“
Charles,” Bones said distinctly. “You’d better have a splendid explanation for her being on top of you.”
The black-haired vampire rose to his feet as soon as I jumped off, brushing the dirt off his clothes.
“Believe me, mate, I’ve never enjoyed a woman astride me less. I came out to say hello, and this she-devil blinded me by flinging rocks in my eyes. Then she vigorously attempted to split my skull before threatening to impale me with silver if I so much as even
twitched! It’s been a few years since I’ve been to America, but I daresay the method of greeting a person has changed
dramatically!”
Bones rolled his eyes and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re still upright, Charles, and the only reason you are is because she didn’t have any silver. She’d have staked you right and proper otherwise. She has a tendency to shrivel someone first
and then introduce herself afterwards.
”
”
Jeaniene Frost (Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress, #1))
“
We may not always be happy with the things we do. Talking it through properly with ourselves to get an answer to the missteps we make is essential. We might thus receive an explanation for our blunders. Instead of encaging our emotions, let us go down into the dark net of our subconscious and start transforming our inner world by uncluttering the melting pot of our sensibilities and tuning up our thinking patterns. This may be the start of a new day.
(“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. In India they use the word “karma” for lack of any better term. But it’s a concept that’s rarely given a proper explanation. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
”
”
Paulo Coelho
“
Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
”
”
Theodore John Kaczynski (Industrial Society and Its Future)
“
You know, it’s interesting. Children learn
much more, far more quickly than adults. Do you know why that is?”
Elizabeth assumed there was some scientific explanation for it, but
shook her head.
“Because they’re open-minded. Because they want to know and they
want to learn. Adults”—he shook his head sadly—“think they know it all.
They grow up and forget so easily instead of opening their minds, they choose
what to believe and what not to believe. You can’t make a choice on things like
that, you either believe or you don’t. That’s why their learning is slower. They
are more cynical, they lose faith, and they only demand to know things that
will help them get by day by day. They’ve no interest in the extras. But, Elizabeth,”
he said, his voice a loud whisper, eyes wide and sparkling, and Elizabeth
shivered as goose pimples rose on her arms. She felt as if he were sharing
the world’s greatest secret with her.
“It’s the extras that make life.”
“That make life what?” she whispered.
He smiled. “That make life.”
Elizabeth swallowed the lump in her throat. “That’s it?”
Ivan smiled. “What do you mean, that’s it? How much more can you
get than life, how much more can you ask for than life? That’s the gift. Life
is everything, and you haven’t lived it properly until you believe.
”
”
Cecelia Ahern
“
There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of "personal sorrows" or of "incurable illness." These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension. But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering. What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
”
”
Albert Camus
“
The critic's proper business is explanation and evaluation, which means he must make use of his analytic powers to translate the concrete to the abstract.
”
”
John Gardner (On Moral Fiction)
“
To my sister's eyes, there is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
Explanations are so much easier when one has time to construct them properly.
”
”
Hazel Gaynor (Last Christmas in Paris)
“
Right here and now, you are beginning to wonder: is there really something wrong? Yes, there is. But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term. But it’s a concept that’s rarely given a proper explanation. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (Aleph)
“
While Callender practiced the most salacious form of journalism, his explanation for it remained valid, pointing out: “The more that a nation knows about the mode of conducting its business, the better chance has that business of being properly conducted.
”
”
David Fisher (Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies: The Patriots)
“
1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.
There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.
2. Myth: Prayer works.
Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject.
3. Myth: Atheists are immoral.
There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.
4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science.
In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. We have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.
5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive death.
We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies.
6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view.
7. Myth: Believing in God is not a cause of evil.
The examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the justification for their evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.
8. Myth: God explains the origins of the universe.
All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it is all going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law 'create' or 'build' a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, 'loves' us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans?
9. Myth: There's no harm in believing in God.
Religious views inform voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight.
”
”
Matthew S. McCormick
“
This divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.
”
”
Albert Camus (Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
“
We say it is "explanation" but it is only in "description" that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a manifold succession where the naive man and investigator of older cultures saw only two things "cause" and "effect " as it was said we have perfected the conception of becoming but have not got a knowledge of what is above and behind the conception. The series of "causes" stands before us much more complete in every case we conclude that this and that must first precede in order that that other may follow - but we have not grasped anything thereby. The peculiarity for example in every chemical process seems a "miracle " the same as before just like all locomotion nobody has "explained" impulse. How could we ever explain We operate only with things which do not exist with lines surfaces bodies atoms divisible times divisible spaces - how can explanation ever be possible when we first make everything a conception our conception It is sufficient to regard science as the exactest humanizing of things that is possible we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions. Cause and effect: there is probably never any such duality in fact there is a continuum before us from which we isolate a few portions - just as we always observe a motion as isolated points and therefore do not properly see it but infer it. The abruptness with which many effects take place leads us into error it is however only an abruptness for us. There is an infinite multitude of processes in that abrupt moment which escape us. An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum which could see the flux of events not according to our mode of perception as things arbitrarily separated and broken - would throw aside the conception of cause and effect and would deny all conditionality.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
“
... as far as I can see, everyone is mad. Do you know Matty, that's the only explanation for the world that I can see -- everyone's as mad as hatters... Mad. All of us. Everyone.
”
”
Doris Lessing (A Proper Marriage (Children of Violence, #2))
“
the book of Daniel is the key to prophetic interpretation, and proper understanding of its revelation would do much to help the interpretation of other prophetic portions.
”
”
John F. Walvoord (Every Prophecy of the Bible: Clear Explanations for Uncertain Times)
“
Bel had clearly not only failed to make the proper sacrifices to the Gay Porn gods, but had offended them, too. He had no other explanation for why he was in this situation.
”
”
A.J. Sherwood (A Mage's Guide to Human Familiars (R'iyah Family Archives #1))
“
You've been hiding yourself, and you're good at it. A master of camouflage."
She laughed. "Camouflage?"
"That's the only possible explanation. You've made a frock from the same silk covering the drawing room walls, trimmed it with cat hair and feathers. Then when gentlemen visit, you stand still and blend in."
"You have a surprisingly vivid imagination."
"What I have is experience." He stopped in the road and turned to face her. "I've built a fortune by spotting things that are undervalued, dusting them off, and selling them at the proper price. I know a hidden treasure when I see one.
”
”
Tessa Dare (The Wallflower Wager (Girl Meets Duke, #3))
“
I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck...And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
“
Alix knows that she deserves better than being abandoned by her husband twice a week while he gallivants around spending money on tequila shots and hotel rooms, that she deserves her messages to be replied to, her calls answered, a proper explanation for the absence of her husband for twelve straight hours. She knows it, but somehow the pendulum of pros versus cons keeps swinging back to the pros.
”
”
Lisa Jewell (None of This Is True)
“
To trace the series of these revolutions, to explain their causes, and thus to connect together all the indications of change that are found in the mineral kingdom, is the proper object of a THEORY OF THE EARTH.
”
”
John Playfair (Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth)
“
For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.
Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.
But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.
”
”
Karen Armstrong
“
You could pretend that Guenever was a sort of man-eating lioncelle herself, or that she was one of those selfish women who insist on ruling everywhere. In fact, this is what she did seem to be to a superficial inspection. She was beautiful, sanguine, hot-tempered, demanding, impulsive, acquisitive, charming - she had all the proper qualities for a man-eater. But the rock on which these easy explanations founder, is that she was not promiscuous. There was never anybody in her life except Lancelot and Arthur. She never ate anybody except these. And even these she did not eat in the full sense of the word. People who have been digested by a man-eating lioncelle tend to become nonentities - to live no life except within the vitals of the devourer. Yet both Arthur and Lancelot, the people whom she apparently devoured, lived full lives, and accomplished things of their own.
She lived in warlike times, when the lives of young people were as short as those of airmen in the twentieth century. In such times, the elderly moralists are content to relax their moral laws a little, in return for being defended. The condemned pilots, with their lust for life and love which is probably to be lost so soon, touch the hearts of young women, or possibly call up an answering bravado. Generosity, courage, honesty, pity, the faculty to look short life in the face - certainly comradeship and tenderness - these qualities may explain why Guenever took Lancelot as well as Arthur. It was courage more than anything else - the courage to take and give from the heart, while there was time. Poets are always urging women to have this kind of courage. She gathered her rose-buds while she might, and the striking thing was that she only gathered two of them, which she kept always, and that those two were the best.
”
”
T.H. White (The Ill-Made Knight (The Once and Future King, #3))
“
"The indictment [the Western/modern question, 'Why be moral?'] also issued from a gross underrating of the 'moral' force that was regarded within the Islamic tradition as an essential and integral part of the 'law.' At the foundation of this underrating stood the observer's ideological judgement about religion (at least the Islamic religion), a judgment of repugnance, especially when religion as a moral and theological force is seen to be fused with law. The judgement, in other words, undercuts a proper apprehension of the role of modernity as a legal form, of its power and force. Historical evidence [in modernity/Enlightenment thought and its intellectual progeny] was thus made to fit into what makes sense to us, not what made sense to a culture that defined itself -- systematically, teleologically, and existentially -- in different terms. This entrenched repugnance for the religious -- at least in this case to the 'Islamic' in Muslim societies -- amounted, in legal terms, to the foreclosure of the possibility of considering the force of the moral within the realm of the legal, and vice versa. Theistic teleology, eschatology, and socially grounded moral gain, status, honor, shame, and much else of a similar type were reduced in importance, if not totally set aside, in favor of other explanations that 'fit better' within our preferred, but distinctively modern, countermoral systems of value. History was brought down to us, to the epistemological here and now, according to our own terms, when in theory no one denies that it was our historiographical set of terms that ought to have been subordinated to the imperatives of historical writing.
