Short Affirmation Quotes

Don’t waste your time in anger, regrets, worries, and grudges. Life is too short to be unhappy.

Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.

Life is short. Focus on what really matters most. You have to change your priorities over time.

Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables.

You're gay," wash stated. Rhodes nodded, a short jerk of his head, dropping his gaze to his beer. "As in, you-like-men gay." Still eying his beer, Rhodes gave an affirmative shrug. "As in, you like-to-fuck-men gay." "Yes!

Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.

We lived on 82nd Street and the Metropolitan Museum was my short cut to Central Park. I wrote: "I go into the museum and look at all the pictures on the walls. Instead of feeling my own insignificance I want to go straight home and paint." A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can't wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else.

The hero's achievement, in short, is to affirm life.

I decided to choose: No more sadness because of how someone else will feel. No more hiding my feelings. No more avoiding the truth of how I felt. No more unresolved situations. No more letting people rob me of my happiness and joy and letting life pass me by. No more misery and selling myself short. No more letting people take and steal my inner peace. No more giving a shit about what other people think of me—they are going to form their opinion anyway—and the question is, who cares? Not me. That’s the least of my worries. No more giving everyone the best of me. It is time for me to fall in love with myself and give myself ALL of me!

...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing…

When white people stop short of reconciliation, it's often because they are motivated by a deep need to believe in their own goodness, and for that goodness to be affirmed over and over and over again.

I ask myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines - a straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And besides, the last word is not said, - probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?...There is never time to say our last word - the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. ...My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirmed that he achieved greatness.

...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a ...more "...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you're black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It's a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour on a predetermined day, in honour of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you're the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or King. What a laugh.

You more than anyone else deserve to be loved and happy. Do not remain in any relationship that robs you of those two things.

Wisdom, in short, whose lessons have been represented as so hard to learn by those who never were at her school, only teaches us to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life, a little farther than that life carries it. And this is, not to buy at too dear a price. Now, whoever takes this maxim abroad with him into the grand market of the world, and constantly applies it to honours, to riches, to pleasures, and to every other commodity which that market affords, is, I will venture to affirm, a wise man.

I didn’t want to be a religious professional whose identity was institutionalized. I didn’t want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn’t want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.

Life's rewards as well as it's short-comings are magnetic reflections of the vivacious energies we release through our thoughts, our actions, and our words.

who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

Anyone who falls short of God’s grace, out of rage, can harm many. It our sacred duty to love, motivate and pray for one another, so we will all be under God’s grace.

Prayers can be whatever you wish them to be. They can be short or long requests, expressions of gratitude and affirmations that your requests are being honored.

In all the opposition to AA, there is never any protest against over-representation of low castes in low-paying jobs.

Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood," he once said. "Now he's in the minority––nobody wants him there, unless it's to rob his ass––and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There's no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn't getting anything productive done until he's out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don't have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here––so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it's annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they'll ever get from us.

He pauses, swipes a matchstick on a column. It bursts into flame. “I tell you, you must take risks in my studio.” He finds a cigarette behind his ear and lights it. “I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.” An affirmative murmur. “I say this, yes, but I still see so many of you afraid to cut in.” He begins to pace, slowly like a wolf, which is definitely his mirror animal. “I see what you are doing. When you leave yesterday, I go from work to work. You feel like Rambo maybe with the drills, the saws. You make lots of noise, lots of dust, but very few of you have found even this much”—he pinches two fingers together—“of your sculptures. Today this changes.” He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. “May I, Melinda?” “Please,

A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these resources, but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value but that are essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.

For as to what we have heard you affirm, that there are other kingdoms and states in the world inhabited by human creatures as large as yourself, our philosophers are in much doubt, and would rather conjecture that you dropped from the moon, or one of the stars; because it is certain, that a hundred mortals of your bulk would in a short time destroy all the fruits and cattle of his majesty’s dominions: besides, our histories of six thousand moons make no mention of any other regions than the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefusca did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’ And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.

The first task of seeking guidance then is to touch your own struggles, doubts, and insecurities—in short, to affirm your life as a quest.8 Your life, my life, is given graciously by God. Our lives are not problems to be solved but journeys to be taken with Jesus as our friend and finest guide.

Rejection was to be rejection but not denial, as reception was to be reception but not subservience. Both methods, the Affirmative Way and the Negative Way, were to co-exist; one might almost say, to co-inhere, since each was to be the key of the other: in intellect as in emotion, in morals as in doctrine.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

Biological Exuberance is, above all, an affirmation of life's vitality and infinite possibilities: a worldview that is once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable. A world, in short, exactly like the one we inhabit.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, "I know, I know, but all the same...

What is the key to the Short Path? It is threefold. First, stop searching for the Overself since it follows you wherever you go. Second, believe in its Presence, with and within you. Third, keep on trying to understand its truth until you can abandon further thoughts about it. You cannot acquire what is already here. So drop the ego’s false idea and affirm the real one.

Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as public. Undoubtedly. And our State must once more enlarge; and this time the enlargement will be nothing short of a whole army, which will have to go out and fight with the invaders for all that we have, as well as for the things and persons whom we were describing above. Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves? No, I said; not if we were right in the principle which was acknowledged by all of us when we were framing the State: the principle, as you will remember, was that one man cannot practise many arts with success. Very

The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything becomes “a mental conception.” With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts the existence of its interlocutor and is not quite sure that it exists itself. From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only “a mental conception.” Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in the lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind. In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all end in the monosyllable, No. To No there is only one reply, Yes. Nihilism has no point. There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

New Age spirituality purports to promote change – its mantra is ‘transformation’ – but, in reality, it endorses the status quo. It preaches changing oneself to accept the world as it is. New Agers are too busy with their affirmations and introspections to do anything like take direct action. Indeed, in some books the advice to unleash one’s inner goddess turns out to be little more than to bring back the old ‘domestic goddess’. Using myth as one’s personal charter is nothing new (as we saw in Chapter 3), but when Alexander the Great chose Achilles, the psychopathic hero of Homer’s Iliad, to revere and emulate, he did so with action in mind. Alexander used classical myth as his ‘life coach’ and changed the world. New Agers use classical myth to ensure that the spirit is soothed, the horoscope reassuring, and the house clean, but the world stays the same.

However, I have also argued for allegory’s positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

Black Power, in short, is an attitude, an inward affirmation of the essential worth of blackness. It means that the black man will not be poisoned by the stereotypes that others have of him, but will affirm from the depth of his soul : "Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone." 16 And "if the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that `sho good eatin' that he persists in imagining.

