"The author of the Political Justice took abstract reason for the rule of conduct, and abstract good for its end. He places the human mind on an elevation, from which it commands a view of the whole line of moral consequences; and requires it to conform its acts to the larger and more enlightened conscience which it has thus acquired. He absolves man from the gross and narrow ties of sense, custom, authority, private and local attachment, in order that he may devote himself to the boundless pursuit of universal benevolence. Mr Godwin gives no quarter to the amiable weaknesses of our nature, nor does he stoop to avail himself of the supplementary aids of an imperfect virtue. Gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way, not that they may be merged in the opposite vices or in want of principle; but that the void may be filled up by the disinterested love of good, and the dictates of inflexible justice, which is the "law of laws and sovereign of sovereigns". All minor considerations yield, in his system to the stern sense of duty, as they do, in the ordinary and established ones, to the voice of necessity."
-William Hazlitt on William Godwin.
It is not complimentary to the masses that they are so easily led, but we are not interested in praising or blaming; we are concerned for truth, and the truth is that for better or for worse religious people follow leaders. A good man may change the moral complexion of a whole nation; or a corrupt and worldly clergy may lead a nation into bondage.... -AW Tozer
Why, we didnt need sociology or HR; we needed anthropology. We needed the symposium when we had chosen the ampitheater, and the stoa when we had chosen the cinema varete of streaming enigmatically prolific and abundant data--lifetimes of it. It had come across that SQL remote pull sessions costed hundreds of dollars from disinterested third parties; they had free trial periods, but it was so off putting as to make one forget and yearn for the server-in-the-bathroom of yesteryear.
I wotted a kind of netherworld, a space of odd gravity pockets, where spoken words were not heard, they found no purchase, but the thunk word was far more substantive, it lived and breathed like a monster created in secret, but on the escape and quite frankly, running amok.
I had fallen in with an institute of higher learnings, talking of self-evident objective truths, self-evident good, and so forth, but they would spam me talking about various sins of Mrs Bacon, and the high virtues of Anne Hathaway, how MSNBC set out to renovate culture by uprooting the whole thing, a stripmining of objective good to encapsulate spores on the winds. Indeed, I wondered how the organization line devolved and coalesced from outling Plato to soapboxing for political movements.
"He has a nice smile" but so do lawn gnomes.
Of that, I had hit on a line in Romans 15, about "receiving others as Christ received you". I thought of the magnitude of that, how that went beyond even Christ's own words of loving others, this put it in perspective, Paul saying to use the standard of Christ. Christ's love sacrificed for the good of others, not just being socially kind to people, but really getting in there, man, and doing a good turn above and beyond.
As Christ did?
He was even more than willing to lay down his own life.
What if all those ppl you knocked down fell into your pathway forward?
Remember, the universe cleans itself, and karma is a great wheel that will eventually make a full rotation: it will all come back around.
And if you won't be good to yourself, could you reasonably expect others to be good to you, in turn?
Like even, if pressed, some venison meatballs in the pasta sauce, and me, the American, getting told that there is in fact something of just pasta in pasta sauce, but then there's meat sauce. And other stuff.
But again, not as I would, but as God would that I would do, for that which I would do, I should do not, and that which I kick against the pricks, was probably where I should be in the first place, without all the caterwauling.
Even the most unworkable dreams have a kind of pull, that magnetism that dreams have, where you can't wake up, and you might feel anxiety, but its like, in your own head, you're watching tv. Of TV, during Gunsmoke I roused and lit one wondering what in the hades had happened the prior day, like I didn't know, but you know, unworkable dreams, and the salient saccharine daydreams of stuff that really won't happen, but you kinda would like that instead, and hell, I just don't know.
In any confrontation, there is either intimidation or inspiration. You choose how you react: whether to cower or rise to the occasion. We can become complacent in our dictums, and we become lazy, we can become slaves to our circumstances. We can react with hostility, defensiveness, envy, and maybe even fear.
Do we regroup and come back better, or do we hide under the porch, my friends? An orphan became the Emperor of most of the known world. He said in his private journal that he retained the mindset to react to anything, not by whim or instinct, but reflectively, that he could choose how to react.
Our modern leadership guru wants us to be lions, but even the lion's great majesty is just an image, for the lion is a scavenger, an opportunist. How much of that should we employ?
Certainly we should take advantage of circumstance, when our principles are observed.
Should we lapse into complacency at the expense of core business? Do we spend the work day dreaming of some turn of luck that affords the purchase of daydreams?
Neigh. We work and dream, too, but we can't stop work to dream, nor can we afford to neglect our dreaming for work.
We might miss stray currents and less beneficial aspects by staying to the center.
Count the stars or drop shafts beneath the crust of the earth, we do, but understand mankind?
Why, it was otherwise, "as flies unto wanton boys are we to the gods"/this Bud's for you! and it was kind of a twiddle widdle play purdy kind of microwaving under a hard glare of pallid indifference, and for all it was, this humanity thing, a scholastic undertaking, but for breathing hard enough, a kind of puff of boredom, such that it could snap the wings right off a butterfly.
In my being birthed a proletariat, I but smelt the earth, time to time, at my fingers, poo on my shoes, cuticles bloody rosettes, and I came to prefer as it were, not to "taste the barrel", but to enjoy the grape, which meant to me I would have the more convenient single man's screw-on aluminum cap rather than the more effete cork.
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