”
”
Wael B. Hallaq (The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament)
“
Thud of metal on fishbone, skull, neckless headbody, the fish is whole, I couldn’t anymore, I had no right to. We didn’t need it, our proper food was tin cans. We were committing this act, violation, for sport or amusement or pleasure, recreation they call it, these were no longer the right reasons. That’s an explanation but no excuse my father used to say, a favorite maxim.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
“
The kind of category-defying love Foucault describes is a “problem” only because love is supposed to stay inside the proper social channels in our heteronormative culture. The family you’re born into is the family you’re supposed to be content with—and we are told repeatedly, without any explanation or supporting evidence, that we are meant to “love them no matter what.” To fit into such a culture, your friendships ought to be lesser.
”
”
Samantha Allen (Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States (Little Brown Us))
“
It is safe to say that the message spoke of a common shape to all the processes of the world, and insisted there was a unity to all explanations. It confirmed that all phenomena are expressions of a single phenomenon, and while all droplets consider themselves independent, they are nonetheless still ocean through and through.
In that message the great suspicions were vindicated and the old cliches were jettisoned. The hymn of the world was notated and an invitation to join the choir extended. The shape of Being was outlined in all its myriad forms and the whole was expressed in the part.
With the right ears even a lesser creature can hear the song. It is sung constantly, from the heart of each atom and star.
The galaxies hum of shape and form in their essence. That is their secret.
The particles whisper of the nature of proper interactions. That is their game.
And during a storm, in the forest, on the right night, it is no secret that the leaves all sing of God.
”
”
Exurb1a (The Fifth Science)
“
Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike (II, i), and literatura, though it does not mean ‘literature’, included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for ‘making up’ a ‘set book’: syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar (I, xli–xliv). He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
“
I love the quiet beauty of the night sky," she continued thoughtfully, "filled with mystery and starlight, but there is something magical about the dawn. It is strange, When the sky begins to lighten and soft colors first appear, the transition is so gentle you hardly notice it. But if you are aware enough to observe, if you take the time to really be a part of the transformation, it feels..."
Her explanation trailed off. She found it difficult to find the words to properly describe the wonder she felt as she experienced the very common daily occurrence.
"It feels like it possesses all the possibilities of life," Avenell offered quietly.
Lily turned in place. She slipped her arms around his naked torso and tipped her head back to look into his face. Her smile was so wide her cheeks ached, but she did not hold back. Her joy in the past few months had grown by leaps and bounds, and only because of how much she had seen her happiness reflected in the man she loved.
Love flowed freely between them as he lowered his head to take her mouth in a kiss that was slow and deep.
”
”
Amy Sandas (The Untouchable Earl (Fallen Ladies, #2))
“
It was late evening and as she came out to wear her
sneakers, she was met by not a very charitable glance of
another bhaiji. He always sat there, at the entrance, as a kind
of watchman. He commented on Nanaki’s scarf and advised
her to come properly clad in a dupatta. She walked out in a
huff, heckles raised. Who was this man? Who was he to tell
her how she ought to be dressed? Whose rules were these?
In all honesty, Nanaki’s visit to the gurudwara was her own
personal matter. It was more or less an aesthetic experience,
feeding a very personal need for which she felt she owed no
one an explanation.
”
”
Sakoon Singh (In The Land of The Lovers)
“
I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
”
”
Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
“
Now Ravana said to himself,
"These are all petty weapons. I should really get down to proper business." And he invoked the one called "Maya"--a weapon which created illusions and confused the enemy. With proper incantations and worship, he sent off this weapon and it created an illusion of reviving all the armies and its leaders--Kumbakarna and Indrajit and the others--and bringing them back to the battlefield.
Presently Rama found all those who, he thought, were no more, coming on with battle cries and surrounding him. Every man in the enemy's army was again up in arms.They seemed to fall on Rama with victorious cries. This was very confusing and Rama asked Matali, whom he had by now revived,
"What is happening now? How are all these coming back? They were dead." Matali explained,
"In your original identity you are the creator of illusions in this universe. Please know that Ravana has created phantoms to confuse you. If you make up your mind, you can dispel them immediately."
Matali's explanation was a great help. Rama at once invoked a weapon called
"Gnana"--which means "wisdom" or "perception." This was a very rare weapon, and he sent it forth. And all the terrifying armies who seemed to have come on in such a great mass suddenly evaporated into thin air.
”
”
Vālmīki
“
The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been brought up properly.
”
”
Theodore John Kaczynski
“
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.
”
”
Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
“
Who gave the decisive deathblow to the argument from design on the basis of biological complexity? Both philosophers and biologists are divided on this point (Oppy 1996; Dawkins 1986; Sober 2008). Some have claimed that the biological design argument did not falter until Darwin provided a proper naturalistic explanation for adaptive complexity; others maintain that David Hume had already shattered the argument to pieces by sheer logical force several decades earlier, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume 2007 [1779]). Elliott Sober has been among the philosophers who maintain that, as Hume was not in a position to offer a serious alternative explanation of adaptive complexity, it is hardly surprising that 'intelligent people strongly favored the design hypothesis' (Sober 2000, 36). In his most recent book, however, Sober (2008) carefully develops what he thinks is the most charitable reconstruction of the design argument, and proceeds to show why it is defective for intrinsic reasons (for earlier version of this argument, see Sober 1999, 2002). Sober argues that the design argument can be rejected even without the need to consider alternative explanations for adaptive complexity (Sober 2008, 126): 'To see why the design argument is defective, there is no need to have a view as to whether Darwin’s theory of evolution is true' (Sober 2008, 154).
”
”
Maarten Boudry
“
All human beings are driven by "an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take a position toward it." And that goes for suffering, too...."Human beings apparently want to be edified by their miseries." Sociologist Peter Berger writes, every culture has provided an "explanation of human events that bestows meaning upon the experiences of suffering and evil." Notice Berger did not say people are taught that suffering itself is good or meaningful. What Berger means rather is that it is important for people to see how the experience of suffering does not have to be a waste, and could be a meaningful though painful way to live life well. Because of this deep human "inner compulsion," every culture either must help its people face suffering or risk a loss of credibility. When no explanation at all is given- when suffering is perceived as simply senseless, a complete waste, and inescapable- victims can develop a deep, undying anger and poisonous hate called ressentiment by Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and others. This ressentiment can lead to serious social instability. And so, to use sociological language, every society must provide a discourse through which its people can make sense of suffering. That discourse includes some understanding of the causes of pain as well as the proper responses to it. And with that discourse, a society equips its people for the battles of living in this world.
”
”
Timothy J. Keller (Walking with God through Pain and Suffering)
“
Marriage is a paradox second only to life itself. That at the age of twenty or so, with little knowledge of each other and a dangerous overdose of self-confidence, two human beings should undertake to commit themselves for life – and that church and state should receive their vows with a straight face – all this is absurd indeed. And it is tolerable only if it is reveled in as such. A pox on all the neat little explanations as to why it is reasonable that two teenagers should be bound to each other until death. It is not reasonable. It happens to be true to life, but it remains absurd. Down with the books that moralize reasonably on the subject of why divorce is wrong. Divorce is not a wrong; it is a metaphysical impossibility. It is an attempt to do something about life rather than with it - to work out the square root of –I rather than to use it.
Up with the absurdity of marriage then. Let the peasant rejoice. He is a very odd ball on a very odd pool table, and his marriage is one of the few things left to him that will roll properly in this game. And up with the marriage service. Let the peasant go back and read it while he rejoices - preferably in the old unbowdlerized version still used by the Church of England. It is full of death and cast iron. And it is one of the great remaining sanity markers. The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good. In such a world, the marriage service is not reasonable, but it is sane; which is quite another matter. The lunatic lives in a world of reason, and he goes mad without making sense; it is precisely paradox that keeps the rest of us sane. To be born, to love a woman, to cry at music, to catch a cold, to die – these are not excursions on the narrow road of logic; they are blind launchings on a trackless sea. They are not bargains, they are commitments, and for ordinary people, marriage is the very keel of their commitment, the largest piece of ballast in their small and storm-tossed boat. Its unqualified hurling of two people into their deathbead is absurd, but so is the rest of that welter of unqualified hurlings we call life. You cannot contract out of being born, out of crying, out of loving, out of dying; you cannot contract out of marriage. It may be uncomfortable, it certainly is absurd; but it is not abnormal.
”
”
Robert Farrar Capon (Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage)
“
Today the evolution theory of the ancient Yogis will be better understood in the light of modern research. And yet the theory of the Yogis is a better explanation. The two causes of evolution advanced by the moderns, viz sexual selection and survival of the fittest, are inadequate. Suppose human knowledge to have advanced so much as to eliminate competition, both from the function of acquiring physical sustenance and of acquiring a mate. Then, according to the moderns, human progress will stop and the race will die. The result of this theory is to furnish every oppressor with an argument to calm the qualms of conscience. Men are not lacking, who, posing as philosophers, want to kill out all wicked and incompetent persons (they are, of course, the only judges of competency) and thus preserve the human race! But the great ancient evolutionist, Patanjali, declares that the true secret of evolution is the manifestation of the perfection which is already in every being; that this perfection has been barred and the infinite tide behind is struggling to express itself. These struggles and competitions are but the results of our ignorance, because we do not know the proper way to unlock the gate and let the water in. This infinite tide behind must express itself; it is the cause of all manifestation. Competitions for life or sex-gratification are only momentary, unnecessary, extraneous effects, caused by ignorance. Even when all competition has ceased, this perfect nature behind will make us go forward until everyone has become perfect. Therefore there is no reason to believe that competition is necessary to progress.
”
”
Vivekananda (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
“
The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.
This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains.
Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.