Argument 4: Affirmative action is unfair to white men because it causes them to lose opportunities to less qualified women and people of color. As with argument 3, remember that these are representational goals, of which we are falling far short. When you say that a representational number of women or people of color cuts out more deserving white men, you are saying that women and people of color deserve to be less represented in our schools and our companies and that white men are deserving of an over-representational majority of these spots. We see the disparities in jobs and education among race and gender lines. Either you believe these disparities exist because you believe that people of color and women are less intelligent, less hard working, and less talented than white men, or you believe that there are systemic issues keeping women and people of color from being hired into jobs, prompted, paid a fair wage, and accepted into college.

La Nebuleuse is a poem of lovely & deep perspective, where, symboloized by artless beings, are seen the successive generations of men following each other uncomprehendingly, almost undiscerningly, so different are their souls, & always summed up, to the moment of their decline, by the child, the future, the “nebula”, whose birth, finally confirmed, brings death. Under its morning clearness, to the faded smiles of aged stars. And, the vision ended, it is urged that this morrow, which is becoming today, will be altogether likes its dead brothers, & that in short there is nothing new in the spectacle which amuses the dead years leaning… But this “nothingness” has no importance for the human atoms that form & determine it; it is the delightful newness that we breathe & of which we live. The new! The new! And let each intelligence, though short-lived, affirm his will to exist, & to be dissimilar to all antecedent or surrounding manifestations, & let each nebula aspire to the character of a star whose light shall be distinct & clear among other lights.

when the Samaritan woman at the well calls Jesus a prophet (John 4:19), this is only an initial step toward His being called the Messiah (4:25–26) and the Savior of the world (4:42). Again, when the multiplication of the loaves prompts the confession of Jesus as a prophet (6:14), it is simply a preparation for His being confessed shortly afterwards as “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (6:69). The same is true of the man born blind, who begins by affirming Jesus a prophet (9:17) and ends by believing in Him as “Son of God” (9:35–38).

...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you're black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It's a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour on a predetermined day, in honour of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you're the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or King. What a laugh.

My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions — and safe — and profitable — and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!

Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign themselves or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendor. They wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet a sovereign world, humor. The lone wolves who know no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied and who can never break through the starry space,who feel themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere—for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and manyfaceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too, in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either saint or sinner (or for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though "one possessed nothing," to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favorite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humor alone to make efficacious.

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these resources, but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value but that are essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.

The story is told about three men who were sentenced to death by guillotine. One was a doctor, another a lawyer, and the third an engineer. The day of execution arrived, and the three prisoners were lined up on the gallows. “Do you wish to face the blade, or look away?” the henchman asked the doctor. “I’ll face the blade!” the physician courageously replied. The doctor placed his neck onto the guillotine, and the executioner pulled the rope to release the blade. Then an amazing thing happened – the blade fell to a point just inches above the doctor’s neck, and stopped! The crowd of gathered townspeople was astonished, and tittered with speculation. After a bevy of excited discussions, the executioner told the doctor, “This is obviously a sign from God that you do not deserve to die. Go forth – you are pardoned.” Joyfully the doctor arose and went on his way. The second man to confront death was the lawyer, who also chose to face the blade. The cord was pulled, down fell the blade, and once again it stopped but a few inches from the man’s naked throat! Again the crowd buzzed – two miracles in one day! Just as he did minutes earlier, the executioner informed the prisoner that divine intervention had obviously been issued, and he, too, was free. Happily he departed. The final prisoner was the engineer who, like his predecessors, chose to face the blade. He fitted his neck into the crook of the guillotine and looked up at the apparatus above him. The executioner was about to pull the cord when the engineer pointed to the pulley system and called out, “Wait a minute! – I think I can see the problem!” Within each of us there resides an overworking engineer who is more concerned with analyzing the problem than accepting the solution. Many of us have become so resigned to receiving the short end of the stick in life, that if we were offered the long end, we would doubt its authenticity and refuse it. We must be willing to drop the heavy load of guilt, unworthiness, and self-denial we have carried for so long, perhaps lifetimes. We must openly affirm that we are ready to receive all the good that life has to offer us, without argument or wariness. Then we must accept our good – not just in word, but in action. In so doing we claim our right to live in a new world – one which attests that we are deserving not of punishment, but of release, freedom, and celebration.

The adepts of certain forms of yoga affirm that most of the techniques appropriate to other ages are impracticable in the age in which we live, in which life is too short to bring them to fulfillment. The methods they propose as most suitable for the modem age can only be taught secretly, since they sometimes contradict religious and ethical concepts and taboos which are inherited from past times but whose value few individuals are mentally free to challenge. [...] Yoga is often spoken of as though it were a system of exercises, physical culture for the mind and body. This is true to a certain extent in the preliminary stages connected with Hatha yoga. Although it is absolutely unnecessary to utilize this training to attain the highest forms of realization, it is such a great aid, such a useful preparation, that there seems no advantage to be had in neglecting it.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

One may readily concede that the historical factuality of the resurrection cannot be affirmed with the same level of confidence as the historical factuality of the crucifixion. All historical judgments can be made only with relative certainty, and the judgment that Jesus rose from the dead can be offered—from the historian’s point of view—only with great caution. The character of the event itself hardly falls within ordinary categories of experience.28 Still, something extraordinary happened shortly after Jesus’ death that rallied the dispirited disciples and sent them out proclaiming to the world that Jesus had risen and had appeared to them. Reductive psychological explanations fail to do justice to the widespread testimony to this event within the original community and to the moral seriousness of the movement that resulted from it. The best explanation is to say that God did something beyond all power of human imagining by raising Jesus from the dead. To make such a claim is to make an assertion that redefines reality.29 If such an event has happened in history, then history is not a closed system of immanent causes and effects. God is powerfully at work in the world in ways that defy common sense, redeeming the creation from its bondage to necessity and decay. That, of course, is precisely what the early Christians believed and proclaimed: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. (EPH. 1:17–21. emphasis mine)

I may add as a fourth reason, which diminishes the authority of prodigies, that there is no testimony for any, even those which have not been expressly detected, that is not opposed by an infinite number of witnesses; so that not only the miracle destroys the credit of testimony, but the testimony destroys itself. To make this the better understood, let us consider, that, in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary; and that it is impossible the religions of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of Siam, and of China should, all of them, be established on any solid foundation. Every miracle, therefore, pretended to have been wrought in any of these religions (and all of them abound in miracles), as its direct scope is to establish the particular system to which it is attributed; so has it the same force, though more indirectly, to overthrow every other system. In destroying a rival system, it likewise destroys the credit of those miracles, on which that system was established; so that all the prodigies of different religions are to be regarded as contrary facts, and the evidences of these prodigies, whether weak or strong, as opposite to each other. According to this method of reasoning, when we believe any miracle of Mahomet or his successors, we have for our warrant the testimony of a few barbarous Arabians: And on the other hand, we are to regard the authority of Titus Livius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and, in short, of all the authors and witnesses, Grecian, Chinese, and Roman Catholic, who have related any miracle in their particular religion; I say, we are to regard their testimony in the same light as if they had mentioned that Mahometan miracle, and had in express terms contradicted it, with the same certainty as they have for the miracle they relate. This argument may appear over subtle and refined; but is not in reality different from the reasoning of a judge, who supposes, that the credit of two witnesses, maintaining a crime against any one, is destroyed by the testimony of two others, who affirm him to have been two hundred leagues distant, at the same instant when the crime is said to have been committed.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these resources, but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value but that are essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.

