Abigail Ray > Recent Status Updates

X "we have a right to rejoice when the truth here comes at last some man, and whom is an excellent spirit to whom have been given light wisdom and understanding who can accurately read an original mind, however, and write, however, efficiently, cultured and partially expanded that mind may be and who can say with confidence. This is the interpretation there of."

"But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight."

"The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!"

"Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only 19, to be the counselor of her mother and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all."

"it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. Enemy occupied territory--that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage."

"It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil--an isolated, bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection."

"Nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly... you cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society."

"As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine, but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is love."

"Grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet."

"It is a remarkable fact that on this subject Heaven and Hell speak with one voice. The temper tells me, "Take care. Think how much this good resolve the acceptance of this Grace is going to cost." But Our Lord equally tells us to count the cost.

"The lie consists in the suggestion that our best protection is a prudent regard for the safety of our pocket, our habitual indulgences and our ambitions, but that is quite false. A real protection is to be sought elsewhere in... steady, rational, thinking, and the advice of good friends and good books and if need be and a skilled spiritual Director, swimming lessons are better than a lifeline to the shore."

"The lie consists in the suggestion that our best protection is a prudent regard for the safety of our pocket, our habitual indulgences and our ambitions, but that is quite false. A real protection is to be sought elsewhere in... steady, rational, thinking, and the advice of good friends and good books and if need be and a skilled spiritual Director, swimming lessons are better than a lifeline to the shore."

"We are in fact very like honest, but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax. We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary and we hope-we very ardently hope-that after we have paid it there will still be enough left to live on."

"In a world of empathy-based aesthetics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth."

"Bad ages produce bad poets, and have their decadence and moral decline, reinforced thereby. Virtuous ages, produce virtuous, poets, and have their greatness and moral superiority strengthened thereby, and this intern means that the poet is someone of great political significance, both assign of the moral strength of the times and a means for maintaining the same."

"The prioritizing of the message over the aesthetic is a sign of decadence. Such productions become either cheap pastiches, or simply the hectoring, moralizing voice of the vested interests of the powerful, as were exemplified, he claims, in the dramas that marked the court of Charles II."

"If the state of nature is the ideal and if society corrupts, then the history of society becomes the history of the corruption and oppression of human nature." Which therefore only leads this present generation to be cataclysmic to historical definitions and requires the overthrow of historicity and tradition.

"Rousseau's basic point about nature, society and the authenticity of youthful innocence has become one of the unacknowledged assumptions of this present age. It is part of the social imaginary."

"The idea of the innate innocence of the hypothetical state of nature presses toward a cult of childhood and youth. Whereas in a society based on, say, Confucian, ideals, age is to be respected because age brings with it wisdom the western world of today, generally credits, youth, with wisdom, and sees old age as corrupt myopic or behind the times."

Important question: how can one arrange society in such a way that it sets those terms(individual identity established and recognized) in a manner consonant with self-love or in a way that does not lead to an alienated and authentic self-hood?

"I would show that justice and goodness are not merely abstract words that by reason alone independent of conscious, no natural law can be established and that the entire right of nature is only a chimera if it is not founded on a natural need in the human heart."

"This inward turn, the turn to the individual, gave the individual a value – a dignity – that eventually came to stand as independent of any sacred order or set of divine commands"

"More negatively, we are all then tempted to use the rhetoric of emotivism to dismiss views with which we disagree as arbitrary prejudices."

"Human beings may still like to think they believe in good and bad, but these concepts are unhitched from any transcendent framework and merely reflect personal emotional and psychological preferences. In practice, it is we decide our own preferred ends and shape our ethics to that purpose. Any greater sense of purpose any transcendent teleology is now dead and buried."

"When it comes to moral arguments, the tendency of the present age is to assert our moral convictions as normative, incorrect by rejecting those with which we disagree as irrational, prejudice, rooted, and personal emotional preference that is precisely what underlies the ever increasing number of words ending in -phobia"

Philip Rieff "No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. Their cultures have not survived the third culture notion of a culture of the persists. Independent of all secret orders is unprecedented and human history."

"What this means is that the society itself is an ethical community what it implies is that the individual finds her self-consciousness and being recognized by that society, and this occurs because she is behaving according to the conventions of that society .In short, there is a need for the expressive individual to be at one with the expressive community"

"For such selves in such a world institutions, such as schools and churches are places where one goes to perform, not to be formed-- or, perhaps better, where one goes to be formed by performing."

"-

"-society itself creates through its smothering of the individuals ability simply to be herself this then leads to the second reversal in the world of political, religious and economic man commitment was outwardly directed to those communal beliefs, practices, and institutions that were bigger than the individual and in which the individual, to the degree that he or she conformed to or cooperated with them, found-"