its essence, snobbery merely indicates any way of judging another human whereby one takes a relatively small section of their identity and uses it to come to a total and fixed judgement on their entire worth. For the music snob, we are what we listen to; for the clothes snob, we are our trousers. And according to the job snobbery at large in the modern world, we are what is on our business card.

...the conceptual commitment account is actually quite psychological. It is far from drawing an airtight distinction. Quite often, whether or not a person considers a subject to be in a predicate will be relative to that person's knowledge, intuitions, personality, etc.. For example, it was common in the ancient world (and is still common in non-scientific cultures) to classify whales with fish. Such a person would consider 'A whale is a fish' to be analytic--the concept of fish includes whale. A Kantian might reply that this mistaken evaluation is due to the person's ignorance. A biologist would even claim that the statement, 'A whale is a fish' is analytically false. But we must not make such hasty judgements. After all, if the person is not working with scientific definitions of 'fish' or 'mammal,' he has not necessarily misclassified the whale. After all, there are obvious analogies between whales and fish. If somone who has not taken a modern biology class defines 'fish' simply to be an aquatic animal, he is perfectly justified in including whales in the category of fish. In other words, for him, according to his vocabulary and definitions, the truth is analytic. Thus, what might be analytic for one person could be synthetic for another and Kant has given no way to resolve such disputes.

My parents’ belief that my dead relatives could see everything I was doing from heaven was niggling me. Well, at least from heaven you can see how little money I have, I reasoned with Papa’s ghost, figuring that in the afterlife he’d be blessed with an angelic, non-judgemental attitude and would just be smiling down on me benevolently.

If we love each other without creating a race war, people wouldn't get hurt that much, and feelings too.

Within this historic and optimistic future in mind, I have made no value judgment of the destiny bestowed on each nation. For all this, however, leadership matters; so do the institutional structures and the system of political governance.

And what is consensus? It means a majority of the individuals in a society coming together and agreeing to make their values into laws, or 'society's standards.' A law is enforced only by force. So your 'consensus' really means that some individuals - the lawmakers, whoever they are - the majority of democracy - impose their personal values, their will, on the other's. That's 'judgementalism,' that's imposition. The relativist is accusing the absolutist of exactly the moral fault he's guilty of. It's not just bad philosophy. It's bad morality; it's hypocrisy; it's dishonest. The very people who say, 'Don't impose your values on me because they're relative and subjective' then go on to create a society that they say is only man-mad, not based on God or natural law, and they say that all values come from man, so a society is then nothing but some men imposing their values on others.

I know of good people with black hearts. I know of bad people with big hearts. It isn’t always what it seems. Generalized boundaries are convenient to categorized judgements. There is more to what it appears. I know of oceans that doesn’t quench a thirst and little ponds of quenching thousands. Let the good play the God and bad play the devil. For I know of Gods bringing dooms and death.

To sum up what is most crucial in Japanese political culture: the Japanese have never been encouraged to think that the force of an idea could measure up to the physical forces of a government. The key to understanding Japanese power relations is that they are unregulated by transcendental concepts. The public has no intellectual means to a consistent judgement of the political aspects of life. The weaker, ideologically inspired political groups or individuals have no leverage of any kind over the status quo other than the little material pressure they are sometimes able to muster. In short, Japanese political practice is a matter of ‘might is right’ disguised by assurances and tokens of ‘benevolence’.

Judgment does not necessarily relate to the judiciary system

show, Trisha. Dennis had seen a Trisha episode about people with depression, and thought maybe his dad had that. Dennis loved Trisha. It was a daytime talk show where ordinary people were given the opportunity to talk about their problems, or yell abuse at their relatives, and it was all presided over by a kindly looking but judgemental woman conveniently called… Trisha. For a while Dennis thought life without his mum would be some kind of adventure. He’d stay up late, eat take-aways and watch rude comedy shows. However, as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, he realised that it wasn’t an adventure at all.

