In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.
challenge order religion human true holocaust assumptions explanation flood god atheism theodicy
One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.
purpose life modesty time war christianity religion real children parents thought suffering bible kind wrong self-respect attention holocaust judaism questions jesus divine arrogance discovery foolish day jealousy jews quiet public pieces wall false atheist wine suffer things matter martyrdom punishment explanation exile western israel secularism part jewish masochism atheism jerusalem secular theodicy
But some part of him realized, even as he fought to break free from Lupin, that Sirius had never kept him waiting before.... Sirius had risked everything, always, to see Harry, to help him.... If Sirius was not reappearing out of that archway when Harry was yelling for him as though his life depended on it, the only possible explanation was that he could not come back.... That he really was...
life death break free waiting sirius-black explanation part
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
life future meaning transcendence living understanding consciousness patterns escape explanation human-beings freedom hope
Love is an endless mystery, because there is no reasonable cause that could explain it.
mystery explanation
Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.
mystery crazy understand explanation
In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.
life religion explanation theory
There has to be new words to explain new worlds.
life truth inspirational words new explanation worlds
People struggling with life in a fallen world often want explanations when what they really need is imagination.
people explanation fallen
Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.
self-knowledge intuition explanation
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