Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Pray for Me

“No man can now see his own prejudices
though a philosopher should point at them."
Fanny Wright

My prejudices & biases (beliefs &  convictions)
I can see occlude the one’s I can’t.  Stick  in a
thumb, pull out a plum: what a good boy
am I.

In the mean time: shame on you and you

Now that I'm enlightened about religion
and other matters, I take my pleasure in
trying to make monkeys of the unenlightened
--as recalcitrant and incorrigible as they are.

Always ugly--mission impossible, actually.



Still, I confess--guilty pleasure.
Pray for me

24 comments:

  1. "Miłosz's 1953 book, The Captive Mind, is a study about how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime. Miłosz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much."

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  2. How do intellectuals behave under not so repressive regime?My reason and ratios and rationalization serves my bias/belief mindset which may dictate to the stomach--how much it can take IT itself (mind-set) is impregnable, salved and sealed./

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  3. You have to be in hot water to be clean. There was a coaster in the store with an Emily Dickinson quote: the wounded hart leaps the highest. Or deer. I am thinking of the Psalm: as the deer pants for the water, so my soul, o Lord, longs for you. ( I have sung this in a beautiful Buxtehude cantata.) (Wie der Hirsch schreiet...). How do we think without trouble? Not so well. Man seems to deal with nothing so poorly as with good days. I know my theology so well only because I cannot live up to my own standards.

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  4. Or rather, I know my Lord because he has mercy on the unlovable. Our stomachs churn at lack of mercy.

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  5. Thorn in the side. Pea under the mattresses. Always unease and distress. Existential . Comes with the territory of being alive and conscious. Original spin.

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  6. Luther said he thought it would be best to be somewhere in the middle, not too poor to despair and not too rich to be too comfortable or insolent. As to myself I would love to be comfortable but when I am very comfortable, I get selfish and bored.

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  7. I'm always uncomfortable--but selfish too. Wretch-like-me. Why I never could relate to Carl and his Walk on Water impenetrability and Have-a-good-Day patronizing generosity. Hiss. .

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  8. One can be more or less selfish.

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  9. I'm more comfortable admitting MORE than less--another reason why I don't get along with a "Carl." grrrrr

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  10. I do want to serve. Makes me get up in the morning.

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  11. Service :Thoreau said he wouldn't walks across the stree to save the world and yet is solitary preoccupations indirectly had great impact on the work of Gandhi and MLKing.

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  12. http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-Henry-Tale-Walden/dp/0763618284/ref=sr_1_25?ie=UTF8&qid=1400706491&sr=8-25&keywords=thoreau+henry%2C+children

    Found this in the local library children's section the other day. There are many kinds of service.

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  13. "Stunning illustrations distinguish this lively fictional portrait of Henry David Thoreau, a man whose simple yet extraordinary vision made history — and reminded us that "heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

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  14. Thinking about the tension between lively fictional account and biography.

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  15. So what are your thinking-about thoughts about this important distinction?

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  16. Difference between hagiography, slander, gossip, prejudice and fact. Could be shabby and shoddy. But I am headed for the Rockies. I might have to thank Henry for the parks--or maybe not. Nevertheless, I will raise a glass to him while there.

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  17. You might enjoy Civil Disobediendce if not Walden (both on line) "They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head."

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  18. I choose my prophets carefully. A prejudice.

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  19. Of course. Do you imagine there are them who don't? I've been going back & forth with your hero Bror this morning after he made fun of some Baptists who invited him to their bible study (him,new on the block in New Mexico) He chooses his prophets carefully and don't mind denigrating others (Abomination he says--about Calvinists) So it goes. As you say: a prejudice. And prickly

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  20. He reminds you of you, don't he.

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