Porridge is our soup, our grits, our sustenance, so it's pretty much the go-to for breakfast. For the first time, I ate with a bunch of other Taiwanese-Chinese kids my age who knew what the hell they were doing. Even at Chinese school, there were always kids that brought hamburgers, shunned chopsticks, or didn't get down with the funky shit. They were like faux-bootleg-Canal Street Chinamen. That was one of the things that really annoyed me about growing up Chinese in the States. Even if you wanted to roll with Chinese/Taiwanese kids, there were barely any around and the ones that were around had lost their culture and identity. They barely spoke Chinese, resented Chinese food, and if we got picked on by white people on the basketball court, everyone just looked out for themselves. It wasn't that I wanted people to carry around little red books to affirm their "Chinese-ness," but I just wanted to know there were other people that wanted this community to live on in America. There was on kid who wouldn't eat the thousand-year-old eggs at breakfast and all the other kids started roasting him. "If you don't get down with the nasty shit, you're not Chinese!" I was down with the mob, but something left me unsettled. One thing ABCs love to do is compete on "Chinese-ness," i.e., who will eat the most chicken feet, pig intestines, and have the highest SAT scores. I scored high in chick feet, sneaker game, and pirated good, but relatively low on the SAT. I had made National Guild Honorable Mention for piano when I was around twelve and promptly quit. My parents had me play tennis and take karate, but ironically, I quit tennis two tournaments short of being ranked in the state of Florida and left karate after getting my brown belt. The family never understood it, but I knew what I was doing. I didn't want to play their stupid Asian Olympics, but I wanted to prove to myself that if I did want to be the stereotypical Chinaman they wanted, I could. (189) I had become so obsessed with not being a stereotype that half of who I was had gone dormant. But it was also a positive. Instead of following the path most Asian kids do, I struck out on my own. There's nature, there's nurture, and as Harry Potter teaches us, there's who YOU want to be. (198) Everyone was in-between. The relief of the airport and the opportunity to reflect on my trip helped me realize that I didn't want to blame anyone anymore, Not my parents, not white people, not America. Did I still think there was a lot wrong with the aforementioned? Hell, yeah, but unless I was going to do something about it, I couldn't say shit. So I drank my Apple Sidra and shut the fuck up. (199)

Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism. (...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away. Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I." Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.

Tick-tock appeared to have forgotten all about both Brandon and the woman who had literally laughed herself to death. His brilliant green eyes had fixed on something which interested him much more than the dead woman. "Come here, cully," he said. "I want a better look at you." Gasher gave him a shove. Jake stumbled forward. He would have fallen if Tick-Tock's strong hands hadn't caught him by the shoulders. Then, when he was sure Jake had his balance again, Tick-Tock grasped the boy's left wrist and raised it. It was Jake's Seiko which had drawn his interest. "If this here's what I think it is, it's an omen for sure and true," Tick-Tock said. "Talk to me, boy--what's this sigul you wear?" Jake, who hadn't the slightest idea what a sigul was, could only hope for the best. "It's a watch. But it doesn't work, Mr. Tick-Tock." Hoots chuckled at that, then clapped both hands over his mouth when the Tick-Tock Man turned to look at him. After a moment, Tick-Tock looked back at Jake, and a sunny smile replaced the frown. Looking at that smile almost made you forget that it was a dead woman and not a movie Mexican taking a siesta against the wall of an adobe over there. Looking at it almost made you forget that these people were crazy, and the Tick-Tock Man was likely the craziest inmate in the whole asylum. "Watch," Tick-Tock said, nodding. "Ar, a likely enough name for such; after all, what does a person want with a timepiece but to watch it once in a while? Ar, Brandon? Ar, Tilly? Ar, Gasher?" They responded with eager affirmatives. The Tick-Tock Man favored them with his winning smile, then turned back to Jake again. Now Jake noticed that the smile, winning or not, stopped well short of the Tick-Tock Man's green eyes. They were as they had been throughout: cool, cruel, and curious.

Our attachments to whom we think we’re supposed to be are like chains around our necks. Our identities get wrapped up in the external roles, titles, and accomplishments that we put value on … A wealthy businessman values how much he’s worth financially. A research scientist values the cure she is working on. A writer values the books he writes and publishes. In my case, I valued how much social change I could create through my advocacy for women’s rights and my humanitarian work. At first, it might seem that one pursuit or identity is more valuable than another. Surely, the cure for a disease is more important than how many books an author sells. Surely, creating social change that improves thousands—if not millions—of lives is more important than increasing the wealth of one individual. At a fundamental level, though, no matter what our vocation is, our accomplishments are where we find our core self-value and feel affirmed. Attachments are attachments, I realized, no matter who we are or what we identify with. When we value ourselves because of what we accomplish and how much we accomplish, our souls are forever held hostage to these attachments. No matter how much we do, how many dollars we accumulate, cures we discover, books we sell, or people we help, it is never going to be enough to permanently fulfill us.… I was completely identified with my work, and in my own mind, I could never be successful enough at it. That was a very big chain around my soul, a huge weight on my being. Realizing this was like cutting the umbilical cord to my shame.… One short silent retreat couldn’t instantly change the shape of my life—or my mind. It had just given me a taste of what freedom from attachments could be like. It was like tasting chocolate for the first time: we can’t describe how good it tastes until we’ve actually tasted it, and then we can’t ever forget that taste. Now that I had seen the source of my pain and the route to my freedom, I had a clear path to follow. As Zainab’s story so powerfully illustrates, we can learn to recognize assumptions for the thoughts that they are, rather than cleaving to them as an ultimate defining reality we’re bound to. We get to choose, “Do I want to take this to heart or let it go?” EXPANSION

Page 141: Group Polarization Patterns Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example. * * * A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms. *** While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.