”
”
Tom Shippey (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century)
“
In order to understand the thoughts of foreign peoples, we must necessarily convert their self-revelation into our own terms, but our words are apt to carry such a weight of preconceived idea as to crush the fragile myth or philosophy in the very act of explanation. If we want to open up a real communication with our
fellow-man, we must take care to revalue our words before clapping them on his experience. As far as possible we must hold back our set formulæ until we have walked round the object he is confronted with and looked at it from every side. But analysis will not carry us all the way to intimacy. Culture is not a mass of beliefs and ideas, but a balanced harmony, and our comprehension depends on our ability to place every idea in its proper surroundings and to determine its bearings upon all the other ideas.
”
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Vilhelm Grønbech (The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2)
“
Living organisms were not independently created, but have descended and diversified over time from common ancestors. And thus, no other biological theory so elegantly explains this. Evolutionary theory has withstood the test of time—by way of vicarious experimentation, observation, analysis, and relentless criticism, though opposing viewpoints still cling to the concept of "design." As a person of the biological sciences, I cannot subscribe to such misguided notions that suggest static biological states. Clearly, proper examination of the natural world reveal evolutionary trajectories—some random, others nonrandom—and all having observable genetic implications. It is only when we apply evolutionary explanations to living systems that it becomes ever so clear. The world was not specifically designed with us in mind, but rather we long since adapted and conformed to our surroundings, only giving it the illusionary appearance of "design.
”
”
Tommy Rodriguez (Diaries of Dissension: A Case Against the Irrational and Absurd)
“
When we live intensely, we run more risks and we become more fragile.
We already know that people who do nothing suffer nothing. But avoiding doing things out of fear of getting hurt is not a path to growth.
When we mix our fears with reality, we are limiting ourselves.
Don’t forget that the decisions we don’t make also cause us pain.
Be careful about how you interpret what happens to you. If you don’t have an explanation that brings you peace, don’t make one up.
What causes one kind of emotional pain to be more intense than another? Well, it depends on the emotional attachment to the source of the pain. What hurts more intensely is what directly affects us or the people we love. What hurts more is what affects our greatest aspirations and objectives.
We are more easily hurt by what affects our desires or fears, and the more intense our desire, the more painful our frustration when we do not achieve it. The emotional involvement determines and explains the intensity of our pain. The greater the emotional involvement, the greater the pain.
When pain comes in the door, perspective goes out the window, taking with it our ability to reason properly, to analyze events, and to make good decisions.
Each time you remember what happened you transform what happened.
None of our experiences is in vain if we are capable of learning from what happened to us and from the suffering and pain it caused us. But we won’t be able to learn from what happened if we don’t look back and review our experiences.
Carrying your past is like carrying a huge backpack full of stones that prevents you from walking freely. But to walk through life all you need is a bit of water and food, a dream, and a destination—and, in a pinch, you can probably do without a destination.
Let bygones be bygones, learn from what happened, and bring that chapter to a close.
Your beliefs feed your decisions, your fears, and your desires.
Knowledge will set you free, so make an effort to learn, study, read, travel.
”
”
Tomás Navarro (Kintsugi: The Japanese Art of Embracing the Imperfect and Loving Your Flaws)
“
Iain MacGregor,” she whispered longingly, looking up. The woods were quiet. Strips of moonlight shone through tree limbs that reached like surreal black fingertips across her vision. A single tear slid down her cheek. She touched her mouth, imagining his kiss.
Taking a small pocket knife out of her cargo pants, she looked about. A mystic had once told her that if she left pieces of herself around while she lived, it would expand her haunting territory when she died. Jane wasn’t sure she believed in sideshow magic tricks—or the Old Magick as the mystic had spelled it on her sign. She had no idea what had possessed her to talk to the palm reader and ask about ghosts. Still, just in case, she was leaving her stamp all over the woods.
She cut her palm and pressed it to a nearby tree under a branch. Holding the wound to the rough bark stung at first, but then it made her feel better. This forest wouldn’t be a bad eternity.
The sound of running feet erupted behind her and she stiffened. No one ever came out here at night. She’d walked the woods hundreds of times. Her mind instantly went to the creepy girl ghosts chanting by the stream.
“Whoohoo!”
Jane whipped around, startled as a streak of naked flesh sprinted past her. The Scottish voice was met with loud cheers from those who followed him. “Water’s this way, lads, or my name isn’t Raibeart MacGregor, King of the Highlands!”
Another naked man dashed through the forest after him. “It smells of freedom.”
Jane stayed hidden in the branches, undetected, with her hand pressed to the bark.
“Aye, freedom from your proper Cait,” Raibeart answered, his voice coming through the dark where he’d disappeared into the trees.
“Murdoch, stop him before he reaches town. Cait will not teleport ya out of jail again,” a third man yelled, not running quite so fast. “Raibeart, ya are goin’ the wrong way!”
“Och, Angus, my Cait canna live without me,” Murdoch, the second streaker, answered. “She’ll always come to my rescue.”
“I said stop him, Murdoch, we’re new to this place.” Angus skidded to a stop and lifted his jaw, as if sensing he was being watched. He looked in her direction and instantly covered his manhood as his eyes caught Jane’s shocked face in the tree limbs. “Oh, lassie.”
“Oh, naked man,” Jane teased before she could stop herself.
“That I am,” Angus answered, “but there is an explanation for it.”
“I don’t think some things need explained,” Jane said.
”
”
Michelle M. Pillow (Spellbound (Warlocks MacGregor, #2))
“
Until that moment Elizabeth wouldn’t have believed she could feel more humiliated than she already did. Robbed of even the defense of righteous indignation, she faced the fact that she was the unwanted gest of someone who’d made a fool of her not once but twice.
“How did you get here? I didn’t hear any horses, and a carriage sure as well can’t make the climb.”
“A wheeled conveyance brought us most of the way,” she prevaricated, seizing on Lucinda’s earlier explanation, “and it’s gone on now.” She saw his eyes narrow with angry disgust as he realized he was stuck with them unless he wanted to spend several days escorting them back to the inn. Terrified that the tears burning the backs of her eyes were going to fall, Elizabeth tipped her head back and turned it, pretending to be inspecting the ceiling, the staircase, the walls, anything. Through the haze of tears she noticed for the first time that the place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a year.
Beside her Lucinda glanced around through narrowed eyes and arrived at the same conclusion.
Jake, anticipating that the old woman was about to make some disparaging comment about Ian’s house, leapt into the breach with forced joviality.
“Well, now,” he burst out, rubbing his hands together and striding forward to the fire. “Now that’s all settled, shall we all be properly introduced? Then we’ll see about supper.” He looked expectantly at Ian, waiting for him to handle the introductions, but instead of doing the thing properly he merely nodded curtly to the beautiful blond girl and said, “Elizabeth Cameron-Jake Wiley.”
“How do you do, Mr. Wiley,” Elizabeth said.
“Call me Jake,” he said cheerfully, then he turned expectantly to the scowling duenna. “And you are?”
Fearing that Lucinda was about to rip up at Ian for his cavalier handling of the introductions, Elizabeth hastily said, “This is my companion, Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones.”
“Good heavens! Two names. Well, no need to stand on formality, since we’re going to be cooped up together for at least a few days! Just call me Jake. What shall I call you?”
“You may call me Miss Throckmorton-Jones,” she informed him, looking down the length of her beaklike nose.
“Er-very well,” he replied, casting an anxious look of appeal to Ian, who seemed to be momentarily enjoying Jake’s futile efforts to create an atmosphere of conviviality. Disconcerted, Jake ran his hands through his disheveled hair and arranged a forced smile on her face. Nervously, he gestured about the untidy room. “Well, now, if we’d known we were going to have such…ah…gra…that is, illustrious company, we’d have-“
“Swept off the chairs?” Lucinda suggested acidly. “Shoveled off the floor?
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
Imagine that you are watching a really great magic trick. The celebrated conjuring duo Penn and Teller have a routine in which they simultaneously appear to shoot each other with pistols, and each appears to catch the bullet in his teeth. Elaborate precautions are taken to scratch identifying marks on the bullets before they are put in the guns, the whole procedure is witnessed at close range by volunteers from the audience who have experience of firearms, and apparently all possibilities for trickery are eliminated. Teller’s marked bullet ends up in Penn’s mouth and Penn’s marked bullet ends up in Teller’s. I [Richard Dawkins] am utterly unable to think of any way in which this could be a trick. The Argument from Personal Incredulity screams from the depths of my prescientific brain centres, and almost compels me to say, ‘It must be a miracle. There is no scientific explanation. It’s got to be supernatural.’ But the still small voice of scientific education speaks a different message. Penn and Teller are world-class illusionists. There is a perfectly good explanation. It is just that I am too naïve, or too unobservant, or too unimaginative, to think of it. That is the proper response to a conjuring trick. It is also the proper response to a biological phenomenon that appears to be irreducibly complex. Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris— to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but
nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing.
"C'est normal." And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one
workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).
”
”
Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)
“
The relation between technology and slavery has often been evoked by histo- rians of the ancient world. According to the current opinion, in fact, the striking lack of technological development in the Greek world was due to the ease with which the Greeks, thanks to slavery, could procure manual labor. If Greek mate- rial civilization remained at the stage of the organon, that is, of the utilization of human or animal power by means of a variety of instruments and did not have access to machines, this happened, one reads in a classic work on this argument, “because there was no need to economize on manual labor, since one had access to living machines that were abundant and inexpensive, different from both human and animal: slaves” (Schuhl, pp. 13–14). It does not interest us here to verify the correctness of this explanation, whose limits have been demonstrated by Koyré (pp. 291ff.) and which, like every explanation of that kind, could be easily reversed (one could say just as reasonably, as Aristotle does in the end, that the lack of machines rendered slavery necessary).
