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There is exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and of gold for wares.
The phases of fire are craving and satiety.
It is in changing that things find repose.
It would not be better if things happened to people just as they wish.
There is, beneath these sharply cut crystals and this frozen surface, a continuous flux which is not comparable to any flux I have ever seen. There is a succession of states, each of which anounces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. . . . Thus to seek with ready-made concepts to penetrate into the inmost nature of things is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it. . . . Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?
One may, with Hartshorne and other rationalist philosophers, press rationality to the point of postulating certain necessary truths for which we have no conceivable alternatives. Or, like Buddhist thinkers of many periods—and like Wieman, too—one may find in the very conditions of contingency a religious significance that informs the whole quality of life as lived. Contingency embraced without any nostalgia or yearning for necessary truth yields a different quality of life than contingency assented to as necessarily so in the absence of any conceivable alternative.
It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is
permanent and God is fluent.
It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God
many.
It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently , as that, in
comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.
It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the
World.
It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.
It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.
Sagan's book gave me much pleasure, a pleasure which was not diminished by Sagan's
unmalicious, even innocent, scientism, the likes of which I have not encountered since the
standard bull sessions of high school and college--up to but not past the sophomore year. . . .
What is to be deplored is not Sagan's sophomoric scientism--which I think I like better than
its counterpart, a sophomoric theism which attributes the wonders of the Cosmos to a God
who created it like a child with a cookie cutter--no, what is deplorable is that these serious
issues involving God and the nature of man should be co-opted by these particular disputants,
a popularizer like Sagan and fundamentalists who believe God created the world six thousand
years ago. It's enough to give both science and Christianity a bad name.
It has frequently been said that feminist theology draws on women's experience as a basic source of content as well as a criterion of truth. There has been a tendency to treat this principle of "experience" as unique to feminist theology (or, perhaps, to liberation theologies) and to see it as distant from the "objective" sources of truth of classical theologies. This seems to be a misunderstanding of the experimental basis of all theological reflection. What have been called the objective sources of theology, Scripture and tradition, are themselves codified collective human experience.
Human experience is the starting point and ending point of the hermeneutical
circle. Codified tradition both reaches back to roots in experience and
is constantly renewed or discarded through the test of experience. "Experience"
includes experience of the divine, experience of oneself, and experience
of the community and the world, in an interacting dialectic.
This stark contrast between the language we use in attending the religious realities, of whatever faith, and the realities themselves should not strike us as strange. Simple acknowledgment of the fallibility of our human forms and symbols should offer precedent enough for insisting that every creature, however elevated or humble, however committed in ... heart and mind to the truth of the faith, stands under the judgment of reality as lived, of reality as encountered in experience. With the use of language, [we] may appropriately grope toward understanding and toward some degree of intelligibility in responding to what meets us in the lived experiences. But, since we live more deeply than we can think, no formulation of truth out of the language we use can be adequate for expressing what is really real, fully available, fully experienced, within this mystery of existing, in the mystery of dying, or in whatever surpasses these creatural occurrences of such urgent moment to each of us.
We live by trust, in part by hope, in part by inquiry, patiently and humbly pursued. And to the degree that these sensibilities of our creaturehood are observed, the pursuit of intelligibility and understanding in [our] faith is a creative adventure full of promise in expanding, sensitizing, illumining, and hopefully fulfilling this pilgrimage of existing. Every other mode of seeking to wrest the fire and efficacy of reality, either by way of sanctioning those who presume to believe, or as ground for registering reality's curse upon those who presume not to believe in accordance with the prescribed language of human forms and symbols, is blasphemous, and carries within its own degree of dementia. And this, I submit, is the judgment of reality itself; not of any human formulation dependent upon the language of our fallible forms and symbols.
