Tag: Truth
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What, can the devil speak true?
Do you ever have the feeling that you know something so well, understand it so completely, that further discussion is unnecessary? That differing opinions about it are shallow, and not worth considering because they may be misleading or false? Although knowledge is always tentative, and should be open to amendments if new facts come to…
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Truth is truth to the end of reckoning
Truth is an interesting concept don’t you think? In a way, it is an autological word which often prefers to use itself for its own definition: Truth is, well, Truth; it describes what is… Still, there was a time when I thought I understood it as something else -something more…sacred perhaps. But now I’m not…
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When valour preys on reason, it eats the sword it fights with.
Have you ever wondered what it means to be reasonable? Is it actually an injunction to be fair and sensible about something, or merely to change your mind? Is it to consider the merits of whatever is being discussed and arrive at a compromise that takes both sides of the argument into consideration, so that…
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Opinion crowns with an imperial voice
I suspect that most of us, at one time or another, have been tempted to paste our own views over those with which we disagree. Sometimes we might even feel it is not only our duty to correct the opinions but also the people spreading their mistaken beliefs and set them straight. Religious zealots might…
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An accident of birth
For years now, I have picked through the garden of my life -sometimes for pleasure, and sometimes for utility. I weed, of course -the privilege of growing in my aging plot is largely contingent on my having planted it in the first place. Contingent on the purpose for which it was intended. Things that arrive…
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Truth hath a quiet breast
All these years I have been naïve, I suppose; I did not question that democracy entailed giving those governed a say in their fate. Perhaps I was not thorough enough in my analysis of the matter, and assumed that this would be obtained when and if a sufficient majority agreed to a particular proposal. But…
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Nobody in Particular
Why do we believe something? How do we know that we are right? When I was a child, I was certain that the Fleetwood television set my parents had just purchased, was the best. So was the make of our car -and our vacuum cleaner too, come to think of it. But why? Was it…
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The Feminist Egg
Once upon a time, I suppose that one of the characteristics of Age was its hubris. After a certain age, it was easy to dismiss most new things as mere variations on time-tested themes –additions, clever perhaps, intriguing even, but still accretions. Ecclesiastes lived in old minds: The thing that hath been, it is that which shall…
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Sweet Flowers are Slow
It never ceases to amaze me what unfettered minds can discover. Sometimes I wonder how they do it. How they set out 180 degrees from the target and still end up hitting it. Of course, the world is full of answers scattered like flowers in a field, in plain sight for anybody who…