What is decisive, rather, from the perspective of our study, is to ask ourselves if between modern technology and slavery there is not a connection more es- sential than the common productive end. Indeed, if it is clear that the machine is presented from its first appearance as the realization of the paradigm of the animate instrument of which the slave had furnished the originary model, it is all the more true that what both intend is not so much, or not only, an increase and simplification of productive labor but also, by liberating human beings from necessity, to secure them access to their most proper dimension—for the Greeks the political life, for the moderns the possibility of mastering the nature’s forces and thus their own.
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”
Giorgio Agamben (The Omnibus Homo Sacer (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics))
“
Straightening reluctantly, she strolled about the room with forced nonchalance, her hands clasped behind her back, looking blindly at the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling, trying to think what to say. And then inspiration struck. The solution was demeaning but practical, and properly presented, it could appear she was graciously doing him a favor. She paused a moment to arrange her features into what she hoped was the right expression of enthusiasm and compassion, then she wheeled around abruptly. “Mr. Thornton!” Her voice seemed to explode in the room at the same time his startled amber gaze riveted on her face, then drifted down her bodice, roving boldly over her ripened curves. Unnerved but determined, Elizabeth forged shakily ahead: “It appears as if no one has occupied this house in quite some time.”
“I commend you on that astute observation, lady Cameron,” Ian mocked lazily, watching the tension and emotion play across her expressive face. For the life of him he could not understand what she was doing here or why she seemed to be trying to ingratiate herself this morning. Last night the explanation he’d given Jake had made sense; now, looking at her, he couldn’t quite believe any of it. Then he remembered that Elizabeth Cameron had always robbed him of the ability to think rationally.
“Houses do have a way of succumbing to dirt when no one looks after them,” she stated with a bright look.
“Another creditable observation. You’ve certainly a quick mind.”
“Must you make this so very difficult!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
“I apologize,” he said with mocking gravity. “Do go on. You were saying?”
“Well, I was thinking, since we’re quite stranded here-Lucinda and I, I mean-with absolutely nothing but time on our hands, that this house could certainly use a woman’s touch.”
“Capital idea!” burst out Jake, returning from his mission to locate the butter and casting a highly hopeful look at Lucinda.
He was rewarded with a glare from her that could have pulverized rock. “It could use an army of servants carrying shovels and wearing masks on their faces,” the duenna countered ruthlessly.
“You needn’t help, Lucinda,” Elizabeth explained, aghast. “I never meant to imply you should. But I could! I-“ She whirled around as Ian Thornton surged to his feet and took her elbow in a none-too-gentle grasp.
“Lady Cameron,” he said. “I think you and I have something to discuss that may be better spoken in private. Shall we?”
He gestured to the open door and then practically dragged her along in his wake. Outdoors in the sunlight he marched her forward several paces, then dropped her arm. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
“Hear what?” Elizabeth said nervously.
“An explanation-the truth, if you’re capable of it. Last night you drew a gun on me, and this morning you’re awash with excitement over the prospect over the prospect of cleaning my house. I want to know why.”
“Well,” Elizabeth burst out in defense of her actions with the gun, “you were extremely disagreeable!”
“I am still disagreeable,” he pointed out shortly, ignoring Elizabeth’s raised brows. “I haven’t changed. I am not the one who’s suddenly oozing goodwill this morning.”
Elizabeth turned her head to the lane, trying desperately to think of an explanation that wouldn’t reveal to him her humiliating circumstances.
“The silence is deafening, Lady Cameron, and somewhat surprising. As I recall, the last time we met you could scarcely contain all the edifying information you were trying to impart to me.” Elizabeth knew he was referring to her monologue on the history of hyacinths in the greenhouse. “I just don’t know where to begin,” she admitted.
“Let’s stick to the salient points. What are you doing here?
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
Lifting a goblet of wine to her lips, Evie glanced at him over the rim as she drank. “What is in that ledger?”
“A lesson in creative record keeping. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Egan has been draining the club’s accounts. He shaves away increments here and there, in small enough quantities that the thefts have gone unnoticed. But over time, it totals up to a considerable sum. God knows how many years he’s been doing it. So far, every account book I’ve looked at contains deliberate inaccuracies.”
“How can you be certain that they’re deliberate?”
“There is a clear pattern.” He flipped open a ledger and nudged it over to her. “The club made a profit of approximately twenty thousand pounds last Tuesday. If you cross-check the numbers with the record of loans, bank deposits, and cash outlays, you’ll see the discrepancies.”
Evie followed the trail of his finger as he ran it along the notes he had made in the margin. “You see?” he murmured. “These are what the proper amounts should be. He’s padded the expenses liberally. The cost of ivory dice, for example. Even allowing for the fact that the dice are only used for one night and then never again, the annual charge should be no more than two thousand pounds, according to Rohan.” The practice of using fresh dice every night was standard for any gaming club, to ward off any question that they might be loaded.
“But here it says that almost three thousand pounds was spent on dice,” Evie murmured.
“Exactly.” Sebastian leaned back in his chair and smiled lazily. “I deceived my father the same way in my depraved youth, when he paid my monthly upkeep and I had need of more ready coin than he was willing to provide.”
“What did you need it for?” Evie could not resist asking.
The smile tarried on his lips. “I’m afraid the explanation would require a host of words to which you would take strong exception.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3))
“
It should now be a truism that the historian must not claim to give _the_ explanation of a complex historical phenomenon. Such questions as: "What were the causes of the Great War, of the Fall of the Roman Republic?" -- expecting, by implication, a list of neatly defined items -- such questions are by now relegated to the privacy of the tutorial or the examination room, where the historian is shielded from the critical eye of his professional colleagues. But it is the historian's legitimate task to single out some of the strands in the complex weave and to trace their importance in the pattern; and it is in this humbler frame of mind that he will most usefully perform his proper task of letting the present and past illuminate each other.
”
”
E. Badian (Lucius Sulla; the deadly reformer (Todd memorial lecture))
“
Most people lack a proper understanding of what ADHD is and so many different explanations have been developed. The worst is ignorant prejudice spewed by those who vocalize conclusions about the people who have it. An example of this would be, “People with ADHD could control themselves if they wanted to.
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Jennie Friedman (ADHD: A Different Hard Drive?: Attention Deficit-Hyperactive Disorder)
“
The real meaning of Occam’s razor, Rosemary believed, was that explanations and solutions should be free from elements that have no real bearing on the system in question—that solving problems isn’t so much about simplifying them as it is about properly and realistically reducing them to only what’s relevant. And
”
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Christian Cantrell (Containment (Children of Occam Book 1))
“
PERSONAL PROFILE FOR EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
Consider the following list of twelve characteristics that are central to communicating both in an interview and on the job. If you feel you are lacking in a particular category, you can use the explanations and suggestions given to enhance your interactive ability in the workplace.
1. Activation of PMA. Use positive thinking techniques such as internal coaching.
2. Physical appearance. Make sure to dress appropriately for the event. In most interviews, business attire (a suit or sport coat and tie for men; a suit, dress, or tailored pants for women) is recommended. What you wear to the interview communicates not only how important the event is to you but your ability to assess a situation and how you should behave in it. Appropriate grooming is essential, both in an interview and on the job.
3. Posture. Carry yourself with confidence. Let your posture communicate that you are a winner. Keep your face on a vertical plane, spine straight, shoulders comfortably back. By simply straightening up and using the diaphragmatic breathing you learned in Chapter 6 (which proper posture encourages), you will feel much better about yourself. Others will perceive you in a more positive light as well.
4. Rate of speech. Your rate of speech ought to be appropriate for the specific situation and person or persons it is intended for. Too fast is annoying, and too slow is boring. A good way to pace your speech is to speak at close to the rate of the person who is talking to you.
5. Eye contact. Absolutely essential for successful communication. Occasionally, you should avert your gaze briefly in order to avoid staring. But try not to look down at your lap or let your eyes wander all around the room as you speak. This suggests a lack of confidence and an inability to stay on track.
6. Facial expressions. You gain more credibility when you are open and expressive. The warmer personality will seem stronger and more confident. And perhaps most important, remember to smile in conversation. If you seem interested and enthusiastic, it will enhance the chemistry between you and the interviewer or your supervisor.
You can develop the ability to use facial expressions to your advantage through a kind of biofeedback that makes use of the mirror and continuously experimenting in real life. Look at your reflection for several minutes. Practice being relaxed and create the expressions that are appropriate. Do you look interested? Alert? Motivated? Practice responding to an interviewer. Impress the “muscle memory” of these expressions into your mind.
”
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
“
All in all, The Sutra of the Teaching ofAksayamati lists eight criteria that distinguish expedient and definitive meaning:
i) The expedient meaning assists entry onto the path, while the definitive meaning guides disciples to engage in the fruition.
a) The expedient meaning deals with the seeming, while the definitive meaning deals with the ultimate.
3) The expedient meaning teaches about afflicted phenomena, and the definitive meaning teaches about purified phenomena.
4) The expedient meaning teaches how to engage in proper actions, and the definitive meaning shows how karma and afflictions become exhausted.
S) The expedient meaning causes weariness with cyclic existence, while the definitive meaning demonstrates that cyclic existence and nirvana are undifferentiable.
6) The expedient meaning teaches a variety of terms and definitions, whereas the definitive meaning teaches the profound, true reality that is difficult to see and realize.
7) The expedient meaning gives detailed explanations in accordance with worldly conduct, while the definitive meaning focuses on concise and pithy instructions for cultivating meditative concentration.
8) The expedient meaning teaches about sentient beings, persons, a self, and so on, while the definitive meaning teaches about the three doors to complete liberation, nonapplication, nonorigination, nonarising, nonentity, identitylessness, and such.
”
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Karl Brunnhölzl (The Center of the Sunlit Sky: Madhyamaka in the Kagyu Tradition (Nitartha Institute Series))
“
Now, since Christ rescues us from both the guilt and the power of sin, one aspect of his work is the work of sanctification, whereby he renews us into the image of God and conforms us to his own likeness. So Christian proclamation properly includes the shaping of a Christian moral vision, and preaching Christ crucified does not exclude, but intentionally includes, such a vision. But it is never appropriate, in my estimation, for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts requires some explanation of aspects of our behavior, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behavior to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ.