When a man firmly believed that if he violated the sacredness of a particular sanctuary he would be struck dead on the spot or smitten suddenly with a mortal disease, he doubtless took care not to incur the penalty; but when anyone had had the courage to defy the danger and escaped with impunity, the spell was broken. . . . Unquestionably the conviction which experience in time forced on all but the very ignorant, that divine punishments were not to be confidently expected in a temporal form, contributed much to the downfall of the old religions and the general adoption of one which, without absolutely excluding providential interferences in this life for the punishment of guilt or the reward of merit, removed the principal scene of divine retribution to a world after death. But rewards and punishments postponed to that distance of time . . . must be awarded not definitely to particular actions but on a general survey of the person's whole life, and he easily persuades himself that, whatever may have been his peccadilloes, there will be a balance in his favor at the last. . . . The sole quality in these punishments which might seem calculated to make them efficacious, their overpowering magnitude, is itself a reason why nobody (except a hypochondriac here and there) ever really believes that he [or she] is in any very serious danger of incurring them. Even the worst malefactor is hardly able to think that any crime he has had it in his power to commit, any evil he can have inflicted in this short space of existence, can have deserved torture extending through an eternity. Accordingly religious writers and preachers never tire of complaining how little effect religious motives have . . . on lives and conduct, notwithstanding the tremendous penalties which are alleged to await.
They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I
had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't
get started right when he's little, ain't got no show--when the pinch comes there ain't
nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a
minute, and says to myself, hold on,--s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you
felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad--I'd feel just the same way I do
now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do
right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't
answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do
whichever come handiest at the time.
As we come to experience the erotic as sacred, we
begin to know ourselves as holy and to imagine ourselves sharing in the creation of one
another and of our common well-being.... We begin to realize that God moves among us,
transcending our particularities. She is born and embodied in our midst. She is ground and
figure, power and person, this creative Spirit, root of our commonlife and of our most
intensely personal longings....
Perhaps the erotic power of God will be most often the dark, woman-loving-women energy
among us as long as we are living under heterosexist, racist patriarchy. If so, it will be this
way for a long time.
Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man
gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The
group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look--it looked better in
the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion
by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western
civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions--good weather, good hotel room, good food,
good guide--be a bore?
Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a
bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You
are in a bunker in dowtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A
medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles
bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of
golden light catches the portico.
Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
Explain.
At first women tried to equalize their place with movement men, but they had as little success as had the Grimke sisters and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 130 years before. Like the pioneer feminists, they discovered that men might fight for equality "out there," but they were not willing to give equal treatment to the women they worked and lived with.
When women in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) wrote a paper entitled "The Position of Women in SNCC," black-power leader Stokely Carmichael remarked, "The only position for women in SNCC is prone." And when women in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) demanded a feminist plank at the 1966 convention, they were pelted with tomatoes and expelled from the meeting.
—Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, explaining that feminists were
treated as second-class
citizens even by liberal and radical men in the
student-protest movement of the 60s, in A History of Women in
America, chapt. 19
Dogbert: How's it feel?
Dilbert: I felt a little slow getting ready for work, but you have to expect that on a Monday.
Dogbert: Today's Thursday.
Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell those stories over and over, until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.
—Chitra Divakaruni, "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," in The Best American Short Stories 1999, ed. Amy Tan
A: California got first choice.
Humanity today is not safe in the presence of humanity. The old cannibalism has given way to anonymous action in which the killer and the killed do not know each other, and in which,indeed, the very fact of mass death has the effect of making mass killing less reprehensible than the death of a single individual.
In short, we have evolved in every respect except our ability to protect ourselves against human intelligence. Our knowledge is vast but does not embrace the workings of peace. . . We study history, philosophy, religions, languages, literature, art, architecture, political science . . . anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, sanitation . . . chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics. But we have yet to make peace basic to our education. The most important subject in the world is hardly taught at all.
Note that Cousins anticipates the more recent aphorism of British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking: "It is not yet clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value."
If there is a conflict between the well-being of the nation and the well-being of humanity, the well-being of humanity comes first.
If there is a conflict between the needs of this generation and the needs of all later generations, the needs of the later generations come first.
If there is a conflict between public edict and private conscience, private conscience comes first.
If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first.
And the little girl had approached the bed no nearer than thirty feet when
she pulled out a pistol and shot the wolf dead; for even in a cap and nightgown
a wolf looks no more like your grandmother than Calvin Coolidge looks like
the Metro-Goldwyn lion.