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

A facile approach to this underside of the Portuguese presence in Asia would be to dismiss it as little more than a generalization of the phenomenon later celebrated by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim: of the European “going native.” It is the contention in this chapter that such an approach is false, because it imposes on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the judgements and categories of a later period, judgements that were crucially related to changed attitudes towards miscegenation, and the “proper” place of the European in Asia.

Your ideal weight is a collection of experiences, feelings, ambitions, and mental processes. It's a space that is fluid, ever-changing, and abstract. There is no numerical relation to what is best. Instead, you must live your life free from numerical restraints. An ideal weight is not one you can predict, choose, or write down as a digit. Rather, it's a place you reach by thinking very little about your body at all. You reach it without realizing it, You reach it without micromanaging it, You reach it without judgement. And you reach it seemingly by accident while living your life to its fullest every day.

The original Asch studies involved a group of seven to nine people sitting in a semi-circle taking it in turn to declare which of three simultaneously presented stimulus lines was the same length as a standard comparison line. Only the last person to respond was a true naïve subject, all the others, unbeknown to the subject, were confederates of the experimenter. … The results revealed that subjects registered incredulity and gave signs of distress and anxiety. Only 25 per cent managed to resist the group pressure throughout, 33 per cent conformed on half or more of the focal trials, and 5 per cent conformed on all of them. All in all subjects yielded on about 33 per cent of trials. Asch reasoned that since the stimuli were unambiguous subjects could not be using the others’ judgements as information about the correct response, rather they were conforming in order not to appear different or in order to avoid censure and rejection by the other members of the group

dominance of what we can call the expertise model for knowledge. What is taken to matter for knowledge is whether you can, as an expert can, grasp the relevant items in a way that relates them to one another and to the field as a whole, and can give a reasoned account of this, one which explains the particular judgements you make and relates them to your unified grasp of the whole.

The word coping is often a misleading judgement, used inappropriately in relation to grief. Observers who make comments about a grieving person along the lines of ‘He/she seems to be coping really well’, or ‘He/she isn’t coping very well’ tend to base their ability to judge your wellbeing on how they feel about what you are doing. For example, if you are very obviously distressed and crying, you are likely to be described ay ‘not coping very well’. If you don’t express your grief overtly or don’t show more grief than the observer is comfortable with, they are likely to describe you as ‘coping very well’. It is also possible to show too little grief for their comfort level. If you don’t cry or appear filled with sorrow or pain, they don’t have a role and may consequently describe you as cold. The title of this book — Coping with Grief — is an attempt to redefine what coping really means. When any of us are newly bereaved, we are ‘coping’ if we can keep breathing, put one foot after the other, get out of bed, dress ourselves, and attend to essential tasks even if on automatic pilot.

The word coping is often a misleading judgement, used inappropriately in relation to grief. Observers who make comments about a grieving person along the lines of ‘He/she seems to be coping really well’, or ‘He/she isn’t coping very well’ tend to base their ability to judge your wellbeing on how they feel about what you are doing. For example, if you are very obviously distressed and crying, you are likely to be described as ‘not coping very well’. If you don’t express your grief overtly or don’t show more grief than the observer is comfortable with, they are likely to describe you as ‘coping very well’. It is also possible to show too little grief for their comfort level. If you don’t cry or appear filled with sorrow or pain, they don’t have a role and may consequently describe you as cold. The title of this book — Coping with Grief — is an attempt to redefine what coping really means. When any of us are newly bereaved, we are ‘coping’ if we can keep breathing, put one foot after the other, get out of bed, dress ourselves, and attend to essential tasks even if on automatic pilot.

Considerable educational effort has now and again been made to develop in students the ability to reason their ways through complex moral dilemmas, and to formulate morally enlightened choices as a result. But there is no evidence that, once having acquired such moral reasoning skills, these students will behave any better than their morally untutored peers when it comes to the willingness of the great human majority, when circumstance are “right,” to engage in state-authorized aggression and killing in wars, participation in judicial executions, perpetration of school and adult bullying, domestic abuse, endorsement of torture in the name of national security, depredation of the world's natural resources and biodiversity in the interests of human development and financial gain—a list that could be continued at some length. The moral bridge is a bridge that relatively few cross automatically and naturally, from morally reasoned judgement to moral conduct.