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T. David Gordon (Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers)
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Supernatural Supernatural has several meanings; the usual is “miraculous; ascribed to agencies or powers above or beyond nature; divine.” Because science is commonly regarded as a method of studying the natural world, a supernatural phenomenon is by this definition unexplainable by, and therefore totally incompatible with, science. Today, a few religious traditions continue to maintain that psi is supernatural and therefore not amenable to scientific study. But a few hundred years ago virtually all natural phenomena were thought to be manifestations of supernatural agencies and spirits. Through years of systematic investigation, many of these phenomena are now understood in quite ordinary terms. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to expect that so-called miracles are simply indicators of our present ignorance. Any such events may be more properly labeled first as paranormal, then as normal once we have developed an acceptable scientific explanation. As astronaut Edgar Mitchell put it: “There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural, particularly regarding relatively rare occurrences.”2 Mystical Mystical refers to the direct perception of reality; knowledge derived directly rather than indirectly. In many respects, mysticism is surprisingly similar to science in that it is a systematic method of exploring the nature of the world. Science concentrates on outer, objective phenomena, and mysticism concentrates on inner, subjective phenomena. It is interesting that numerous scientists, scholars, and sages over the years have revealed deep, underlying similarities between the goals, practices, and findings of science and mysticism. Some of the most famous scientists wrote in terms that are practically indistinguishable from the writings of mystics.
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Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
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Science has an established tradition when it comes to aspects of nature that defy logical explanation and resist experimentation. It ignores them. This is actually a proper response, since no one wants researchers offering fudgy guesses. Official silence may not be helpful, but it is respectable. However, as a result, the very word “consciousness” may seem out of place in science books or articles, despite the fact that, as we’ll see, most famous names in quantum mechanics regarded it as central to the understanding of the cosmos.
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Robert Lanza (The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality)
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When someone asks you for an explanation based on science but that science has no effective transforming result, such an explanation takes the form of a rationalization. A rationalization without effective transformations is a dogma. Likewise, when religion explains you something you can't properly use that too takes the form of a body of rationalizations. And in the same manner, that story becomes your dogma. So as you see, humans are constantly corrupting the truth because of their obsession with their brain, the center of their reasons. Now the human brain in itself is a very limited machine, so these habits of humans seeking to rationalize everything, always downgrades, corrupts and stupidifies everything. You have certainly experienced that inside yourself when explaining something you know to someone who doesn't know the same, because that person interprets the encounter as a conflict between two opposing dogmas, 2 beliefs, 2 flags of ideologized rationalizations. In essence, that is how religions and science turned into absolute nonsense. When you know that something is true because you can see it but others can't see the same, even when your life has changed before their eyes, that's a truth that can't be captured by the dogmas of others. That truth can't be rationalized and for that reason is downgraded and even labeled a lie. But how can you find answers in the same system that creates problems? Any dogma and rationalization turns people apathetic and stupid. As a result, the opposite path, of seeking something of a higher nature, will change your vibration, your mind and your personality. That is in essence what it means to be free. You evolve in such a way that you become invisible to others. They can't see why, they can't explain, they can't understand you, and eventually they will tell themselves you are not real. That's the definition of a prison planet and that's exactly how you escape it. So it doesn't matter who I am or what I did or who I was. It matters only I am giving you a key to get out of this madness from which many will never escape, because they can't, they don't have the divine sparkle in their spirit. Thy are not ready. And maybe they never will be. In fact, they will tell you that you have replaced their dogma for another, just to make you doubt and return to their state. When you are explaining, you are losing time, rationalizing your answers, and conforming to the views of those who can't go beyond the common dogmas. It's a downgrading catching you through sympathy and compassion. The cruel truth is that the highest truths can't be explained. You find them not in my words but behind them.
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Dan Desmarques
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What we need is a book of knowledge written so well as to constitute literature in its own right. Something for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and of us - a manual for living well and for survival. The quality of its writing must be such that it would serve for pleasure, for devotional reading, as a source of facts and even as a primary school text. It would range from simple things such as how to light a fire, to our place in the solar system and the universe. It would be a primer of philosophy and science - it would provide a top-down look at the Earth and us. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of medicine, including the ciculation of the blood, the role of the organs. The discovery that bacteria and viruses caused infectious diseases is relatively recent; imagine the consequences if such knowledge was lost. In its time the Bible set the constraints for behaviour and for health. WE need a new book like the Bible that would serve in the same way but acknowledge science. It would explain properties like temperature, the meaning of their scales of measurement and how to measure them. It would list the periodic table of the elements. It would give an account of the air, the rocks, and the oceans. It would give schoolchildren of today a proper understanding of our civilization and of the planet it occupies. It would inform them at an age when their minds were most receptive and give them facts they would remember for a lifetime. It would also be the survival manual for our successors. A book that was readily available should disaster happen. It would help bring science back as part of our culture and be an inheritance. Whatever else may be wrong with science, it still provides the best explanation we have of the material world.
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James Lovelock (We Belong to Gaia (Green Ideas))
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I never wanted children of my own because they make a man weak, but there’s something to be said for having a protégé. Someone who can be molded into a proper successor. You became that someone. You had the required ruthlessness in your veins, and your years on the streets had brought that to the surface. You were the perfect subject, and look at what we’ve been able to achieve together.” He lifted his arms to indicate the vast wealth around us. “I am the fucking king of this country, and you are poised to take over once I’ve tired of my reign.” He hadn’t wanted a son; he’d wanted a mirror. A human experiment. Someone he could mold into his image without fear of injury or weakness. The explanation made sense when I looked at Naz from a different perspective—set aside the desires of a homeless orphan and looked at the man as he was.
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Jill Ramsower (Impossible Odds (The Five Families, #4))
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seems that modern society has devised other forms of dharma that help to keep violence at bay. Stefano Tomelleri, using Durkheim’s concept of social distance, sees the division of labour as a means of coping with mimetic rivalry through the creation of social distance.12 This is also reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a tool to control human behaviour, preventing any form of horizontal communication, meaning any mimetic activity, through an external source of control.13 In both cases the aim is the eradication of violence. How could you envisage a contemporary social order that, although acknowledging the constant presence of violence, tries to cope with it? The division of labour, unlike the caste system, leaves room for the individual, at least in principle. The market may force one to make some choices instead of others, but it is not proper to speak about capitalism, as the Marxists did, in terms of rigidity of social stratification. The division of labour has experienced important changes in the recent years, and I am not sure that I can give a definite explanation to account for this phenomenon. Certainly the organization of labour is particularly relevant for the stability of North American society. When people refer to the so-called ‘American dream’, they certainly exaggerate and overestimate its nature, but it is not entirely deceptive either. If one looks at the nouveaux riches of Silicon Valley, it is true that many of them are really self-made men, and a good percentage are immigrants, mostly from India or China. So, I am not sure I would agree completely that division of labour keeps mimetic rivalry under control, but at the same time it is a very complex subject. There is unquestionably more social mobility in the United States than in Europe. However, we live in a world in which social mobility, although experiencing phases of inhibition and local rigidity, is constantly increasing. Structural injustice, although still present, has been gradually ironed out by Christian ethics, and the market itself asks for a wider circulation of ‘human capital’.
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Continuum (Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture)
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A witch is a causal theory of explanation. And it’s fair to say that if your causal theory to explain why bad things happen is that your neighbor flies around on a broom and cavorts with the devil at night, inflicting people, crops, and cattle with disease, preventing cows from giving milk, beer from fermenting, and butter from churning—and that the proper way to cure the problem is to burn her at the stake—then either you are insane or you lived in Europe six centuries ago, and you even had biblical support, specifically Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
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Over the two centuries before Jesus, the celebration had taken on quite a bit of Greek Socratic (Hellenistic) influence, which suited Jewish social tradition quite nicely, so what had begun as the recitation of a story had morphed into almost a question and response ritual. On the morning of Preparation Day for the celebration, the head of the household took a lamb to The Temple for slaughter. Then, he would bring the meat home so that it, together with the other prescribed ritual foodstuffs, could be properly prepared. Eventually, when it was time for the meal, those gathered would be called to table for a joyous repast. But the feast included an important ritual. Someone at table would query those gathered, following an informal script that revolved around four questions that not only told the great Story of Exodus, but also applied it to the participants’ present lives. So we might imagine: “This is the story of our slavery, and today we are enslaved…” “We wandered for forty years in the arid desert, and today we find that we are wandering, unable to make a decision…” “But at last we arrived in the Promised Land, and we’re planning … this year, God-willing.” Followed by, “Since then we have been committed to making ourselves and our people thrive in God’s promise of this Land—and look around this table and see the kernel of the community that needs our love, every day.” From this deep annual ritual and the understandings flowing from it, we can well imagine how this core metaphor became a spiritual springboard for every Hebrew’s journey with God—a journey of freedom and liberation, one with four sequential paths that continually repeated in the lives of every individual, and in the life of the community. So there is the key—and it is a far-reaching link, indeed. The explanation for early Christians’ natural comfort with being Followers of The Way was specifically and profoundly rooted in their Jewish traditions and almost certainly, the principal of fourness, in ancient rituals from prehistory. The sequence was well-known to them, and the road well-marked. Yet, as Christians did in so many other ways, they expanded the journey from that of their predecessors, pushing beyond the liberation of a single tribe and outer freedom from an oppressive Pharaoh. Christians took the framework of freedom and crafted an identifiable, cyclical inner journey of transformation available to everyone, incorporating the living reality of Jesus the Christ. And soon, The Way came to be understood by early Christians as the ongoing gradual process of transformation into the image of the eternal Christ in whom they believed they were already made.
