Advent

It has been a pretty uneventful week, this last one. Anyway, as the saying goes, “ No news is good news .......”.

There has however been a pretty odd occurrence to say the least- I got a few jokes (pretty corny ones, though) from someone who shouldn't be in touch ........ yes, it was from our lady herself!

I wonder why ...... So a fleeting thought comes to mind on which I choose to ponder. What is it that brings about conflict?
The closest that I could come to ( with any semblance to an answer) was as follows : -

"It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies." -Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh

“The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.” - George Santayana, Vol II, Reason in Society

“Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.”
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.” - George Santayana, Vol III, Reason in Religion

To be, or not to be, —that is the question:—
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? —To die, —to sleep,—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, —'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, —to sleep;—
To sleep! perchance to dream: —ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,—
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns,—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know naught of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. Shakespeare, (Hamlet, III.i)

“The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness.”
“Love is a binding force, by which another is joined to me and cherished by myself.”
“Love works in a circle, for the beloved moves the lover by stamping a likeness, and the lover then goes out to hold the beloved in reality. Who first was the beginning now becomes the end of motion.”
“Love must precede hatred, and nothing is hated save through being contrary to a suitable thing which is loved. And hence it is that every hatred is caused by love.”
“Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recalls a beloved object to one’s memory, and makes one feel one’s love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.”
“Virtues are not emotions.
Emotions are movements of appetite, virtues dispositions of appetite towards movement. Moreover emotions can be good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable; whereas virtues dispose us only to good. Emotions arise in the appetite and are brought into conformity with reason; virtues are effects of reason achieving themselves in reasonable movements of the appetites. Balanced emotions are virtue’s effect, not its substance.”
“Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not.”
“Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.... Since movement always proceeds from something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood—namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found.
Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same.”
“To disparage the dictate of reason is equivalent to condemning the command of God.”
-Aquinas, St. Thomas

How could anyone say for sure that he's got the answer unless he “knew it all”? So I must say here that I do not have a monopoly on the truth or the answer. We used all the harvest of teaching merely as guidelines. It is still my conviction that it is dogma that is poisonous to our minds, for it rapes the mind and saps the soul what little truth that it possesses , to fill it with fanaticism and ignorance that sees no reason.