Yet despite his differences with Barfield, Lewis credits him with bringing about two fundamental changes in his own thinking. The first of these was the demolition of Lewis’s “chronological snobbery,” which Lewis defined as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”[235] The second change related to Lewis’s way of thinking about reality. Lewis, like most of that age, tended to assume that “the universe revealed by the senses” constituted “rock-bottom reality.” For Lewis, this was the most economical and commonsense way of thinking about things, which he took to be thoroughly scientific. “I wanted Nature to be quite independent of our observation; something other, indifferent, self-existing.”[236] But what of human moral judgements? Or feelings of joy? Or the experience of beauty? How did such subjective ways of thinking and experiencing fit into this? It was no idle thought. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Lewis had been influenced by what he styled the “New Look,” a rationalist way of thinking which led him to believe that he must abandon any notion that his fleeting experiences of “Joy” were clues to the deeper meaning of life.[237] Lewis went with the flow, immersing himself in this then-fashionable way of thinking. He came to believe that his boyhood desires, longings, and experience had been exposed as meaningless. Lewis decided that he was “done with all that.” He had “‘seen through’ them.” He was “never going to be taken in again.”[238] Yet Barfield persuaded Lewis that these lines of argument were inconsistent. Lewis was relying on precisely the same inner patterns of thought that he had dismissed in order to secure his knowledge of an allegedly “objective” world. The consistent outcome of believing only in “the universe revealed by the senses” was to adopt “a Behaviouristic theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics.” Yet Lewis regarded such a theory as unbelievable. There was an alternative, which gave full weight to the importance of human moral and aesthetic intuitions and did not discount or dismiss them. For Lewis, this led to only one conclusion: “Our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.”[239] And where might that line of thought take him?

A man's own judgement should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself. Many men do this or that because someone else thought it right.

In conclusion, it is appropriate to say something about the destiny of the face, in the world that we have entered – a world in which eros is being rapidly detached from inter-personal commitments and redesigned as a commodity. The first victim of this process is the face, which has to be subdued to the rule of the body, to be shown as overcome, wiped out or spat upon. The underlying tendency of erotic images in our time is to present the body as the focus and meaning of desire, the place where it all occurs, in the momentary spasm of sensual pleasure of which the soul is at best a spectator, and no part of the game. In pornography the face has no role to play, other than to be subjected to the empire of the body. Kisses are of no significance, and eyes look nowhere since they are searching for nothing beyond the present pleasure. All this amounts to a marginalization, indeed a kind of desecration, of the human face. And this desecration of the face is also a cancelling out of the subject. Sex, in the pornographic culture, is not a relation between subjects but a relation between objects. And anything that might enter to impede that conception of the sexual act – the face in particular – must be veiled, marred or spat upon, as an unwelcome intrusion of judgement into a sphere where everything goes. All this is anticipated in the pornographic novel, Histoire d’O, in which enslaved and imprisoned women are instructed to ignore the identity of the men who enjoy them, to submit their faces to the penis, and to be defaced by it. A parallel development can be witnessed in the world of sex idols. Fashion models and pop stars tend to display faces that are withdrawn, scowling and closed. Little or nothing is given through their faces, which offer no invitation to love or companionship. The function of the fashion-model’s face is to put the body on display; the face is simply one of the body’s attractions, with no special role to play as a focus of another’s interest. It is characterized by an almost metaphysical vacancy, as though there is no soul inside, but only, as Henry James once wrote, a dead kitten and a ball of string. How we have arrived at this point is a deep question that I must here pass over. But one thing is certain, which is that things were not always so. Sex symbols and sex idols have always existed. But seldom before have they been faceless. One of the most famous of those symbols, Simonetta Vespucci, mistress of Lorenzo da Medici, so captured the heart of Botticelli that he used her as the model for his great painting of the Birth of Venus. In the central figure the body has no meaning other than the diffusion and outgrowth of the soul that dreams in the face – anatomically it is wholly deformed, and a girl who actually looked like this would have no chance in a modern fashion parade. Botticelli is presenting us with the true, Platonic eros, as he saw it – the face that shines with a light that is not of this world, and which invites us to transcend our appetites and to aspire to that higher realm where we are united to the forms – Plato’s version of a world in which the only individuals are souls. Hence the body of Botticelli’s Venus is subservient to the face, a kind of caricature of the female anatomy which nevertheless takes its meaning from the holy invitation that we read in the eyes above.

