21
" Either god exists or it doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, it either interacts with the universe in some detectable way or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that god is indistinguishable from a non-existent god. That only leaves a god who interacts with the universe in some detectable way. But if science, which is the greatest realization of the use of our senses to, you know, detect things, hasn’t found this god, that doesn’t say much for individuals.
In short, the god you’ve created is, in fact, undetectable by science. The limits of science are not the province of religious knowledge. Where science is ignorant, so is religion. The only difference is that religion lacks the integrity of science. "
― Matt Dillahunty
22
" I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself. "
26
" There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.
I am referring here to romantic love, in the serious meaning of that term—as distinguished from the superficial infatuations of those whose sense of life is devoid of any consistent values, i.e., of any lasting emotions other than fear. Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.
Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism—in terms of human suffering—is the belief that love is a matter of “the heart,” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. Love is the expression of philosophy—of a subconscious philosophical sum—and, perhaps, no other aspect of human existence needs the conscious power of philosophy quite so desperately. When that power is called upon to verify and support an emotional appraisal, when love is a conscious integration of reason and emotion, of mind and values, then—and only then—it is the greatest reward of man’s life. "
― Ayn Rand , The Romantic Manifesto
27
" You have always been my only muse. I cannot paint or sculpt. I have only my words to render your likeness. Sometimes I wish I were both God and Adam so I could tear out my rib and create you from my own flesh. I would say I’d create you from my heart, but I gave that to you when you left me. But that’s a cliché, isn’t it? Sadly, that’s all I have these days. The whole story is a cliché. I desired you. I ate of you. I lost you. That ancient story – older than the Garden, old as the Snake. I would have liked to call this story of ours The Temptation but the word temptation, once the province of pious theologians, has now been co-opted by every third second-rate romance novelist. And although I loved you, my beautiful girl, this is not a romance novel. "
― Tiffany Reisz , The Siren (The Original Sinners, #1)
32
" Cathy smiled back ‘Rules were meant to be broken.’
‘Don’t disagree,’ Oversteegen replied immediately. ‘Indeed they are. Providin’, however, that the one breakin’ the rules is willin’ t’ pay the price for it, and the price gets charged in full. Which you were, Lady Catharine. I saluted you for it then–at the family dinner table that night, in fact. My mother was infinitely more indisposed thereafter; tottered back t’ her bed cursin’ me for an ingrate. My father was none too pleased either. I salute you for it, again. Otherwise, breakin’ rules becomes the province of brats instead of heroes. Fastest way I can think t’ turn serious political affairs int’ a playpen. A civilized society needs a conscience, and conscience can’t be developed without martyrs—real ones—against which a nation can measure its crimes and sins. "
― David Weber , Crown of Slaves (Honorverse: Wages of Sin, #1)
34
" Today pluralism operates as a court religion, while having less and less intellectual credibility. Betraying the plastic terminology in which its directives are framed are the additions to the “Human Rights Code” passed in the Canadian province of Ontario in 1994. The Code cites “human dignity” to justify the criminalization of “conduct or communication [that] promotes the superiority or inferiority of a person or class because of race, class, or sexual orientation.” The law has already been applied to prosecute scholars making hereditarian arguments about social behavior, and its proponents defend this muzzling as necessary for “human dignity.” But never are we told whence that dignity is derived. It is certainly not the one to which the Bible, a text that unequivocally condemns certain “sexual orientations,” refers. Nor are we speaking here about the dignity of nonengineered academic discourse, an act that the supporters of the Ontario Human Rights Code consider to be criminal if judged insensitive. Yet the pluralist advocates of human rights codes that now operate in Canada, Australia, England, and on the European continent assume there is a human dignity. Indeed this dignity is so widely and passionately accepted, or so it is asserted, that we must criminalize unkind communication. In the name of that supposedly axiomatic dignity, we are called upon to suppress scholarship and even to imprison its authors. "
― Paul Edward Gottfried , After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
35
" Kissing gave a man all sorts of immoral ideas. Such ideas were, in Madame Hera's world, the province only of men. That Ainsley herself had had ideas - her mind boggled, trying to imagine what Madame would say to that. In fact, those very ideas cropped up in several of the letters Felicity had forwarded to her, variously referred to as 'unnatural desires,' 'longing,' 'carnal stirrings,' fever of the blood,' 'indecent thoughts' and even, memorably, 'an irrepressible need to scratch an itch. "
36
" . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658 "
38
" What’s in an Orange?
Cuba has encouraged foreign investments in agriculture. The Cuban citrus industry was started during the 1960’s to supply the former Soviet Union, as well as other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, with oranges and grapefruit. After the economic crash and the restructuring of the Soviet Union, the demand for citrus crops fell off by about half. In 1994, the National Citrus Corporation was founded in Cuba, and is now known as the “Fruit Trees Enterprise Group.” It consists of 13 nationally owned citrus enterprises, a commercial company and 4 processing plants. Cítricos Caribe S.A. has three cold storage facilities and exports to contracted foreign vendors. A Chilean venture and a Greek-British consortium, both affected by the decline of demand, halted their operations in 2014. However an Israel company has successfully developed huge citrus and tropical fruit plantations on the island, with most of their crops being sold in Europe. Israeli orange groves stretch for miles in the Matanzas Province, east of Havana. The province known chiefly for its white sandy beaches and resorts also has the massive BM Corporation, based in Tel Aviv, operating huge citrus groves and one of its packinghouses there. Its modern processing factory is located in the middle of 115,000 acres of groves. It is known as the world’s largest citrus operation.
Read the award winning bock that is at all the US Military Academies, "
― Hank Bracker
