Hi. These are my everyday Diary Entries.You may find them interesting, All the experiences I have and the life I live. This is my personal Diary...So my thoughts are my opinions, sometimes they are just allegiances, feelings, Some may be philosophical in nature, some may be a matter of faith
Today, I left my mother to a place on my bike. It was a tense ride and slowest I've driven so far. Even my mom could only heave a sigh of relief only after the bike came to a halt with her still in one piece. I asked her, "Wouldn't it have made more sense to pay 10 rupees, hire a rickshaw and earn some peace?" She said she'd prefer carrying the heavy bag and break a sweat than take a rickshaw
I believe many people think peace is an absence of strife, having no problems, no catastrophes, no troubles or tribulations. Very few people believe peace is also attained as a sum of good decisions. Good decisions that don't create momentary tensions.
My mother preferred carrying that heavy bag in the scorching heat and deafening noise than pay 10 rupees and make a good decision. The consequence of choosing the former also would be to curse the purpose of doing the work, sympathize with oneself, "…what a difficult life I lead", and not being able to do anything cheerfully or with love.
Like everything else, peace comes at a price. I stand here outside a long queue with people complaining about slow service. Sir, please take a little pain to learn how to pay bills online. Wage a war on yourself and your less than average existence. Peace will follow this War
As Ash Wednesday has begun today, I was meditating on the homily of Pope Benedict XVI. He mentions and I quote,
"God created men and women for resurrection and life, and this truth gives an authentic and definitive meaning to human history, to the personal and social lives of men and women,
to culture, politics and the economy. Without the light of faith, the entire universe finishes shut within a tomb devoid of any future, any hope."
All of history has seen triumphant victories and big-hearted losers. What comes to my mind are those countries, or regimes or periods which saw victims, or generosities that had a price to pay. To take one example is the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were massacred. My point is that Human History cannot be a page without being a part of a book. A book points somewhere, it leads to a climax or an end where everything is understood in proper light. Detaching one particular murder on a page makes and reading it independently would make you wonder why such injustice. Our Human histories of War or Terrorism or misfortune, whether individual or historical, should also make us think? Does not it make us wonder that everything loses meaning and is pointless to fight for just a better world, or to have to pay a price, an individual, or for an entire community or people to pay a price for an ideal. Is it worth it just to make a day or two better? Will this human history of people who have died more valiant than others go up as smoke if we are to believe that life is here and now and while you and I are here, let's talk, give and take?
Resurrection changes it all. Human History of fortunes and misfortunes, stroke of luck and grave evil and injustice all can be seen in perspective. There is accountability, there is reward. There is a chance!
An excellent article by Clare O Neil in the Sydney Morning Herald where she argues about the moral, commercial and societal difficulties that surrogacy poses. Here's a snippet
A second, more complex set of moral concerns is that commercial surrogacy could commodify pregnancy, babies and motherhood, leading to the breakdown of cultural beliefs we may not wish to change.
Babies and pregnancy are seen by society as sacrosanct. Through commercial surrogacy, they are given a price, and sold and exchanged much like other goods and services. If we allow babies to be bought, why not a two-year-old child? Should we allow babies to be sold at auction? For many, these (albeit extreme) hypotheticals feel intuitively wrong, contravening a basic belief that some things simply should not be bought and sold.
Here is a very good snippet from this column written by Christopher O. Tollefse called, Speaking Truth to Evil (in Public Discourse), on how certain acts not matter what the circumstance or the good one wishes to attain, is always wrong by the virtue of choosing that object, an evil object i.e (say) murder, Rape, Contraception ect.
Only "Unjustified" False Assertion?
The first challenge has to do with the nature of moral absolutes, such as the absolute norm against murder, or, as I believe, the absolute norm against lying. Hadley Arkes and Francis Beckwith, while seeming to agree that these are moral absolutes, have both argued that absolute norms such as these contain within them a moral qualifier. The prohibition on murder is a prohibition on unjustified killing. Likewise, the prohibition on lying is on unjustified false assertion.
Yet no critic, speaking from the Catholic intellectual or faith tradition, has drawn the obvious conclusion from this that therefore the (absolute) norm regarding adultery is a norm against unjustified extramarital congress; or that the (absolute) norm against contraception is a norm against unjustified prevention of conception. And this is hardly surprising, for it is widely recognized that this is not, in fact, the nature of these norms.
As John Paul II labored to explain, there are acts which, independently of their further ends, or of their circumstances, are wrong precisely in virtue of the object chosen. That object—the form of behavior settled upon by the agent—is incompatible with the human good, including the human being's ultimate orientation to God. Choices of these sorts are wrong everywhere and always. Their objects are designated "intrinsically evil" precisely to indicate that their moral character can be recognized by considering only the object of the act itself (other questions, concerning the gravity of any particular violation, for example, will require attention to ends and circumstances).