It is always a difficult task to hold the scales of justice at even balance when weighing the deeds of men. It becomes doubly more so when dealing with men engaged in a movement that one believes had its origin with God, and that its leaders on occasion act under the inspiration of God. Under such conditions to state events as to be historically exact, and yet, on the other hand, so treat the course of events as not to destroy faith in these men, nor in their work, becomes a task of supreme delicacy; and one that tries the soul and the skill of the historian. The only way such a task can be accomplished, in the judgement of the writer, is to frankly state events as they occurred, in full consideration of all related circumstances, allowing the line of condemnation or of justification to fall where it may; being confident that in the sum of things justice will follow truth; and God will be glorified in his work, no matter what may befall individuals, or groups of individuals.

...yes, we were pretty good boys. After all, we were the future middle class. "...By then some of us had behaved badly. There were illegitimate children, petty theft, various forms of betrayal. But, even so, I think we would have called ourselves basically good. And if a few of us had gotten into trouble, we could point to complicated circumstances, weaknesses, errors of judgement; yet even with these lapses we would still have claimed a certain morality. We were decent, or hoped we were. But where does it change? ... It depends on what you want and how much you want it and how you place yourself in relation to the generally accepted system of morality. You know that old argument that some people have the right to set aside conventional morality because of their superiority or whatever? Clearly, there are people who do terrible things and are able to justify their misconduct by need or superiority or by saying they weren't responsible. But if these things continue and if you're unable to avoid self-deception, then you reach a point where you have to say, No, I am not a good person. I have behaved badly. That is the first admission. The second admission is that I will continue to behave badly.

It is related that on one occasion the Prophet asked the archangel Gabriel to show himself in the 'mighty form' in which God created him. 'O Beloved of God,' said Gabriel, 'I have a terrifying form such as no one could look upon without being rapt from himself.' The Prophet insisted none the less, and Gabriel finally agreed to allow his angelic dimension to encompass earthly vision. There was a great rush of sound, as of a hurricane in full spate, and Gabriel appeared in his earth-crushing splendour so that his form blotted out the horizon. the Prophet fainted under the impact of this vision, whereupon the archangel resumed his earthly disguise, embraced the fallen man and kissed him, saying: 'Be not afraid, O Beloved of god, for I am thy brother Gabriel!' but he added: 'What would it have been like if you had seen Israfil (he who summons to the Last Judgement), for then my own form would have seemed to you a small and puny thing.

The LORD God brings man into Communion with himself, by that sweet Familiar way of COVENANT, in all ages, from the Foundation to the Consummation of the world. God might have dealt with man in a More Absolute Lordly and Majestical way, peremptorily Commanding and requiring from man his Duty and Allegiance: but he hath pleased to Condescend to a More Relative familiar Covenant way; And this after the manner of man, viz. familiarly, sweetly, and condescendingly dealing with man by Covenant, as one man with another. God by his Covenants Reveals, Applies, Confirms, and Increaseth this sweet Communion betwixt himself and his People in all ages and generation of the world, from the Creation to the judgement day.