Moral: Little girls are not so easy to fool nowadays as they used to
be.
Alys and I were married on December 13, 1894. . . . She had been brought up, as American
women always were in those days, to think that sex was beastly, that all women hated it, and
that men's brutal lusts were the chief obstacle to happiness in marriage. She therefore thought
that intercourse should only take place when children were desired. As we had decided to
have no children, she had to modify her position on this point, but she still supposed that she
would desire intercourse to be very rare. I did not argue the matter, and I did not find it
necessary to do so.
Neither she nor I had any previous experience of sexual intercourse when we married. We
found, as such couples aparently usually do, a certain amount of difficulty at the start. I have
heard many people say that this caused their honeymoon to be a difficult time, but we had no
such experience. The difficulties appeared to us merely comic, and were soon overcome. . . .
Since the White Male System/Addictive System defines itself as reality, everything else is
unreal by definition. Since its referent is the external referent, the internal referent is unreal
and nonexistent by definition. The process of invalidating that which the system does not
know, understand, cannot measure, and cannot thereby control is so extreme that large areas
of perception and knowledge are lost. We give the system the power to make the known
unknown.
Most women have had the experience of being in a group of men, saying something absolutely profound, and getting no response at all, only to hear one of the men say the same thing a few minutes later and be immediately acknowledged as brilliant. The woman (who has been made invisible or nonexistent) starts to wonder what she did wrong, or what is wrong with her, and she says little or nothing from that point on (which may be the expected, hoped-for response).
It is very important to understand the process that makes someone or some idea or perception nonexistent, because this is one of the most powerful processes at work within the Addictive System. A primary function of any addiction is to make ourselves and our own processes invisible to ourselves and others. Since the self and the processes of the self cannot easily be measured or controlled, they must be defined into nonexistence.
Whole areas of knowledge and information have been defined into nonexistence because the system cannot know, understand, control, or measure them.
It is incumbent upon us adults, whether we are parents or not, to offer the children of our culture a finer vision of relationships than they can find in the pyramid of patriarchal secularism. I prefer the more horizontal model of "web." This particular model was concretized for me one day when my daughter Jenny and I were walking in the woods. We chanced upon two saplings which anchored a large and impressive spider web. Its lovely pattern sparkled in the early morning sunlight, which caught the dew drops that still clung to its webbed strands. We were awestruck. We humans, endowed with higher-order brains and sophisticated neurological structures, were humbled by the wonderful work of our tiny, talented sister.
The picture of that wonderful creation comes to me as I struggle to understand, and speak about, this rich and perplexing experience of being human. I like to imagine that web multiplied many times over, each duplication in a different plane, all the planes intersecting and all faces of the web connected.
Just as the concept of power in the web is relational, so, too, is the concept of the self. The self's very life springs from the relationality of communal life. Indeed, we live in our web and our web lives in us. Possibilities are not inherent in the individual; they emerge out of the relationality which the self experiences in community. This emerging relationality creates possibilities. Freedom, then, becomes an occasion not for the exercise of self-interest and unilateral power, but relational growth. [Bernard] Loomer puts it well: "We are most free in all the dimensions of our freedom when we enter more deeply into those relationships which are creative of ourselves as people of larger size."
Relational power must deal with the concrete life of other beings, in the richnss of its many dimensions. Those who practice unilateral power have an easier task, of course. For them others exist as stereotypes, fitted into neat categories that mask the very real disorderliness of human life. Those who practice relational power, on the other hand, dive into the disorder; for they know that therein lies the only possibility for authentic relationships. "Power, to be creative and not destructive, must be inextricably related to the ambiguous, contradictory, and baffling character of concrete existence." [Loomer] The person of greater size will be able to recognize that the forces which produce tragedy and evil are inseparable from the forces which can produce good. Such a person will be able to take within himself or herself "greater evil and greater good without losing personal integrity." ... We achieve our fulfillment in the finer relationships we work to create and which, in turn, sustain us. When we engage in such creative work, we sustain our web of relationality and nourish all of life.
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