With the overall emphasis on condemnation comes a covertly oppressive message of grace. Mary recalls, “The leader of my women’s Bible study is an ordained clergywoman. She told us that no one’s gone to hell for having sex before marriage. If we ’fall off the wagon,’ just repent.” While this kind of message seems to help balance the Puritanical influence, it falls short of affirming sexual desire and its satisfaction for the single woman. The need to repent still declares that her participation in sexual activity is sinful without exception. This declaration is proving to be false and oppressive, sending the single African American woman on an endless sin/ repent merry-go-round of wondering if G ~ d is pleased with her. This woman’s sexual desire is normative, and unrelenting. What does G ~ d think of her acts of satisfaction, whether alone or with a partner? Perhaps a church can help by preaching and teaching a message of holistic human goodness.

We like to think we’re smarter than the average doodle, and even if we’re not, we feel affirmed in this delusion each year when the newest crop of Darwin Awards circulates by email, that short list of self-inflicted fatalities caused by spectacularly poor judgment, as in the case of the attorney in Toronto who was demonstrating the strength of the windows in his twenty-two-story office tower by throwing his shoulder against the glass when he broke it and fell through. The truth is that we’re all hardwired to make errors in judgment. Good judgment is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute observer of one’s own thinking and performance.

Does that mean that all one has to do is wait for the right moment? It was not just a question of that, as Hesse explained: the vita active and the vita contemplativa stand in a very sensitive relation to one another, which must constantly be rebalanced. He would come to summarize this in 1956: 'The flaw in our questioning and complaining is presumably this: namely, that we desire to have something given to us from outside that we can only attain within ourselves, through our own dedication. We demand that life must have a meaning - yet it has precisely as much meaning as we are able to impart to it.' This led him on to formulate the idea of a elite, a secret society, the invisible realm of the league of those taking part in The Journey to the East and finally to The Glass Bead Game - the 'monastery for free spirits' that Nietzsche had in mind and that Hesse affirmed and rejected in equal measure: 'In short, wanting to improve humanity is always a hopeless task. That is why I have always built my faith on the individual, for the individual can be educated and is capable of improvement, and according to my faith it has always been and still remains the small elite of well-intentioned, dedicated, and courageous people who are the guardians of all that is good and beautiful in the world.

Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war—except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war—short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide—is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong—wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero.

Personalism therefore includes among its leading ideas, the affirmation of the unity of mankind, both in space and time, which was foreshadowed by certain schools of thought in the latter days of antiquity and confirmed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For the Christian there are neither citizens nor barbarians, neither bond nor free, neither Jew nor gentile, neither white, black or yellow, but only men created in the image of God and called to salvation in Christ. The conception of a human race with a collective history and destiny, from which no individual destiny can be separated, is one of the sovereign ideas of the Fathers of the Church. In a secularised form, this is the animating principle of eighteenth century cosmopolitanism, and later of Marxism. It is flatly opposed to the ideas of absolute discontinuity between free spirits (as in Sartre) or between civilizations (in Malraux or Frobenius). It is against every form of racialism or of caste, against the ‘elimination of the abnormal’ , the contempt of the foreigner, against the totalitarians’ denigration of political adversaries—in short, it is altogether against the fabrication of scapegoats. Any man, however different, or even degraded, remains a man, for whom we ought to make a human way of life possible.

suggests that we can choose thoughts that will bring us out of depression. Practically anything that is repeated again and again will work. Remember the importance of repetition?[89] It could be a nursery rhyme. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, I’ve seen the results firsthand. People have kicked out depression simply by repeating phrases such as “blue cat” or “purple dogs” or “pink frog.” It’s true! These new phrases directly initiate activity in the brain, away from the parts that respond to depressed thinking. The new words activate neurons in the thinking part of the brain. Activity in the feeling portion slows. Stress chemicals being poured into the brain diminish. You might choose to short-circuit the cycle of thinking that leads to depression by repeating the phrase, “Yes, praise God.” Or you might pray for yourself or someone else. You could also say, “I can do this!” Any affirmations will work.[90] You also can improve mood and eliminate

Instead, the new thought actually creates activity in the neocortex—the thinking part of the brain. Depressive thoughts activate the subcortex, the feeling part of the brain. We have the choice of using either the subcortex (feeling portion) or the neocortex (thinking portion) region of our brain. Remember, your mind will move in the direction of the most current and dominant thought. You can make a thought dominant by saying it over and over again. Even repeatedly saying, “I am depressed” has an effect upon your depression. And when you’re depressed you tend to act in a way that reinforces your depression. You may look depressed. You think defeatist, depressive thoughts. When you’re depressed you’re letting your mind tell you what to feel, think, and do. The author of BrainSwitch Out of Depression suggests that we can choose thoughts that will bring us out of depression. Practically anything that is repeated again and again will work. Remember the importance of repetition?[89] It could be a nursery rhyme. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, I’ve seen the results firsthand. People have kicked out depression simply by repeating phrases such as “blue cat” or “purple dogs” or “pink frog.” It’s true! These new phrases directly initiate activity in the brain, away from the parts that respond to depressed thinking. The new words activate neurons in the thinking part of the brain. Activity in the feeling portion slows. Stress chemicals being poured into the brain diminish. You might choose to short-circuit the cycle of thinking that leads to depression by repeating the phrase, “Yes, praise God.” Or you might pray for yourself or someone else. You could also say, “I can do this!” Any affirmations will work.[90] You also can improve mood and eliminate

Genesis 22:14 “The LORD Will Provide” When Abraham names this place, he affirms that God is superintending the flow of events. This is to be read as complimentary to the name given to God in Ge 21:33 (see note there). Here the designation of the place recognizes Yahweh as God of the short term, caring for the needs of the moment. This is an important point to make in the context of the ancient Near East. In the polytheism of Abraham’s day, national and cosmic deities handled the long-term kinds of issues that concerned the stability of the world and national destiny. Other deities were more involved in the daily life of the people. These patron (city, ancestral) deities were believed to have the bulk of the impact in the life of the individual. We must remember that God has still not presented to Abraham the tenets of monotheism either on the practical level (the sole object of worship) or on the philosophical level (no other God exists). Nevertheless, in the names attributed to God, Abraham is moving in that direction. He has now recognized that this covenant God of his is not just a replacement for one of the standard categories of deity. He is filling all the roles of deity. We can hardly begin to understand how revolutionary this was. ◆

If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us. In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept "reality," for ourselves.?--To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being--which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.

The very first acts of thought, affirmation and denial, holding true and holding not true, are, in as much as they presuppose, not only the habit of holding things true and holding them not true, but a right to do this, already dominated by the belief that we can gain possession of knowledge, that judgments really can hit upon the truth;--in short, logic does not doubt its ability to assert something about the true-in-itself (namely, that it cannot have opposite attributes). Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things--that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof "I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time"--quite coarse and false.)