So it is necessary that we have a means of monitoring the tension developed by muscular activity, and equally necessary that the threshold of response for the inhibitory function of that monitor be a variable threshold that can be readily adjusted to suit many purposes, from preventing tissue damage due to overload, to providing a smooth and delicate twist of the tuning knob of a sensitive shortwave receiver. And such a marvelously adaptable tension-feedback system we do have in our Golgi tendon organs, reflex arcs which connect the sensory events in a stretching tendon directly to the motor events which control that degree of stretch, neural feed-back loops whose degree of sensory and motor stimulation may be widely altered according to our intent, our conscious training, and our unconscious habits. This ingenious device does, however, contain a singular danger, a danger unfortunately inherent in the very features of the Golgi reflex which are the cleverest, and the most indispensable to its proper function. The degree of facilitation of the feed-back loop, which sets the threshold value for the “required tension,” is controlled by descending impulses from higher brain centers down into the loop’s internuncial network in the brain stem and the spinal cord. In this way, conscious judgements and the fruits of practice are translated into precise neuromuscular values. But judgement and practice are not the only factors that can be involved in this facilitating higher brain activity. Relative levels of overall arousal, our attitudes towards our past experience, the quality of our present mood, neurotic avoidances and compulsions of all kinds, emotional associations from all quarters—any of these things can color descending messages, and do in fact cause considerable alterations in the Golgi’s threshold values. It is possible, for instance, to be so emotionally involved in an effort—either through panic or through exhilaration—that we do not even notice that our exertions have torn us internally until the excitement has receded, leaving the painful injury behind to surprise us. Or acute anxiety may drive the value of the “required tension” so high that our knuckles whiten as we grip the steering wheel, the pencil suddenly snaps in our fingers, or the glass shatters as we set it with too much force onto the table. On the other hand, timidity or the fear of being rejected can so sap us of “required tension” that it is difficult for us to produce a loud, clear knock upon a door that we tremble to enter.

Maruti was called upon to take a difficult decision soon after the first bookings had been made. The pick-up truck, a purely commercial vehicle that was part of the original project along with the 800 and the van, got a very poor response—bookings of just 2,000. In the project report, the pick-up truck was expected to account for 20 per cent of total production. The booking response showed that the customers did not want this vehicle, and manufacturing it in small volumes would not be viable. The company realized it had made a serious error of judgement in not recognizing that petrol-driven commercial vehicles could never compete with diesel-driven ones, as the government-determined price of diesel was much lower than petrol. SMC had estimated that the pick-up truck would be very successful because of good experience in other Asian countries. In Pakistan, it was used for rural transport, after being fitted with a canvas top, and sold in large numbers. However, India had a vehicle called the Tempo, which carried a load slightly more than the pick-up truck and ran on diesel. The highly value-conscious Indian customers immediately realized that the pick-up truck would always lose out to the Tempo, because of the Tempo’s lower operating costs. Realizing that the truck would be a failure, Maruti decided to drop its production and to write off the costs incurred till then in tooling and other related activities. This experience was a reminder to Maruti on the importance of correctly assessing the behaviour of Indian customers, and the dangers of transferring experience of other countries to India, without careful examination.

I mistook some things for what they are. I remove myself almost to none on account of them not needing to be there. I think of the future and what effects can relate back. I want to be less, than more. Social media is powerful, always be careful how you use it, especially as you grow

The Rational Brain relates to our reasoning, conscious part of the brain. Our decisions here are slow, considered, rule-governed and controlled, and give a more complete understanding. We need to understand both these modes and their influence on judgements and choice, as they are the key to behavioural change.

