Day: March 29, 2018

Are we to blame?

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Mike Flemming is to blame for this photo

http://bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law

 

“There are other possibilities that neither hold us hostage to reactive attitudes such as blame nor require us to view others from a position of moral superiority or indifference. We could begin by extending to others the interpretive generosity we would wish for ourselves were we standing in their shoes. Here is Erin Kelly’s eloquent account of what such a standpoint might entail:

While it seems to me that we are not morally required to enter into a wrongdoer’s perspective enough to appreciate the difficulty of the obstacles that led her to falter, the possibility of a compassionate recognition of the reasons for a person’s moral failures humanizes relationships and opens possibilities for understanding, forgiveness, and an honest reckoning with faults we might share.

Which kind of respect would you rather have? “

In some cultures customs become laws,is this logical?

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This photo is from Russia Today.I thought it was the Radio Times for a few minutes

Why  or when should a custom become a law? Why would it be necessary? If it were the custom to eat Christian missionaries in some remote African tribe,ought that to become a law thus ensuring their descendants would cry:
But mother I don’t want to eat a Christian missionary,I want some green leaves and a banana!
And as many of the missionaries were celibate the supply would run out hence it follows that these poor folk would have to build ships and sail to Britain to find some more as they were common here once but now only a few are left in the wilds.
Would you agree that customs might  make bad laws and which of your customs would you love or hate to become laws?

Human words

By Katherine

Words have far more power than we know
We speak with little care and little thought
Hitting human hearts like leaded snow

Thoughtlessly we chatter as we go
Loving silence needs now to be taught
Words have far more impact than we know

On and on in speech we let it flow,
Or by a news reporter we are caught
Hitting human hearts like leaded snow

Some use their words mainly as a show
Meaning nothing, harming those untaught
Words have far more power than we know

When we speak there is an undertow
Like a turning tide well out of sight
Hitting human hearts like leaded snow

Oh, where is there a place with better light?
We did not intend to start a  fight
Words have far more power than we think
Stinging human hearts until they sink

Words of wisdom

 

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I did this using Microsoft Paint on Windows Vista which was a very simple programme
On Windows 10 it is more complex but you have to draw with the cursor which is hard in either case

“It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you”

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“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

All our ethics fled as hate ran loose

The old man stumbles as he sits by me
We were both athletic in our youth
Now we’re wounded by life history.

We sat in pain on plastic sloping seats
London Transport fears  a crazy thief
The old man stumbles as he sits by me

Oh,I would love to sit down by the sea
And let the tide  remove my tears of grief
We’re  each wounded by life history.

Yet we’ve lived three times as long as Keats
The artist soul who died still in his youth
The old man stumbles as he sits by me

My granny  had 10 sons  but four would die
Another  shot in France,oh God on high!
We’re  each wounded by life history.

The genocides and wars unstructured truth
And all our ethics fled as hate ran loose
The old man stumbles as he sits by me
We  wound   and kill  the Others as they flee

 

What is Sacred? by Lee Herrick

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57225/what-is-sacred

Launch Audio in a New Window
I have no idea what priests
dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer
a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun.
I have no more sense of what is sacred
than a monk might have, sweeping the temple
floor, slow gestures of honor to the left,
the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us
what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing.
Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph
you look at over and over again, the one
of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you
did before prayer became necessary, the one
with the sinking cathedral in Mexico City rising up
behind you and a limping man frozen in time
to the right of you, the moment when she touched
your bare arm for the first time, her fingers