Is it really safe to invest in stocks? To answer that question, we would really first need to ask ourselves: what is safe after all? More so, what is safe in business? The answer would be “NOTHING”. Here it is – the stark reality: all businesses have their risks and as far as risks are concerned, the stock market is just another kind of business; that is it! All deep-rooted and unbeaten stock market will advise you on the affirmative. Yet the faint possibility remains that you, at the same time, will without doubt happen upon other stock market players who have done pathetically in the stock market. These traders, when their opinion is sought, will not leave a stone unturned in advising you to steer clear of the stock market. Mystified whose advice you should take? Fine, both are correct in their own points of view. To cross the threshold into well-paid stock market share trading in the marketplace of any place in the human race, it is to a great extent compulsory that you are geared up with the inclusive fluency of the sod above and beyond in receipt of rationalized with the up to date market shifts so that you prefer no less than probable stocks. In essence then can day businesses bear out valuable? If you are in a job in a different place and are unable to have a look at the trade area under conversation well again, it is advisable that you should not make your mind up on daylight trading. You will in point of fact happen upon other forms of trade which do not necessitate your day and night inspection. You in all probability will chew over those as well. Affecting the traders It would also be a reasonable word of warning to say publicly that the stock market affects different types of traders differently. There are cases in point of a lot of investors who have become cleaned out. Putting on next to nothing information and gambling into the share market perceiving others producing immense wealth possibly will provide evidence of being hazardous for you. You could wind up bringing up the rear to your richly deserved wealth and habitual failures will very soon plead your case before you to make your way out from the stock market panorama. Stage-managing and putting on unconditional awareness previous to putting money in will certainly twirl the bazaar in your prop up. Outline your objectives You will of course call for to outline your objectives and endeavor to come across the varied working expenditure alternatives in the stock market. At the beginning decide on fragile investments with the intention that even though you put on or incur fatalities, you will in next to no time gain knowledge of the ins and outs of the deal. Just the once you are contented, you can settle on volume funds. You in all probability will decide on each and every one of the three dealing preferences, specifically day business, short-term trading and enduring investment. At one fell swoop given your institution of resource of profits is exclusively the stock market; you will be able to broaden the horizons of your venture ambitions to a larger extent, for instance conjecture in mutual funds, money futures, product futures, and supplementary endeavor goods. You can accordingly keep up equilibrium of your ventures and disappointments if a few will by a hair's breadth inconvenience you. Seeking singular venture alternatives will additionally comply to you eloquent which one goes well with you the most excellent and you can in that case put in funds in capacity in the unwritten prospect. Make the best use of stock market It often comes to our notice that the stock market if used fine provides us with an exceptionally excellent occasion to put together loads of wealth and in addition utilize the stock market as our principal foundation of revenue. There are also the risks yet the faint possibility remains that risks are everywhere, in every trade.

In particular, healing as practiced by Jesus and his itinerant followers pointed to an unbrokered relationship to God, apart from institutional mediation.38 In short, Jesus’ healing activity flowed out of and affirmed the immediacy of access to God.

The view from below2 There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is that neither bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. This perspective from below must not become the partisan possession of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do justice to life in all its dimensions from a higher satisfaction, whose foundation is beyond any talk of ‘from below’ or ‘from above’. This is the way in which we may affirm it.

He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called his country, one of his worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And, when he weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the projected poem, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like sparks. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges and, among themselves in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes, in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow-men, who once were of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hair's breadth of the mind, what they feel on the trembling on the nerves of a nerve, what they know in their Edenic hearts, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all we know and do not know. The poem is made of these tellings. And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth.

The establishment by the UN in 1975 of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People clearly affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination; and the requirements of a permanent population, a territory with reasonably clearly defined borders, an effective government, and independence from other States are at least arguably as well met as they were in the case of some other entities when they were admitted to the UN as States.

Managing the Neutral Zone: A Checklist Yes No   ___ ___ Have I done my best to normalize the neutral zone by explaining it as an uncomfortable time that (with careful attention) can be turned to everyone’s advantage? ___ ___ Have I redefined the neutral zone by choosing a new and more affirmative metaphor with which to describe it? ___ ___ Have I reinforced that metaphor with training programs, policy changes, and financial rewards for people to keep doing their jobs during the neutral zone? ___ ___ Am I protecting people adequately from inessential further changes? ___ ___ If I can’t protect them, am I clustering those changes meaningfully? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary policies and procedures that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary roles, reporting relationships, and organizational groupings that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I set short-range goals and checkpoints? ___ ___ Have I set realistic output objectives? ___ ___ Have I found the special training programs we need to deal successfully with the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I found ways to keep people feeling that they still belong to the organization and are valued by our part of it? And have I taken care that perks and other forms of “privilege” are not undermining the solidarity of the group? ___ ___ Have I set up one or more Transition Monitoring Teams to keep realistic feedback flowing upward during the time in the neutral zone? ___ ___ Are my people willing to experiment and take risks in intelligently conceived ventures—or are we punishing all failures? ___ ___ Have I stepped back and taken stock of how things are being done in my part of the organization? (This is worth doing both for its own sake and as a visible model for others’ similar efforts.) ___ ___ Have I provided others with opportunities to do the same thing? Have I provided them with the resources—facilitators, survey instruments, and so on—that will help them do that? ___ ___ Have I seen to it that people build their skills in creative thinking and innovation? ___ ___ Have I encouraged experimentation and seen to it that people are not punished for failing in intelligent efforts that do not pan out? ___ ___ Have I worked to transform the losses of our organization into opportunities to try doing things a new way? ___ ___ Have I set an example by brainstorming many answers to old problems—the ones that people say we just have to live with? Am I encouraging others to do the same? ___ ___ Am I regularly checking to see that I am not pushing for certainty and closure when it would be more conducive to creativity to live a little longer with uncertainty and questions? ___ ___ Am I using my time in the neutral zone as an opportunity to replace bucket brigades with integrated systems throughout the organization?

must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign-manual varied exceedingly according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some fastidious persons—but they were exclusively of her own sex—affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty and rendered her countenance even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one of those small blue stains which sometimes occur

Daily: Think positive. Read positive. Listen positive. Talk positive. Affirm positive. Watch positive. Practice positive. Make yourself positive. To

