still, the effort to distinguish....

"We are halfway between the lunatic
 and the terrorist.
There is often a thin line
between petty crime
and
Al Qaeda."

    Eric Denece  - french intelligence

what's my line

But if some mind
 very different from ours
were to look upon some property of some curved line
as we do on the evenness of a straight line,
 he would not recognize as such the evenness of a straight line;
 nor would he arrange the elements of his geometry
according to that very different system,
and would investigate quite other relationships
as I have suggested in my notes.
We fashion our geometry on the properties
 of a straight line because
that seems to us
to be the simplest of all.
 But really all lines that are continuous
and of a uniform nature
are just as simple as one another.
Another kind of mind
which might form an equally clear mental perception
 of some property of any one of these curves,
 as we do of the congruence of a straight line,
might believe these curves to be the simplest of all,
and from that property of these curves
build up the elements of a very different geometry,
 referring all other curves to that one,
 just as we compare them to a straight line.
 Indeed, these minds,
 if they noticed and formed an extremely clear perception
 of some property of, say, the parabola,
would not seek, as our geometers do,
to rectify the parabola,
 they would endeavor,
if one may coin the expression,
to parabolify the straight line.

roger joseph boscovich sj

Ah!

the awareness of God
when it comes
so often strikes me as a sense
of finding myself returned
to a place that i had forgotten about
a sense of suddenly finding myself
in the presence of a great love
that i had forgotten was available to me
i find myself saying
"i missed you"
even though i had not been aware
until that very moment
that i was missing anything





   -larceny at it's finest

21st century mandate

strange warriors chanting


We strongly condemn
the use
of any violence
in connection
with protest
against abortion.

  -found on a trailer to a disturbing movie

what was the substitute?

Where an exclusive humanism was undoubtedly available was in Epicureanism.
And it is no surprise that Lucretius
was one of the inspirations for explorations
in the direction of naturalism,
e.g., with Hume.

But Epicureanism just as it was
couldn’t really do the trick.
 It could teach us to achieve ataraxia
by overcoming our illusions about the Gods.
But this wasn’t what was needed for a humanism
which could flourish in the modern context.
For this was becoming one
 in which the power to create moral order in one’s life
 had a rather different shape.
It had to include the active capacity to shape and fashion our world,
natural and social; and it had to be actuated by some drive to human beneficence.
To put this second requirement
in a way which refers back to the religious tradition,
modern humanism, in addition to being activist and interventionist,
had to produce some substituted for....

 agape' .

  - Charles Taylor   (canadian thinker)