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Alexander J. Shaia (Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation)
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Over time I found an explanation that eased my mind. I thought I should no longer be surprised by the fact that it was my nest friends who came from well-established families, that were not hesitant to stay at the Kibbutz. They were the ones that actually did not have economic concerns. Their risk factor was low. They could stay in the Kibbutz and leave it any time they wanted. They would have supportive parents to help them rebuild their future, whether it was in school or whether it was in finding a proper job to make a living. I did not have these advantages. If I left, I would have to start over from scratch. I knew early on that my chances of making a brave decision and staying at Kibbutz were slim. There was a very high risk associated with that decision. If I could not make it in the Kibbutz then everything would go down the drain. Then I would have to get out in the job market, with no financial assistance, with no place to live, and without any education. I knew my situation was different from the other nest members, and I think as that realization dawned on me, it was then that I first decided to go into the military. I remembered I had a similar dilemma when I decided not to stay in the United States any longer and return to Israel. The decision making process was long and tedious, but ultimately I chose to return to Israel. I never thought about what would happen if I would have chosen to stay in the US instead, or how my life would have turned out.
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Nahum Sivan (Till We Say Goodbye)
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In India, they use the word ‘karma,’ for lack of any better term. But it’s a concept that’s rarely given a proper explanation. It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
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Paulo Coelho (Aleph)
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In our day of competing truths or even a rejection of the existence of absolute truth in any form, it is vital that we look to the Scriptures. The conviction that the Scriptures are true or inerrant is properly a conviction of faith, as noted earlier. Any society with no absolute truths is headed toward chaos. Civilization must have some overarching, moral truths. Even if these are not directly from or based upon Scripture, they can make decent order in a society (see Romans 2:12–16).
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Edward A. Engelbrecht (The Lutheran Difference: An Explanation & Comparison of Christian Beliefs)
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enter your mind, in which case a two-stage inference chain is assembled, governed by two probabilistic parameters, P(False alarm) and P(Prank call). Later, when the possibility of an earthquake enters consideration, the parameter P(False alarm) undergoes a partial explication; a fragment of knowledge is brought over from the remote frame of earthquake experiences and is appended to the link Burglary → Alarm as an alternative cause or explanation. The catchall hypothesis All other causes shrinks (to exclude earthquakes), and its parameters are readjusted. The radio announcement strengthens your suspicion in the earthquake hypothesis and permits you to properly readjust your decisions without elaborating the mechanics of the pressure transducer used in the alarm system. The remote possibility of having forgotten to push the reset button will
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Judea Pearl (Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Representation and Reasoning))
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The real meaning of Occam’s razor, Rosemary believed, was that explanations and solutions should be free from elements that have no real bearing on the system in question—that solving problems isn’t so much about simplifying them as it is about properly and realistically reducing them to only what’s relevant.
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Christian Cantrell (Containment (Children of Occam Book 1))
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The problem is not one of fundamental intellectual incompetence, or men could know nothing at all. Nor is it that the canons of reason and forms of logic are irrelevant to ultimate reality. Were that the case, we would be doomed from the outset to ontological skepticism. Rather, man the thinker, for whatever reason (Judeo-Christian theology would point to the fall and sinfulness of man) employs his intelligence to formulate comprehensive explanations of reality and life that not only rival each other, but together stand exposed as inadequate, inordinate world-wisdom when evaluated by the transcendent cognitive revelation which Judeo-Christian truth affirms. The human spirit slants its perspectives in a manner that does violence to the truth of revelation, while its very formulations are at the same time made possible because reason is a divine gift whose legitimate and proper use man has compromised.
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Carl F.H. Henry (God, Revelation and Authority (Set of 6))
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Darwin uneasily accepted that evolution might occasionally proceed a little faster than he had at first envisaged, but in general he simply dismissed Thompson's claim; although he could not disprove it, he remained stubbornly convinced that he was right. Darwin felt that evolution change, like Lyell's geological forces, must proceed at a respectable pace; apart from anything else, more rapid change hinted at supernatural, perhaps even divine, intervention in the Earth's history - approaches that increasingly had no place in properly philosophical explanations.
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Jim Endersby (A Guinea Pig's History of Biology)
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Now, it may be objected that Orwell was no Borges, that Nineteen Eighty-Four is no postmodern literary experiment, and that I am considering the Appendix too curiously. Perhaps the Newspeak essay should be seen simply as a parody 'presented in the form of a mock-survey, scientific and historical, of the language of Oceania,' whose purpose is to illustrate 'how a totalitarian oligarchy uses the rational tools of science as the instrument of power.' Or perhaps the problem I have identified could be explained as one more manifestation of 'the generic contradiction between naturalism and satire that is the basic formal determinant of the book.' Furthermore, it is pointless to second-guess an author; there are commonsense explanations for Orwell's decision to place the Newspeak essay in an Appendix, and for his failure to identify precisely the essay's author; the incongruities between the Appendix and the novel proper do not reduce the political urgency of the total work; it is a mistake to come to Nineteen Eighty-Four with expectations derived from more conventional novels; paradoxes are the stuff of futuristic stories; readers have a duty to suspend their disbelief; even Homer nods. But, if it was unlike Orwell to lure us deliberately into a hall of mirrors, he certainly did not lack ingenuity. And, even if he encountered difficulties he was unable to solve, his imperfect solutions were consonant with the plan to convey a world deprived of 'objective truth.' Even though his handling of the Appendix may have had unforeseen consequences for the book as a whole, the confusion raised by the document nevertheless 'works.' The footnote's implied promise of verification is hollow, and the reader's attempts to determine the 'objective truth' about Oceania—its social and political structure, its language, its fate—are frustrated. By trying to reconcile the novel and the Appendix, we experience for ourselves—'outside' the novel, as it were—what it might be like to inhabit a world in which the authenticity (never mind the accuracy or objectivity) of all documents is in doubt, in which documents are almost dreamlike, unfixed in time, infused with self-contradiction, at once recognisable and cryptic. Those who keep a checklist of Orwell's 'prophecies' may credit him with anticipating and dramatising the age of 'disinformation.
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Richard K. Sanderson
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Peter Brown, that great historian of early Christianity, has given the most cogent explanation for the arising of the cult of the saints in the late Roman world. He explains that the emphasis of early Christian preaching on judgment, on the human need for redemption from sin, brought to the minds of common people — among whom Christianity was early successful — their social and political condition. Having strictly limited powers to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing, they turned, when they could, to their social betters in hope of aid. If a local patrician could befriend them — could be, at least for a time, their patron — then they had a chance, at least, of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus. For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render malleable seemingly inexorable processes, and to bridge with the warm breath of personal acquaintance the great distances of the late-Roman social world. In a world so sternly organized around sin and justice, patrocimium [patronage] and amicitia [friendship] provided a much-needed language of amnesty.”
As this cult became more and more deeply entrenched in the Christian life, it made sense for there to be, not just feast days for individual saints, but a day on which everyone’s indebtedness to the whole company of saints — gathered around the throne of God, pleading on our behalf — could be properly acknowledged. After all, we do not know who all the saints are: no doubt men and women of great holiness escaped the notice of their peers, but are known to God. They deserve our thanks, even if we cannot thank them by name. So the logic went: and a general celebration of the saints seems to have begun as early as the fourth century, though it would only be four hundred years later that Pope Gregory III would designate the first day of November as the Feast of All Saints.
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Alan Jacobs (Original Sin: A Cultural History)
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It would seem peculiar, or perverse, within an Aristotelian framework of efficient causation to allege that ‘Any thing may produce any thing. ’ Although a doctor doctoring a patient might produce healing in a patient, the doctor doctoring will not eventuate in a fence’s being made white; nor will a painter’s painting bring about a beach tree’s shedding its leaves. A properly specified efficient cause, in Aristotle’s terms, carries with it an explanation of why some motion or change was initiated, and does so in such a way as to make perspicuous the connection between the activity in the agent and the alteration in the patient.
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Anonymous
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this “right to marry” argument has enormous contemporary cultural traction in the West, which requires explanation if it is indeed obviously worthless. I suspect that the felt force lies in another contemporary Western cultural assumption, that it is necessary to be sexually active to be a fulfilled, or even a properly adult, human being. We could no doubt trace the root of this assumption to Freud, but I trust it is evident once named, displayed repeatedly in our popular music, in the Hollywood assumption that the existence of a “40-Year-Old Virgin” is self-evidently hilarious, in our newspaper advice columns that prioritise sexual satisfaction as a personal need, and in countless other ways.18 The (Protestant) churches have visibly surrendered to this cultural assumption, making marriage an inevitable part of Christian maturity for much of the twentieth century. We looked askance at ministerial candidates who were not married and constructed church programmes on the basis that the only single people around were young adults preparing for marriage or widows.
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Preston Sprinkle (Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology))
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In ancient times, Southern and Eastern Christianity developed vernacular Christian literatures such as the Coptic and Slavonic; for the most part, Northern Christianity did not. Liturgy and Scriptures remained in Latin. The concept of a universal interconnected Christian body was thus strengthened, but at the risk of sacred language becoming exotic. The fact that Celt and Saxon alike used Latin may have helped to heal the breach between the Saxons missionized from Rome and the Celtic Christians whom the fathers of the missionized Saxons had suppressed. To Christianize was to Latinize, to bring people within the sphere of classical culture. In modern times, the Christianizing process in preliterate societies in the southern continents has similarly brought its recipients within the sphere of literary culture and international communication. But, in principle anyway, it has favoured the growth of vernacular literature. Original expectations that Latin, or some Western language, would serve for most important sacred purposes gave way to a recognition that Scripture and liturgy belonged to the vernacular, that the language of prayer is most properly the language of the home. The cultural effects of this are obvious; there are many instances of cultural renaissance caused by the growth of vernacular writing.3 The specifically Christian “sacred” use of the vernacular has given some primal cultures a resilience against the solvent of rapid change leading to loss of identity, and enabled a preservation of part of the local focus in the very act of producing a broader identity. There are also theological side effects. The explanation and elucidation of the Christian faith in one’s own vernacular, in dialogue with other vernacular speakers, is a wholly different matter from its recapitulation in an alien language of learned discourse, however correctly acquired.