Appendix 1 Our Family's Core Values and Mission YOUR CORE VALUES What are the most important values in your family? Do your kids know these are critical? Do both parents agree on the ranking of values? This worksheet will help you develop and communicate your top values. A "value" is an ideal that is desirable. It is a quality that we want to model in our own lives and see developed in the lives of our kids. For instance, honesty is a very important value, for without it you can't have trust in your relationships. Take time in writing your answers to the following questions. 1. When time and energy are in short supply, what should we make sure we cover in parenting our children? List a few ideas. Then circle the nonnegotiables. 2. What are the "we'd like to get around to these" values? These are the semi-negotiables. 3. What were the top three values of each of your families of origin (the family you grew up in)? Father Mother 1. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. Think about a healthy, positive family-one that serves as a role model for you. What would you say are their top three values? 1. 2. 3. 5. What are three or four favorite Scripture verses that communicate elements of a healthy family? 1. 2. 3. 4. Based on these verses, what are the three or four principles from Scripture that you'd like to see evidenced in your family? 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. What values are your "pound the table with passion" values? What are the ones that you feel very strongly about? (You may already have them listed.) To help you with this, complete the following sentences: More families need to ... The problem with today's families is ... DEVELOPING YOUR FAMILY'S MISSION STATEMENT Besides writing out your core values, you will do well to develop a family mission statement (or covenant). These important documents will shape your family. The founders of the United States knew that guiding documents would keep us on course as a fledgling democracy; so too will these documents guide your family as you seek to be purposeful. Sample mission statement: We exist to love each other and advance Gods timeless principles and his kingdom on earth. Complete the following: 1. Our family exists to ... 2. What are some activities or behaviors that you imagine your family carrying out? 3. Describe some qualities of character that you can envision your family being known for. 4. What is unique about your family? What makes you different? What are you known for? What sets you apart? 5. What do you hope to do with and through your family that will outlive you? What noble cause greater than yourselves do you want your family to pursue? 6. With these five questions completed, look for a Scripture that supports the basic ideas of your rough-draft concepts for your family mission statement. If there are several candidates, talk about them thoughtfully and choose one, writing it out here: 7. Using the sample as a template, your five questions and your family Scripture, write a rough draft of your family mission statement: 8. Rewrite the mission statement, keeping the same concepts but changing the order of the mission statement. This is simply to give you two options. 9. Discuss this mission statement as a family if the kids are old enough. Discuss it with a few other friends or extended family members. Any feedback? 10. Pray about your family mission statement for a couple of weeks, asking God to affirm it or help you edit it. Then write up the final version. Consider making a permanent version of your family mission statement to hang on a wall in your home.

Section 3. Confirmed also by the vain endeavours of the wicked to banish all fear of God from their minds. Conclusion, that the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in the human mind. All men of sound judgement will therefore hold, that a sense of Deity is indelibly engraven on the human heart. And that this belief is naturally engendered in all, and thoroughly fixed as it were in our very bones, is strikingly attested by the contumacy of the wicked, who, though they struggle furiously, are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God. Though Diagoras[4], and others of like stamps make themselves merry with whatever has been believed in all ages concerning religion, and Dionysus scoffs at the judgement of heaven, it is but a Sardonian grin; for the worm of conscience, keener than burning steel, is gnawing them within. I do not say with Cicero, that errors wear out by age, and that religion increases and grows better day by day. For the world (as will be shortly seen) labours as much as it can to shake off all knowledge of God, and corrupts his worship in innumerable ways. I only say, that, when the stupid hardness of heart, which the wicked eagerly court as a means of despising God, becomes enfeebled, the sense of Deity, which of all things they wished most to be extinguished, is still in vigour, and now and then breaks forth. Whence we infer, that this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget, though many, with all their might, strive to do so. Moreover, if all are born and live for the express purpose of learning to know God, and if the knowledge of God, in so far as it fails to produce this effect, is fleeting and vain, it is clear that all those who do not direct the whole thoughts and actions of their lives to this end fail to fulfil the law of their being. This did not escape the observation even of philosophers. For it is the very thing which Plato meant (in Phoed. et Theact.) when he taught, as he often does, that the chief good of the soul consists in resemblance to God; i.e., when, by means of knowing him, she is wholly transformed into him. Thus Gryllus, also, in Plutarch, (lib. guod bruta anim. ratione utantur,) reasons most skilfully, when he affirms that, if once religion is banished from the lives of men, they not only in no respect excel, but are, in many respects, much more wretched than the brutes, since, being exposed to so many forms of evil, they continually drag on a troubled and restless existence: that the only thing, therefore, which makes them superior is the worship of God, through which alone they aspire to immortality.

try:       •   “Today I will not resist or persist.”       •   “Today I will accept others for who they are.”       •   “Patience is a virtue.”       •   “Today I will just observe and listen.”       •   “Today I will trust that everything will work out well.”       •   “Today I will accept things as they are.”       •   “Today I will be aware of the beauty all around me.” I recommend affirmations that personally speak to you. These will allow you to start your day more serenely. If you encounter difficult moments during the day, repeat your affirmations to get you back on track. VERBAL DECONTROL CUES Short verbal cues are another effective way of relinquishing control. When you are faced with an issue and feel as if you are at an impasse, try saying “Release it,” “Let it go,” or “Just surrender to it.” Use cues that personally speak to you. These simple reminders quickly cut through the control urge by changing your focus and intensity. Later, when you revisit the issue, you may find that circumstances have changed.

a Preamble, a Short Statement, Nineteen Articles of Affirmation and Denial, and a more ample Exposition. Materials submitted at the meeting

In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.

Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution.

Affirmations are short, positive statements about you or your life. They might be as simple as, “I accept myself,” or “I am successful in all that I do.” These positive statements are a new way of telling your story, even if just to yourself.

It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle.

Canon: The authoritative list of inspired biblical books. Within a short time after Jesus’ death, the New Testament canon was affirmed by evaluating the Apostolicity, reception, and teachings of books, but ultimately, the canon is self-authenticating, as the voice of Christ is heard in it (John 10:27; WCF 1:5).

And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.