One does not, therefore, look to whether extramarital intercourse is being performed at the right time, with the right person, in the right way, or with a view to some good end (perhaps an abortionist will give up his trade if a married woman were willing to be his mistress, thus saving the lives of many unborn in the area). Rather, one recognizes that the choice of such intercourse is incompatible with the human good because of its violation of the good of marriage, full stop. In asserting that adultery is always and everywhere impermissible, then, the tradition does not hold that adultery is "unjustified extramarital intercourse," but that it is simply extramarital intercourse as such.
I have recently taken up teaching a few computer courses. When I plan them, I plan assuming that the student already has some prerequisite knowledge of element A (say) without which you cannot learn element B.
The problem begins when the person has enrolled to learn Course C without having any knowledge of Course A - B. You end up teaching him A - B - C or left gasping for air.
Education is a progression. You cannot jump to Dante or Shakspeare without an elementary appreciation of Poetry neither can you appreciate Plato or a novel if you have not already had patience with lesser books of humble length. The latter are a training for the former. They lead you to it. Without that training, you wither give up the truly noble because you haven't yet been training on those less noble stairways leading up to the great Hall.
Being 15 years Newman's junior, when he died suddenly aged 60, Newman was devastated. "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or awife's," he wrote, "but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine." Some 15 centuries earlier, St Augustine in his Confessions wrote in the same way about thedeath not of his mistress, but of his best friend. "My eyes sought him everywhere, but they did not see him; and I hated all places because he was not in them, because they could not say to me, 'Look, he is coming,'as they did when he was alive and absent."
Newman's desire to share a tomb with St John may seem unusual to the modern eye. Yet Alan Bray in his seminal work The Friend (2003) cites many such examples of friends sharing tombs in previous centuries. Such public commitments to "marriages of the soul" were common in pre-modern times. Bray's conclusion is striking: "Newman's burial with St John cannot be detached from Newman's understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its longhistory."
Reading the final page of Newman's Apologia – lyrically dedicated to all his Oratorian brothers and especially to "Ambrose St John, whom God gave me, when He took everyone else away; who are the link between my old life and my new; who have now for 21 years been so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender" – the writer George Eliot was impressed. "Pray mark that beautiful passage in which he thanks his friend Ambrose St John," she wrote to a friend. "I know hardly anything that delights me more than such evidences of sweet brotherly love being a reality in the world."
Do we – can we – today applaud such friendship? Do we – can we – make room, now, for such"evidences of sweet brotherly love"? Men and women often have intense friendships with members of their own sex, friendships that have no sexual component; yet we are losing the vocabulary to speak about them, or we are embarrassed to do so. A "friend" is one you add to a social networking profile on the web; or it is a euphemism for a sexual partneroutside marriage. Can a man nowadays own up with pride to having a dearand close friend, another man to whom he is devoted? Can he, without itbeing suspected as repressed homosexuality? I fear the answer to both may be "no". And it is hard to know which is the sadder.
My friend and I were asked recently what possibly can be the benefit of learning a language. As my friend and I come from the same school of thought that learning is an asset that everything has to be looked at not as ‘benefit’ or otherwise but as ‘learning’ and knowledge, we began to elucidate.
Soon we ran out of arguments. While we knew taking up any art form, music, an instrument, language, delicacy or culture only enriches and ennobles life, we fell short of convincing people that evening. We begged them to consider that perhaps if they learned French, one day a client would hire them simply because doing business with them complements his growth as they have familiarity with French. We tried other natural arguments that ‘nothing ever is a waste’ or ‘you don’t know when it may help you’
We reached higher planes too and discussions turned more mystical with having us saying that when we aspire for certain nobilities, it imprints on our character and personality a hint and trace of the nobility. We have a part of nobility within us. Our personality is sealed with nobility and often becomes synonymous with it. Our identities find new expression and a breath of life. They manifest because we aspire to reach a higher goal (than usual sustenance) as to indulge in the enrichment of life by yielding to its calling.
Our friends weren’t convinced. I don’t blame them.My own friend in my team acknowledged that what has taken years to learn, with hard perseverance and effort, cannot possible be explained loosely and nonchalantly in an evening soiree and expect to be understood.
But another thing we learned is that often, when it comes to things we cannot touch or explain because they cannot be studied under a microscope but can only be conceived and experienced, it is often the testimony of God in our hearts. He explains to us the value of things because He is eventually the source of all goodness. If we have been attracted to Him, surely we will be attracted and find Him in all things that His beauty manifests in.
And surely, it wouldn’t be wrong to say His beauty has manifested in music, art, sculpture, architecture, nature, Poetry and literature, theatre to name a few. Thus appreciation of these nobilities often presupposes knowledge of God that God fills these things with meaning. These things then manifest in our personalities and give us Life. Surely, anyone who understands this simply understands this by the testimony God creates in his mind as a witness to all things good in the world. But that doesn’t guarantee that we would be able to explain the same to others. Another reason, we cannot fully understand neither God‘s reality nor explain it to others with clarity. Eventually, some things are left as a witness in the heart and don’t become advocates in expression.
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