Religious Faith and John Rawls

Extract

The thesis borrows Leon’s idiosyncratic use of a distinction between “egoism,” which is a matter of desiring things, and “egotism,” which involves desiring superiority to other people. Though Rawls defines sin as the repudiation of others—a refusal of the central ethical task of encountering others in Christian love—he treats egotism as the main source of sin. It is not our desire for material things but our wish for superiority to other “people that is the main threat to proper relationships with one another and so with God

I still do not believe that you have gone
I wait is silence for the word  of man
But deadly  rings the knell, an answerphone
I still  cannot endure that you have gone
Now, in pain, I rage against the storm
In the wars of life we cannot win
I still do not accept that you have gone
I wait is silence for a word to come

How to marry an ass
How to faint on glass
How to Honister Pass
How to sign  the cross
How to eat and fast
How to polish grass
How to eat lip gloss
How to type on moss
How to weep and toss
How to call a hearse
How to write much worse
How  to stir a curse
How to be the last
How to lie and burst
How to win my trust

Halfway  lost,my love combined with dread
I  could not sustain life, yet feared his death
He fell, I could not raise him to his bed
Halfway  lost,my love was nearer  dread
I covered his cold body with a spread
For three hours he  lay  like frozen breath
At great cost,my love  held his deep dread
I  could just sustain life ,yet near preyed death

The little words invented as we loved
Now have no other speaker but myself.
Lost, unique,my husband, my beloved,
These special words delighted us in  love
. In my speech , these words no longer live
I cannot use  them, spend our loving wealth.
The chosen words invented as we loved
Now have no other listener but myself

https://www.canva.com/learn/creative-desks/

EXCERPT

So it may be that having a little bit of mess around reminds us that the world is not an ordered and structured thing, but something that contains chaos and unknowns. This jumpstarts our brains into creativity mode and makes us remember that it is OK to be a little bit unconventional and think creatively.

This should show you that you shouldn’t really care too much about tidying your desk, your office, or your room and instead see if there is any creative inspiration there. Whereas being nice and neat and tidy is a good idea for some things – you probably wouldn’t want to have surgery in an operating room with instruments strewn about – for tasks that require significant creativity you should feel free to leave post-its everywhere, books open, and a coffee cup or two lying around.

Continue reading “Black cat” →

Wrath of God

Doris Moansom says:

The Leader thinks the Good Friday agreement was to give Jesus an anaesthetic before he was crucified

Meanwhile Jewish people are warned to stay in  on Good Friday as Christians come out of Church feeling enraged.Not aware Jesus was a Jew

Mary was going to the hospital wearing her new magenta padded coat and an orange felt hat just like the one her mother used to wear when she went to church, although her mother had never had an orange hat. It would have been considered  very bad taste.And with magenta it would give some people migraine
In Mary’s hand was a long green handbag ; inside this  lay her cat Emile.
He was very naughty because he wanted to come to the hospital with her. Emile being a cat will probably not be admitted into the waiting room if she mentioned it to anyone; however ,she was hoping he would keep still.
She did not want to let the cat out of the bag at the wrong moment ,especially when she was seeing a lady doctor.
But the staff are so busy they might not notice that he is a cat and  before he knows what is happening he may be admitted to the hospital and left lying on a trolley in a corridor for 25 hours.
Unlike a human being, Emile is not very patient and he will certainly not lie prone on a trolley all night waiting for the kindness of strangers. As a matter of fact he speaks good English and could easily hold his own in a male ward. Nowadays many of the wards are mixed and would you want to wake up in the morning next to a Tom Cat. That would certainly hit the headlines .
Woman kept for 20 hours on a trolley in a mixed corridor next to a tom cat!At least he is neither a lion nor a lamb.
BTW Theresa May  our ex PM asked corridors to be relabelled as wards and  bathrooms  to be labelled as,
Wards for one with ensuite.
Where will all the other patients be able to relieve themselves…?
Maybe a bucket will serve or if we can walk we can go outside looking for a bush
Let’s pray it is not burning.I don’t want to damage  the Holy by passing water by it.
Though it is only humans who think excretion is bad
We would die without it
And why is Mary at the hospital again?Is it the Vulva Clinic, the Rheumatology or may be Psychiatric Unit where she may get help
The first step will be to give her a book about colour and tell her to get a hat in amore flattering one.Orange hats have never been popular with men.Blue might suit
And so say all of us
Mioaw ,says Emile.He likes hats

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/oct/17/benoit-mandelbrot-obituary

Extract

At the start of his groundbreaking work, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, he asks: “Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.” The approach that he pioneered helps us to describe nature as we actually see it, and so expand our way of thinking.