Daily: Think positive. Read positive. Listen positive. Talk positive. Affirm positive. Watch positive. Practice positive. Make yourself positive. To ensure your beingness and attitude are at their best, I suggest you read The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Hal emphasizes the importance of a morning routine that sets you up for success each and every day. Left to chance, perhaps you will have a good day, perhaps not. By creating a morning routine, you can set the odds heavily in your favor of having an epically fabulous day. Why not increase the odds you will have a fantastic day, full of energy, hope and enthusiasm? Success starts with attitude.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Mastery by George Leonard. I first read this book 20 years ago, after reading Leonard’s Esquire article, the seed from which the book grew. Leonard wrote the book to share lessons from becoming an Aikido master teacher, despite starting practice at the advanced age of 47. I raced through its 170-plus pages in a state of almost feverish excitement, so strongly did it affirm our swimming method. The book helped me see swimming as an ideal vehicle for teaching the mastery habits and behaviors closely interwoven with our instruction in the physical techniques of swimming. I love this book because it is as good a guide as I’ve ever seen to a life well lived. A brief summary: Life is not designed to hand us success or satisfaction, but rather to present us with challenges that make us grow. Mastery is the mysterious process by which those challenges become progressively easier and more satisfying through practice. The key to that satisfaction is to reach the nirvana in which love of practice for its own sake (intrinsic) replaces the original goal (extrinsic) as our grail. The antithesis of mastery is the pursuit of quick fixes. My five steps to mastery: Choose a worthy and meaningful challenge. Seek a sensei or master teacher (like George Leonard) to help you establish the right path and priorities. Practice diligently, always striving to hone key skills and to progress incrementally toward new levels of competence. Love the plateau. All worthwhile progress occurs through brief, thrilling leaps forward followed by long stretches during which you feel you’re going nowhere. Though it seems as if we’re making no progress, we are turning new behaviors into habits. Learning continues at the cellular level . . . if you follow good practice principles. Mastery is a journey, not a destination. True masters never believe they have attained mastery. There is always more to be learned and greater skill to be developed.

The intellect by itself moves nothing,” said Aristotle, and modern psychology has affirmed this law. We encounter those circumstances that reflect the quality of our deeper consciousness. In short, we see only that which we are, and it is this enamoring quality of our ego that deludes us about the world. Most people keep running into the same situations over and over again. Some are accident prone; others are eternally fretting about their health; still others make a failure of one enterprise after another. Some lives take on the tenor of an epic tragedy as fate seems to heap one misfortune on top of another. But it is not misfortune that such people are encountering; merely the outer manifestation of the inner working of their own minds.

We also see in these messages and throughout the Bible that while God exhorts us to have faith in Him, we aren’t always going to reap immediate rewards. Life often seems unfair, and even a strong faith is not guaranteed to produce bliss and prosperity in the short term.

. . . the most perfect apologia I ever heard for the cloistered contemplative life. It is contained in two brief sentences. They come from the life of my late Abbott, Dom Mary Frederic Dunne. He would as any antagonist of the contemplative life two short questions. They admitted of only one very brief answer. He would look kindly at the objectioner and ask softly: "You believe in the efficiency of prayer, don't you?" When the person made the only possible reply - an affirmative one - Dom Frederic would smile and even more quietly ask: "Then what is wrong with a whole life of prayer?

Shutting down due to trauma and chronic anxiety are symptoms of the aftermath. It will take time. Small steps are easier than big steps. I just hope you know that a part of you can never be taken and destroyed. It's the same part of you that is still willing to survive and hope. Hold onto that part of yourself and keep adding to it every day. Meditate, adopt a mantra or affirmation, say a short prayer...start small and I have faith you will move onto the bigger actions when you are ready. You have to fight for the miracles that are ahead of you no matter how bleak it may seem now. It does and will get better. The best is yet to come.

And it has these qualities: • It is reasonably short and parsimonious. • It is specific. • It states what the company does and why it matters in a way that anyone can summarize without having to quote it literally. • It avoids jargon, such as “best of breed,” “best in class,” or vague words such as superior, expert, and empowered. • It is affirming, but not grandiose or self-important. • People easily recognize that it’s you.

Cares for Something/Someone Outside the Self “It is the capacity to care — to care intensely about something beyond the limited self — that we seem to find our best clue to what mature individuality is.” —The Mind Alive The Overstreets convincingly argue that, for several reasons, the capacity to deeply care for someone or something forms the very core of the mature mind. First, it slays adolescent ego-absorption by shifting an individual’s focus outside the self, and training that focus on something bigger than the self. Second, it requires the “emotional overflow” of well-developed inner resources, particularly the development of courage, as sincerely caring is underrated as a truly frightening endeavor: “Caring — whether for another person, a line of work, a field of knowledge, or a conviction — is, in a sense, the most hazardous of human experiences. The emotionally impoverished person cannot afford it; for it means choosing to be vulnerable. . . . There is, in psychological truth, a certain terror that is part of the experience of deep caring: the terror of letting one’s self go; putting one’s whole capacity to feel and suffer at the disposal of something beyond the self. No one, it seems safe to assume, who has ever deeply and genuinely loved another human being or a chosen vocation or a social cause or a religious faith has ever wholly escaped this terror.” Third, it is the only way to catalyze one’s full potential: “If the risks of caring are great, so are the rewards; for it is one of the basic facts of human life that the ungiven self is the unfulfilled self. Only the individual who builds a strong, sound relationship with his world can himself become strong, sound, and resourceful: ready for what happens; able to be affirmative and creative in his dealings with experience.” Caring is such a key element of human fulfillment, in part because it provides a non-duplicable source of motivation:   “If a person never greatly cares about anything beyond himself, he has little spontaneous reason to get over the hump of inertia and submit himself to the discipline of a working material or a body of knowledge. . . . an individual’s area of caring and the strength of his caring determine the inconveniences he will willingly suffer and the risks he will run.” Finally, the practice of caring for things outside the self — a process in which the arrows of influence and need work both ways — disabuses you of delusional notions of complete autonomy and control (ideals maturity approaches, but can never completely attain, nor would find desirable to attain); it serves as a visceral, humbling reminder of where you remain (wonderfully) dependent. In caring for some person or idea, you come to an understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness, a “sense of how things hang together; not just the thing itself, but the meaning of it.” As the Overstreets conclude, “the capacity to care — to enjoy richly, love deeply, feel strongly, and if need be, suffer intensely — is, in short, the best guarantee any one of us can have against” the complete stagnation of the self.

Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it. She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.

I am short. I am smart. I am strong. I am hilarious!

So, then, what aid do the mystics offer? Love, the Rhineland mystics say, is “without why.” We love because we love, and there is no answer as to why we love because there is no question. Johann Scheffler (1624–1677), the mystical poet who used the pen name Angelus Silesius, packed a great deal of wisdom into a very short couplet: The rose is without why. It blossoms because it blossoms; It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen. Love is like the rose. The blossoming of the rose is how we love. Love releases the axiological realm by releasing life from its servitude to some other, servile purpose. Of course, we would all love to have our love returned with love, but that is not a condition of love. That is its risk, down on bended knee, heart pounding, hoping for a yes, yes. Love is transformational, not transactional. When we love we do not start by calculating what is in it for us or demand to know what purpose it serves. Faced with the unprethinkability of being and the unforeseeability of the future, love does not ask, “Why?” Love’s only question, the one true question, the question of all questions is, “Is it unconditionally worthy of affirmation, in itself, for itself, without why?” What is truly loved is loved simply for being there rather than not. We love what is intrinsically worthy of our love, prized and appreciated for itself, not for its use value or its exchange value, for enjoyment (frui), not employment (uti, use), Augustine said.

