And Kafka’s The Trial is a great book. — Dermot Griffin
1. What is not? Everything that has not yet actualized its potential. Most viscerally, me.
2. What is meontology? The study of unmediated experiences of lack and privation. This study inaugurates self-critique and the realization that I live in a moment best described as not-yet. I thereby begin my path toward human perfection and toward God.
3. How do I live in this not-yet? In manic desire for what appears to me to be stable, for what displays a comfort in its own skin that I have never experienced. For you.
4. What is the effect of this desire? In the hope against hope that my desire will come to fulfillment, I keep you in mind, near me. I take care of you and work to engender political reforms that allow our conversation and relationship to perdure. I act to delay your death – even, perhaps, if this contributes to the skyrocketing proportion of the GDP taken up by the cost of medical care – and the death of your friends, and their friends, ad infinitum. In these brief moments when I break free of my narcissistic chains, I act messianically and redeem the world that is responsible for your suffering and your death, which will always be premature for me. I engender a world that my tradition (and perhaps yours) says God engenders, and I articulate my resemblance to God.
This argument makes a long journey from Athens to Jerusalem. It moves from a philosophy of nonbeing to the passionate faith in a redeemer still to come ... whom I represent. Indeed, the notion of a redeemer to come – the difference between Judaism and Christianity – cannot be defended without turning back to the analysis of nonbeing in the Greek philosophical tradition. Without Athens, Jerusalem (Judaism) risks being unable to articulate the meaning of its own religious practices, becoming no more than a set of customs divorced from their ultimate source, a sedimented series of rote actions that can create an identity for its practitioners only through the profane category of “culture.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory Palamas, St. John of the Cross, John Wesley, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, St. John Henry Newman, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Jacques Maritain, Edith Stein, Fulton Sheen, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Martin Buber, Maimonides, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Lossky, Sergei Bulgakov, Richard Swinburne, David Bentley Hart, Psuedo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, and Kitaro Nishida. — Dermot Griffin
confront "the divine" — 180 Proof
God has a lot of explainin' to do, ja — Agent Smith
No, Agent my love. It's us who should explain. The apology should be ours. BTW, you roll the cigarettes yourself? — EugeneW
Why would we need to do the explaining? — Agent Smith
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. — William Kingdon Clifford
The pansy serves as the long-established and enduring symbol of free thought; literature of the American Secular Union inaugurated its usage in the late 1800s. The reasoning behind the pansy as the symbol of free thought lies both in the flower's name and in its appearance. The pansy derives its name from the French word pensée, which means "thought". It allegedly received this name because the flower is perceived by some to bear resemblance to a human face, and in mid-to-late summer it nods forward as if deep in thought. — Wikipedia
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