The world we live in is not naturally smooth-edged and regularly shaped like the familiar cones, circles, spheres and straight lines of Euclid’s geometry: it is rough-edged, wrinkled, crinkled and irregular. “Fractals” was the name he applied to irregular mathematical shapes similar to those in nature, with structures that are self-similar over many scales, the same pattern being repeated over and over. Fractal geometry offers a systematic way of approaching phenomena that look more elaborate the more they are magnified, and the images it generates are themselves a source of great fascination.

Mandelbrot first visualised the set on 1 March 1980 at IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Centre at Yorktown Heights, upstate New York. However, the seeds of this discovery were sown in Paris in 1925, when the mathematicians Gaston Julia, a student of Henri Poincaré, and Pierre Fatou published a paper exploring the world of complex numbers – combinations of the usual real numbers, 1, -1 and so on, with imaginary numbers such as the square root of -1, which Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had labelled “that amphibian between being and not being”. The results of their endeavours eventually became known as Julia sets, though Julia himself never saw them represented graphically.

It was Mandelbrot’s uncle Szolem who initially directed him to the work of Julia and Fatou on what are termed self-similarity and iterated functions. In my documentary The Colours of Infinity, shown on Channel 4 in 1995, Mandelbrot told me how he set about developing his approach: ‘”For me the first step with any difficult mathematical problem was to programme it, and see what it looked like. We started programming Julia sets of all kinds. It was extraordinarily great fun! And in particular, at one point, we became interested in the Julia set of the simplest possible transformation: Z goes to Z squared plus C [where C is a constant number. So Z times Z plus C, and then the outcome of that becomes a new Z while C stays the same, to give new Z times new Z plus C, and so on]. I made many pictures of it. The first ones were very rough. But the very rough pictures were not the answer. Each rough picture asked a question. So I made another picture, another picture. And after a few weeks we had this very strong, overwhelming impression that this was a kind of big bear we had encountered.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/redound-2019-10-07?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=r&file=redoun01&utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=wotd&utm_content=pron

News from the UK:Hospitals expand

I don’t want to live without you any more
I am sad  and  lonely  for your arms
Can’t you tell me where to find  the way back home

Even if I lay down on this floor
I’d still be breathing, which has little charm
I don’t want to live without you any more

If you  can’t come back  here then  let me  know
I’ll  keep the baby living  and unharmed
Can’t you tell me how  to get back home?

Fairy liquid’s green and full of foam
My child has got no father  and no balm
We don’t want to live without you any more

When you went  you left me with  your comb
The baby’s hair is  growing curly  ,tell the Times
Can’t  they show me, find  the way back home?

There may be reason without any rhymes
My eyes are getting bigger than my mind
I don't want to " live " here  any more
Tell me, find me, bring  our baby  home

I wonder what  rhymes with mosquito
They bit me by the pond, I repeat,oh!
They  live near the lake
Yet the water is fake
I reckon they arw Latins,discreet, oh.

I was awake  all  last night ,those bites  itch
I got some wet ice from the fridge
I stood on my hands
As elastic  has strands
A cartwheel is too large for a midge,

The flesh is most sweet on the male
Do not try to kill flying nails
Keep under cover
Don’t strangle your brother
He is either dead or he  looks very frail

No point in committing a  crime
When  you have forgotten your name
Get famous and rich
Then make your pitch
Think  well before we get blamed

I’ve got just one letter
written in your hand
One short letter
I understand,
One is as infinity
compared to having naught.
I’ll keep this letter
In the museum of my heart.
’ve only got  one photograph
and that is  very old
but to me this photograph
is more valuable than gold
Time has thundered by.
Is it now too late?
But may there be a second chance?
Let’s not  accept  love’s fate.
No matter how we falter,
No matter how we fail
Can we still forgive ourselves,
and rewrite this  sad tale.
One more letter,
One more   heartfelt smile,
That will be sufficient
To rebirth a love grown frail.
For once this love was stronger
Once this love was true;
So now we are wondering
If we may create our love anew

I was born at midnight   just before the Nazis hanged Bonhoeffer
Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Before  people knew about the Holocaust
It’s a bit like that now
No, don’t listen to the News, it will only upset you
And whoever is suffering, you can’t help them
Go and read your novel
Make a cake
See if Marks and Spencer still sell woollen jumpers
Invite someone to dinner.
I suppose I’m among  the youngest of the  people born while Hitler was still in his Bunker
And no-one believed the rumours about Auschwitz
Anyway, was it our concern?
No doubt the day I arrived, a lot of Jewish babies died
So it  makes us know that God is not what we thought
That God was a Jew
That he died too, with the suffering ,weak and lonely
What’s God now?
Did we believe only because we thought  he would help us?
Chance is a fine thing
Especially to God