Was it necessary for the word of God to be committed to writing? We affirm... Three things particularly prove the necessity of the Scripture: (1) the preservation of the word; (2) its vindication; (3) its propagation. It was necessary for a written word to be given to the church that the canon of true religious faith might be constant and unmoved; that it might easily be preserved pure and entire against the weakness of memory, the depravity of men and the shortness of life; that it might be more certainly defended from the frauds and corruptions of Satan; that it might more conveniently not only be sent to the absent and widely separated, but also be transmitted to posterity. For by 'letters,' as Vives well observes, 'all the arts are preserved as in a treasury, so that they can never perish, while on the contrary, tradition by the hand is unhappy' (De disciplinis … de Corruptis Artibus 1 [1636], p. 5). This is a divine and wonderful advantage of letters, as Quintilian says, 'that they guard words and deliver them to readers as a sacred trust' (Institutio Oratoria 1.7.31 [Loeb, 1:144–45]). Nor for any other reason are the public laws, statutes and edicts of kings and the decrees of the commonality inscribed upon brass or committed to public tablets, except that this is the most sure method of preserving them uncorrupted and of propagating through many ages the remembrance of those things which it is important for the people to know.

Was it necessary for the word of God to be committed to writing? We affirm... Three things particularly prove the necessity of the Scripture: (1) the preservation of the word; (2) its vindication; (3) its propagation. It was necessary for a written word to be given to the church that the canon of true religious faith might be constant and unmoved; that it might easily be preserved pure and entire against the weakness of memory, the depravity of men and the shortness of life; that it might be more certainly defended from the frauds and corruptions of Satan; that it might more conveniently not only be sent to the absent and widely separated, but also be transmitted to posterity. For by 'letters,' as Vives well observes, 'all the arts are preserved as in a treasury, so that they can never perish, while on the contrary, tradition by the hand is unhappy' (De disciplinis … de Corruptis Artibus 1 [1636], p. 5). This is a divine and wonderful advantage of letters, as Quintilian says, 'that they guard words and deliver them to readers as a sacred trust' (Institutio Oratoria 1.7.31). Nor for any other reason are the public laws, statutes and edicts of kings and the decrees of the commonality inscribed upon brass or committed to public tablets, except that this is the most sure method of preserving them uncorrupted and of propagating through many ages the remembrance of those things which it is important for the people to know.

As to Orphism, it soon blended with the worship of the god Dionysus, who originated in Thrace, and who was worshipped there in the form of a bull. Dionysus was quickly accepted in seventh-century Greece, because he was exactly what the Greeks needed to complete their pantheon of gods; under the name Bacchus he became the god of wine, and his symbol was sometimes an enormous phallus. Frazer speaks of Thracian rites involving wild dances, thrilling music and tipsy excess, and notes that such goings-on were foreign to the clear rational nature of the Greeks. But the religion still spread like wildfire throughout Greece, especially among women—indicating, perhaps, a revolt against civilisation. It became a religion of orgies; women worked themselves into a frenzy and rushed about the hills, tearing to pieces any living creature they found. Euripides’ play The Bacchae tells how King Pentheus, who opposed the religion of Bacchus, was torn to pieces by a crowd of women, which included his mother and sisters, all in ‘Bacchic frenzy.’ In their ecstasy the worshippers of Bacchus became animals, and behaved like animals, killing living creatures and eating them raw. The profound significance of all this was recognised by the philosopher Nietzsche, who declared himself a disciple of the god Dionysus. He spoke of the ‘blissful ecstasy that rises from the innermost depths of man,’ dissolving his sense of personality: in short, the sexual or magical ecstasy. He saw Dionysus as a fundamental principle of human existence; man’s need to throw off his personality, to burst the dream-bubble that surrounds him and to experience total, ecstatic affirmation of everything. In this sense, Dionysus is fundamentally the god, or patron saint, of magic. The spirit of Dionysus pervades all magic, especially the black magic of the later witch cults, with their orgiastic witch’s sabbaths so like the orgies of Dionysus’s female worshippers, even to the use of goats, the animal sacred to Dionysus. (Is it not also significant that Dionysus is a horned god, like the Christian devil?) The ‘scent of truth’ that made Ouspensky prefer books on magic to the ‘hard facts’ of daily journalism is the scent of Dionysian freedom, man’s sudden absurd glimpse of his godlike potentialities. It is also true that the spirit of Dionysus, pushed to new extremes through frustration and egomania, permeates the work of De Sade. As Philip Vellacot remarks of Dionysus in his introduction to The Bacchae: ‘But, though in the first half of the play there is some room for sympathy with Dionysus, this sympathy steadily diminishes until at the end of the play, his inhuman cruelty inspires nothing but horror.’ But this misses the point about Dionysus—that sympathy is hardly an emotion he would appreciate. He descends like a storm wind, scattering all human emotion.

If we don’t learn to separate entertainment from identity and hyped images from real womanhood, our feminine souls are going to pass straight through the shredder. We must stop affirming and reaffirming to ourselves how inferior we are. It’s extremely unhealthy, and in reality, it’s the furthest thing from God’s concept of humility. We’d be wise to take note of how fickle the media is with its own stars and how short lived the friendly spotlight is.

TO EXHIBIT THE Fruit of the Spirit The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.—GALATIANS 5: 22–23 Father, how grateful I am that You desire to live Your life through me. Thank You for conforming me to the image of Jesus and helping me be more like You in every way. You change my desires, needs, habits, innermost goals, and even the patterns by which I operate as I walk with You. Thank You that even though it takes time and intentional effort to change the thinking and behaviors that are ingrained within me, You never give up. Lord, when I read about the fruit of Your Spirit and Your commands about how to relate to others, I am aware of how often I fall short. I want to be as loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled as You are. I realize these aren’t response patterns I can change on my own but that require Your supernatural intervention because they are counter to who I am in my flesh. Only You can transform me inside out so that these attributes can flow through me. Therefore, Jesus, I set my heart to cooperate with You. You said, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15: 5). I affirm that, Lord Jesus. Your life pouring into me is what enables me to live the Christian life and bear the hallmarks of character that are the fruit of Your Spirit. So teach me to abide in You so that Your fruit can always be produced through me to Your glory. Show me if there is any ungodliness in me, that I may repent and walk in Your ways. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for giving me Your Holy Spirit to help me. Thank You not only for conferring Your holiness to me through the cross but also for transforming me into a vessel of that holy life and enabling me to live it. I submit myself to You. To You be all honor, glory, power, and praise forever. In Jesus’s name I pray. Amen.