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Andrew F. Walls (Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith)
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These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.
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G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
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Even economics is based on the notion of “revealed preferences.” What people “think” is not relevant—you want to avoid entering the mushy-soft and self-looping discipline of psychology. People’s “explanations” for what they do are just words, stories they tell themselves, not the business of proper science. What they do, on the other hand, is tangible and measurable and that’s what we should focus on. This axiom, perhaps even principle, is very powerful but is not followed too much by researchers. Revelation of preferences is best understood by the betrothed: a diamond, particularly when it is onerous to the buyer, is vastly more convincing a commitment (and much less reversible) than a verbal promise.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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I concluded that all of the postural muscles are targets for tension but that some are more susceptible than others (see Figure 8). Perhaps the explanation for this is that the most important postural muscles are the ones most frequently involved. Note the high proportion of patients with buttock tenderness: 77 percent on the left and 78 percent on the right. The buttock muscles keep the trunk upright on the legs, a very important job. The neck muscles keep the head erect on the trunk, and the muscles at the top of the shoulders stabilize the arms so that they can be used properly; if the shoulder muscles are not functioning properly, arm function will be severely curtailed. The higher numbers involving the right neck and shoulder may have something to do with the fact that most of us are right-handed. The importance of this pain on pressure cannot be overemphasized. Muscle tenderness on pressure is the hallmark of TMS; it is the only objective evidence of the alteration in muscle physiology brought about by TMS. It explains the "trigger points" that doctors have been talking about for years, which can now be recognized as the central zone of a wider area of muscle pain induced by blood deprivation. Only the postural muscles and their associated nerves are targets for TMS; the muscles of the arms and legs are not similarly involved. This is a clinical fact, similar to the fact that the stomach or colon may be a target organ for tension, so it is not necessary to know why. One wonders, however, if the nature of their work is what makes postural muscles selectively susceptible to TMS. Because they are responsible for maintaining head and trunk posture and supporting the arms at the shoulders, they are constantly active during one's waking hours and,
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John E. Sarno (Mind Over Back Pain: A Radically New Approach to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Back Pain)
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Abductive reasoning is neither deductive nor inductive. Abductive reasoning, even when done properly, doesn’t lead to a certain conclusion, as deductive reasoning does; nor even necessarily to a probable conclusion, as inductive reasoning does; but rather to the most plausible conclusion, meaning the likeliest explanation for the observations.
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Bart D. Ehrman (Can We Trust the Bible on the Historical Jesus?)
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is safe to say that the message spoke of a common shape to all the processes of the world, and insisted there was a unity to all explanations. It confirmed that all phenomena are expressions of a single phenomenon, and while all droplets consider themselves independent, they are nonetheless still ocean through and through. In that message the great suspicions were vindicated and the old cliches were jettisoned. The hymn of the world was notated and an invitation to join the choir extended. The shape of Being was outlined in all its myriad forms and the whole was expressed in the part. With the right ears even a lesser creature can hear the song. It is sung constantly, from the heart of each atom and star. The galaxies hum of shape and form in their essence. That is their secret. The particles whisper of the nature of proper interactions. That is their game. And during a storm, in the forest, on the right night, it is no secret that the leaves all sing of God.
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Exurb1a (The Fifth Science)
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Rhythm must never be contravened in any of the arts. Rhythm is also present in things that are invisible. For the samurai, there is rhythm in how he succeeds in service or falls from grace. There is rhythm for harmony and rhythm for discord. In the Way of commerce, there is cadence in the accumulation of great wealth and a rhythm for losing it. Each Way has its own rhythm. Judge carefully the rhythms signifying prosperity and those that spell regression. There are myriad rhythms in strategy. First, the warrior must know the cadence of harmony and then learn that of discord. He must know the striking, interval and counter cadences that manifest among big and small, fast and slow rhythms [between attacks]. In combat, it is critical for success to know how to adopt the “counter rhythm.” You must calculate the cadences of various enemies and employ a rhythm that is unexpected to them. Use your wisdom to detect and strike concealed cadences to seize victory. I devote much explanation to the question of cadence in all the scrolls. Consider what I record and train assiduously. As written above, your spirit will naturally expand through training diligently from morning to night in the Way of my school’s combat strategy. I hereby convey to the world for the first time in writing my strategy for collective and individual combat in the five scrolls of Ground, Water, Fire, Wind and Ether. For those who care to learn my principles of combat strategy, follow these rules in observing the Way: 1. Think never to veer from the Way 2. Train unremittingly in the Way 3. Acquaint yourself with all arts 4. Know the Ways of all vocations 5. Discern the truth in all things 6. See the intrinsic worth in all things 7. Perceive and know what cannot be seen with the eyes 8. Pay attention even to trifles 9. Do not engage in superfluous activities Train in the Way of combat strategy keeping these basic principles in mind. Particularly in this Way, inability to comprehensively see the most fundamental matters will make it difficult to excel. If you learn these principles successfully, however, you will not lose to twenty or even thirty foes. First, by dedicating your energies wholeheartedly to learning swordsmanship and practicing the “Direct Way,” you will defeat men through superior technique, and even beat them just by looking with your eyes. Your body will learn to move freely through the rigors of arduous training and you will also overcome your opponent physically. Furthermore, with your spirit attuned to the Way you will triumph over the enemy with your mind. Having come so far, how can you be beaten by anyone? In the case of large-scale strategy [implemented by generals, victory is had in many forms]: win at having men of excellence, win at maneuvering large numbers of men [effectively], win at conducting oneself properly, win at governance, win at nourishing the people, and win at conducting the laws of the world the way they are meant to be.
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Alexander Bennett (The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works)
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The resulting tree, or phylogram, to use the proper name, again recognised the four main branches (I–IV in the figure on page 17) of modern dog breeds initially published by Wayne and Vilà. The results were fascinating. The fossil dogs on three of the four branches (I, III, IV) of the tree are closely related to modern breeds while the rare fourth, mainly Scandinavian, branch (II) is closest to modern wolves from Sweden and Ukraine. One possible explanation is that dogs on this branch, which include the Norwegian Elkhound and the Jämthund, acquired their mitochondrial DNA from wild wolves in the recent past, after the advent of agriculture.
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Bryan Sykes (Once a Wolf: The Science Behind Our Dogs' Astonishing Genetic Evolution: The Science that Reveals Our Dogs' Genetic Ancestry)
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Descartes observed that for any but the simplest kinds of argument, one must rely upon memory for knowledge of the conclusion. You clearly and distinctly see that the present step follows from earlier steps; but you have only your memory to testify to such facts as that earlier on you were able to see that S4—Sn themselves followed from prior steps. This dependence upon Exploring the Design Plan memory holds even for such simple arithmetical calculations as that 24 x 32 = 768. (Of course you can record the steps of the argument in your notebook; but then you will rely on memory for the belief that it was you who wrote them down and that you intended them to be an accurate written record of the argument.) And the same goes here for this purported argument to the best explanation. It isn't possible (for most of us, anyway) to hold in mind at one time the relevant phenomena to be explained, the most salient half dozen or so alternative explanations, the reasons (if any) why these explanations aren't as good as the favored candidate, the reasons (if any) for thinking that there must be (or probably is) a good explanation of those phenomena, and finally the inference from the alleged bestness of the explanation in question to the truth of the memory beliefs in question.
”
”
Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function (Warrant, #2))
“
How do I know, prior to my knowing anything by way of memory, that these present phenomena have an explanation? By way of my knowledge that most phenomena (or most similar phenomena?) do? But so to think is to rely upon memory.
”
”
Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function (Warrant, #2))
“
I will remind you of what the central limit theorem tells us: (1) the sample means for any population will be distributed roughly as a normal distribution around the true population mean; (2) we would expect the sample mean and the sample standard deviation to be roughly equal to the mean and standard deviation for the population from which it is drawn; and (3) roughly 68 percent of sample means will lie within one standard error of the population mean, roughly 95 percent will lie within two standard errors of the population mean, and so on. In less technical language, this all means that any sample should look a lot like the population from which it is drawn; while every sample will be different, it would be relatively rare for the mean of a properly drawn sample to deviate by a huge amount from the mean for the relevant underlying population. Similarly, we would also expect two samples drawn from the same population to look a lot like each other. Or, to think about the situation somewhat differently, if we have two samples that have extremely dissimilar means, the most likely explanation is that they came from different populations.
”
”
Charles Wheelan (Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data)
“
Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
”
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Theodore John Kaczynski
“
In game theory, as in applications of other technologies that use RPT [Revealed Preference Theory], the purpose of the machinery is to tell us what happens when patterns of behavior instantiate some particular strategic vector, payoff matrix, and distribution of information—for example, a PD [Prisoner's Dilemma]—that we’re empirically motivated to regard as a correct model of a target situation. The motivational history that produced this vector in a given case is irrelevant to which game is instantiated, or to the location of its equilibrium or equilibria. As Binmore (1994, pp. 95–256) emphasizes at length, if, in the case of any putative PD, there is any available story that would rationalize cooperation by either player, then it follows as a matter of logic that the modeler has assigned at least one of them the wrong utility function (or has mistakenly assumed perfect information, or has failed to detect a commitment action) and so made a mistake in taking their game as an instance of the (one-shot) PD. Perhaps she has not observed enough of their behavior to have inferred an accurate model of the agents they instantiate. The game theorist’s solution algorithms, in themselves, are not empirical hypotheses about anything. Applications of them will be only as good, for purposes of either normative strategic advice or empirical explanation, as the empirical model of the players constructed from the intentional stance is accurate. It is a much-cited fact from the experimental economics literature that when people are brought into laboratories and set into situations contrived to induce PDs, substantial numbers cooperate. What follows from this, by proper use of RPT, not in discredit of it, is that the experimental setup has failed to induce a PD after all. The players’ behavior indicates that their preferences have been misrepresented in the specification of their game as a PD. A game is a mathematical representation of a situation, and the operation of solving a game is an exercise in deductive reasoning. Like any deductive argument, it adds no new empirical information not already contained in the premises. However, it can be of explanatory value in revealing structural relations among facts that we otherwise might not have noticed.
