The Christian message has a moral challenge. If the message is true, the moral challenge has to be accepted. So God is not a fit object for man’s detached scrutiny. You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say “How interes...
The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recal...
Beyond egoistic interests there is no goodness. If one decides to do some good thing, of course according to his ideal of goodness, it must be connected to his Ego consciously or unconsciously. One of noble motives that triggers to do goodness is emp...
Lavender Brown: [runs into the hospital wing, after Ron's been poisoned] Where is he? Where's my Won-Won? Has he been asking for me? [sees Hermione sitting next to Ron's bed] Lavender Brown: What is she doing here? Hermione Granger: [stands] I might ...
The first verse that comes to mind that refutes all of Calvin’s points is “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Whoever means whoever. Not just some, not just the elect; that means that anyone who wants to come to God and repe...
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the...
Coffee and humanity both sprang from the same area in eastern Africa. What if some of those early ape-men nibbled on the bright red berries? What if the resulting mental stimulation opened them up to a new way of looking at old problems, much as it d...
...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice--that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expec...
It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play...
It should be apparent that the belief in objectivity in journalism, as in other professions, is not just a claim about what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in ...
When we consider further the social and psychological roots of the collective urge to kill the world, we are likely to see more of ourselves in it and to begin to think of such groups as something of a dark "cultural underground" of our own society. ...
We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It’s why you sti...
Due to their soft bodies and ephemeral nature, it is unlikely that biological evidence of mushrooms will even be discovered in the archaeological record. This fact poses certain difficulties in determining the antiquity of modern cultural uses of psy...
If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . . No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of school...
..the struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermin...
Group membership can modify individuals' perceptions of themselves. Unable to separate their personal introspection from the ways they believe other people perceive them, teenagers may have what psychologists call an "imaginary audience", meaning tha...
The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group's opinion trumps the individual's before he even becomes aware...
I looked deeply into the fire, and the timeless, eternal dance of colors I saw there was so beautiful, I wanted to cry. Cal's deep voice floated toward me as clearly as a whisper in a tunnel, as if his words were meant for me alone, and the found me ...
My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the l...
In 1935, when there were no other programs, the founders of AA, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, stepped up to the plate and took action to help a crippled population. All credit for the establishment of their wonderful, life-saving group goes to th...
When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the be...