One’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgements,

In his inaugural lecture, Horkheimer opposed positivism because it ‘sees only the particular, in the realm of society it sees only the individual and the relations between individuals; for positivism, everything is exhausted in mere facts’.10 Positivism, an approach to social theory devised in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held that society, like the physical world, operates according to laws. In philosophy, logical positivism holds that all we can reasonably claim to know is based on reports of sensory experience, along with logical and mathematical operations. Propositions not based on such reports or operations are metaphysical and hence nonsense, and even aesthetic or moral judgements, rightly understood, are not genuine judgements but more or less sophisticated grunts of approval or disapproval. Such a philosophy was developed almost contemporaneously with the Frankfurt School. The so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivism, founded by Moritz Schlick in 1922, consisted of a group of philosophers and scientists who met until 1936 at the University of Vienna. Some former members of the Circle went into exile from Austria around the time of the Nazi Anschluss of 1938, and the Circle went on to greatly influence philosophy departments in Britain and the United States, in part because their intellectual trajectory (they took most of Hegel to be metaphysical and therefore nonsense) was more amenable to the Anglophone universities.

Gradually these situations arise, she can see that now, just one step after another, and by the time a few weeks or months have passed, your life is no longer recognizable. You are lying to almost everyone you know. You have come to care passionately, too fully and completely, for an unsuitable person. You can no longer visualize your own future: not only five years from now, but five months, even five weeks. Everything is in disarray. All this for one person, for the relation that exists between you. Your fidelity to the idea of that reason. In the light of that, you have come to hold too loosely many other important things: the respect of your family, the admiration of your colleagues and acquaintances, even the understanding of your closest friends. Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reprisal, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another. Because of Margaret's friends, her former marriage, her family, colleagues, people in town, she is not entirely free to live the limitless spontaneous life that she has imagined for herself. But because of Ivan, because of whatever there is between them, she is, on the other hand, not entirely free to return to her previous existence either. The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.

Superficial charm and good intelligence. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking. Absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations. Unreliability. Untruthfulness and insincerity. Lack of remorse or shame. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior. Poor judgement and failure to learn by experience. Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love. General poverty in major affective reactions. Specific loss of insight. Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations. Fantastic and uninviting behavior, with drink and sometimes without. Suicide rarely carried out. Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated. Failure to follow any life plan. “What

Wikipedia: Unofficial Collaborator The great range of circumstances that led to collaboration with the Stasi makes any overall moral evaluation of the spying activities extremely difficult. There were those that volunteered willingly and without moral scruples to pass detailed reports to the Stasi out of selfish motives, from self-regard, or from the urge to exercise power over others. Others collaborated with the Stasis out of a sincerely held sense of duty that the GDR was the better Germany and that it must be defended from the assaults of its enemies. Others were to a lesser or greater extent themselves victims of state persecution and had been broken or blackmailed into collaboration. Many informants believed that they could protect friends or relations by passing on only positive information about them, while others thought that provided they reported nothing suspicious or otherwise punishable, then no harm would be done by providing the Stasi with reports. These failed to accept that the Stasi could use apparently innocuous information to support their covert operations and interrogations. A further problem in any moral evaluation is presented by the extent to which information from informal collaborators was also used for combating non-political criminality. Moral judgements on collaboration involving criminal police who belonged to the Stasi need to be considered on a case by case basis, according to individual circumstances. A belief has gained traction that any informal collaborator (IM) who refused the Stasi further collaboration and extracted himself (in the now outdated Stasi jargon of the time "sich dekonspirierte") from a role as an IM need have no fear of serious consequences for his life, and could in this way safely cut himself off from communication with the Stasi. This is untrue. Furthermore, even people who declared unequivocally that they were not available for spying activities could nevertheless, over the years, find themselves exposed to high-pressure "recruitment" tactics. It was not uncommon for an IM trying to break out of a collaborative relationship with the Stasi to find his employment opportunities destroyed. The Stasi would often identify refusal to collaborate, using another jargon term, as "enemy-negative conduct" ("feindlich-negativen Haltung"), which frequently resulted in what they termed "Zersetzungsmaßnahmen", a term for which no very direct English translation is available, but for one form of which a definition has been provided that begins: "a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige in a database on one part true, verifiable and degrading, and on the other part false, plausible, irrefutable, and always degrading; a systematic organization of social and professional failures for demolishing the self-confidence of the individual.