”
”
Don Ross
“
After an era of lunar mortification, we are entering an era of solar mystification.
Every great thought is of the order of the lapsus. When Benjamin pronounces this terrifying sentence: 'Fascism is made up of two things: fascism properly so called and anti-fascism', is this not thought sliding, letting itself slide beyond truth, into the fundamental ambiguity of discourse, an ambiguity far greater than any political or ideological explanation, and which alone explains why there has never been any plausible explanation of fascism, whilst anti-fascism is self explanatory? Whatever hypothesis you propose about it, fascism poses more problems than anti-fascism. From the very start, it is more interesting than - and itself encompasses - anti-fascism. This is what Benjamin's statement is saying. And it should not be made to say what it is not saying. Though it surely will be.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
“
In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. So, for instance, if your clothes dryer breaks down and you want to get the people from BHV—the strange Sears, Roebuck of Paris— to come fix it, you will be told, first, that only one man knows how it works and he cannot be found (explanation in terms of the gifts of the romanticized individual); next, that it cannot be fixed for a week because of a store policy (explanation in terms of ideological necessity); and, finally, that you are perfectly right to find all this exasperating, but nothing can be done, because it is in the nature of things for a dryer to break down, dryers are like that (futility of explanation itself). "They are sensitive machines; they are ill suited to the task; no one has ever made one successfully," the store bureaucrat in charge of service says, sighing. "C'est normal." And what works small works big too. The same sequence that explains the broken dryer also governs the explanations of the French Revolution that have been offered by the major French historians. "Voltaire did all this!" was de La Villette's explanation (only one workman); an inevitable fight between the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats, the Marxists said (store policy); until, finally, Foucault announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in the coming of the Reign of Terror, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror (all dryers are like that).
”
”
Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)
“
Ihung up with Josh, and the switch flipped in my head.
Sloan called it my velociraptor brain because it made me fierce and sharp. Something big had to trigger it, and when it did, my compulsive, laser-focused, primal side activated. The one that got me a near perfect score on my SATs and got me through college finals and Mom. The one that made me clean when I was stressed and threatened to launch into full-scale manic OCD if left unchecked—that kicked in.
Emotion drained away, the tiredness from staying up all night crying dissipated, and I became my purpose.
I didn’t do hysterics. Never had. When in crisis, I became systematic and efficient.
And the transition was now complete.
I weighed only for a second whether to call Sloan and tell her or go pick her up. I decided to pick her up. She would be too upset to drive properly, but knowing her, she would try anyway.
From Josh’s explanation of the situation, Brandon wouldn’t be out of the hospital anytime soon. Sloan wouldn’t leave Brandon, and I wouldn’t leave her. She would need things for the stay. People would need to be called. Arrangements made.
I began to compile a list in my head of things to do and things to pack as I quickly but methodically drove to Sloan’s. Phone charger, headphones, blanket, change of clothes for Sloan, toiletries, and her laptop.
It took me twenty minutes to get to her house, and I got out of my car ready for a surgical extraction.
I stood there, surrounded by the earthy smell of Sloan’s just-watered potted porch flowers. The door opened, and I took in her blissfully ignorant face one more time.
“Kristen?”
It wasn’t unusual for me to stop by. But she knew me well enough to instantly know something was wrong.
“Sloan, Brandon has been in an accident,” I said calmly. “He’s alive, but I need you to get your purse and come with me.”
I knew immediately that I’d been right to come get her instead of calling. One look at her and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to put a foot in front of the other. While I mobilized and became strong under stress, she froze and weakened.
“What? ” she breathed.
“We have to hurry. Come on.” I pushed past her and systematically executed my checklist. I gave myself a two-minute window to grab what was needed.
Her gym bag would be in the laundry room, already filled with toiletries and her headphones. I grabbed that, pulled a sweater from her closet, selected a change of clothes for her, and stuffed her laptop inside the bag.
When I came out of the room, she had managed to grab her purse as instructed. She stood by the sofa looking shaken, her eyes moving back and forth like she was trying to figure out what was happening.
Her cell phone sat by her easel and I snatched it, pulling the charger from the wall. I grabbed her favorite throw blanket from the sofa and stuffed that in the bag and zipped it.
List complete.
Then I took her by the elbow, locked her front door, and dragged her to the car.
“Wha…what happened? What happened!” she screamed, finally coming out of her shock.
I opened up the passenger door and put her in. “Buckle yourself up. I’ll tell you what I know on the way.”
When I got around to the driver’s side, she had her phone to her ear. “He’s not answering. He’s not answering! What happened, Kristen?!”
I grabbed her face in my hands. “Listen to me. Look at me. He is alive. He was hit on his bike. Josh went on the call. He was unconscious. It was clear he had some broken bones and a possible head injury. He’s at the ER, and I need to get you to the hospital to be with him. But I need you to be calm.”
Her brown eyes were terrified, but she nodded.
“Right now your job is to call Brandon’s family,” I said firmly. “Relay what I just said to you, calmly. Can you do that for Brandon?”
She nodded again. “Yes.” Her hands shook, but she dialed.
”
”
Abby Jimenez
“
I will not merely say that this story is true: because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (Tremendous Trifles)
“
Kesuma translates, the women ponder my answer. Another woman asks, “But if you don’t have age groups, how do you know how to show and receive proper respect?”
“Um… respect? I don’t know. I guess maybe respect doesn’t mean as much to us. Or it isn’t the same somehow. I respect someone for what he’s accomplished or who he is as a person, not because of how old he is.”
The women look horrified. “But respect… respect is what makes us people. It’s what holds together families. Respect is the most important thing!”
“For me, respect is nice, but I’d rather have, well—love, I guess.”
For some minutes we try to bridge this terrible gulf between us; they are too polite to confess they think me a dangerously insolent heathen, and I am too polite to say I think they’re trapped in some benighted patriarchy. But then I have a sort of revelation—more of an instinct than a reasoned explanation.
“You say respect holds people together. I say love. I think—I don’t know how to explain this. I think when I love someone, really love someone… not, um…” I turn to Kesuma. “Not, you know, sexual love, or a crush or something?” He translates, and the women giggle again. “But when I really love someone it’s because I respect him. Or, my respect for him comes out of my love. I think maybe they’re the same, really.”
I don’t know if this actually means something or not. But it seems to satisfy the women. There are smiling nods all around.
”
”
Julie Powell (Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession)
“
Air Conditioning Repair Sanbernardino| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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Air Conditioning Repair Sandiego| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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Air Conditioning Repair Stockton| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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Air Conditioning Repair Tampa| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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Air Conditioning Repair Tracy| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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Air Conditioning Repair Vacaville| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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Air Conditioning Repair Victorville| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
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heating and cooling near me”
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Air Conditioning Repair Virginiabe| HVAC | Heating and Cooling
“It may not take too long for split air conditioners to cool the room, but a dirty air filter or a blocked condensate drain may be the reason, even if it is left on for hours if there is no proper cooling. The AC is shielded by air filters from dust in the air. It may be simple to clean an air filter in a window AC, but you will need assistance from a split AC professional. Air filters accumulate dust and debris drawn into the ducts, and they remain clogged and impact the cooling process if they are not cleaned regularly. We recommend having the air conditioner serviced twice a year for increased
performance and to avoid any problems during summers.Ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a professional would need assistance may be another possible reason for the lack of cooling. If the air conditioner does not cool properly, the coolant will be low as well. This either means that it has been undercharged, or that there is a gas leak in the split air conditioner. This is a more common problem for people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high.Another potential explanation for the lack of cooling could be ice formation around the coils or a dirty outdoor compressor for which a specialist may need assistance. The coolant will also be poor if the air conditioner does not cool correctly. This either suggests that it has been undercharged, or that the split air conditioner has a gas leak. For people living around coastal regions or anywhere close to waste water, where air pollution is high, this is a more common concern.You can, however, avoid costly AC repairs with regular maintenance and keep your AC running at optimum performance. It is a warning of a burned cable, a faulty starting capacitor or a defective compressor itself when the compressor stops working. In this case, you will need to clean the condenser coil, inspect the capacitor and repair the compressor if it is found to be faulty. When the air conditioner starts to turn on and off, before you get it serviced, it is better to turn it off. Most possibly, the evaporator is dirty and the condenser is dirty or blocked.A dirty filter restricts airflow and reduced airflow creates further problems, like a frozen evaporator coil. Before and after summer, in particular, it is important to adjust the air filter for better cooling and overall performance. To see if the timer function has been turned on and altered accordingly, double check your thermostat settings.
ac companies near me
heating and cooling near me”
#acpowerVirginiabe#AcpowerVirginiabe#airconditioning#hvac #hvaclife #ac #airconditioner #heating #hvacservice #cooling #hvactechnician #hvactech #heatingandcooling #hvacrepair #refrigeration #plumbing #hvacr #hvacinstall #maintenance #furnace #hvaccontractor #aircon #service #acrepair #hvacquality #hvactools #airconditioningrepair #hvaclove#ACRepairNearBy #ACTechnician #HVAC #Heating&Cooling #FurnanceRepai
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