ellauri040.html on line 335: Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, and include assertions that postmodernism promotes obscurantism, is meaningless, and that it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.
ellauri051.html on line 828: 247 The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close, 247 Paska voi pitää sen merkityksettömänä, mutta minä kuuntelen tarkasti,
ellauri067.html on line 581: From early on, Prokosch sought to surround himself with a veil of mystification and cast his life into a hopeless riddle. Approaching his sixtieth year, he boasted that no person had succeeded in knowing him as an integral personality: "I have spent my life alone, utterly alone, and no biography of me could ever more than scratch the surface. All the facts in Who’s Who, or whatever, are so utterly meaningless. My real life (if I ever dared to write it!) has transpired in darkness, secrecy, fleeting contacts and incommunicable delights, any number of strange picaresque escapades and even crimes, and I don't think that any of my 'friends' have even the faintest notion of what I'm really like or have any idea of what my life has really consisted of. . . .With all the surface 'respectability,' diplomatic and scholarly and illustrious social contacts, my real life has been subversive, anarchic, vicious, lonely, and capricious."
ellauri077.html on line 804: Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.
ellauri096.html on line 153: The eliminativist, who thinks that ‘know’ or ‘justified’ is meaningless, will diagnose the epistemic paradoxes as questions that only appear to be well-formed. For instance, the eliminativist about justification would not accept proposition (4) in the regress paradox: ‘Some beliefs are justified’. His point is not that no beliefs meet the high standards for justification, as an anarchist might deny that any ostensible authorities meet the high standards for legitimacy. Instead, the eliminativist unromantically diagnoses ‘justified’ as a pathological term. Just as the astronomer ignores ‘Are there a zillion stars?’ on the grounds that ‘zillion’ is not a genuine numeral, the eliminativist ignores ‘Are some beliefs justified?’ on the grounds that ‘justified’ is not a genuine adjective.
ellauri106.html on line 403: Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn´t stand the complete unadultness — the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he'd come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.
ellauri107.html on line 250: Billy is first the victim of Claggart’s closet, one with similarities to the Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover kinds that project self-loathing onto their targets. Vere’s condition, on the other hand, while containing degrees of benevolence, ultimately emerges as more deadly than Claggart’s. Associating his heart with his hated feminine side, Vere crushes down his capacity for love and compassion with a thoroughly brutal, Night-of-the-Long-Knives sort of intolerance. He, who would never have initiated Billy’s demise, will not permit his own ardor to soften his inflexible judgment, as that would evidently equate with irresolution and weakness. After all, he might rationalize, he is the Captain and the Captain has an image to uphold – right? Forget justice; forget humane treatment; maintaining machismo holds precedence over all! And the tragic result: mindless, meaningless, totally unnecessary suffering and loss on the altar of nothing less than evil itself!
ellauri107.html on line 489: Capitalist ennui at meaningless life
ellauri108.html on line 172: Rastas typically regard words as having an intrinsic power, seeking to avoid language that contributes to servility, self-degradation, and the objectification of the person. Practitioners therefore often use their own form of language, known commonly as "dread talk", "Iyaric", and "Rasta talk". Developed in Jamaica during the 1940s, this use of language fosters group identity and cultivates particular values. Adherents believe that by formulating their own language they are launching an ideological attack on the integrity of the English language, which they view as a tool of Babylon. The use of this language helps Rastas distinguish and separate themselves from non-Rastas, for whom—according to Barrett—Rasta rhetoric can be "meaningless babbling". However, Rasta terms have also filtered into wider Jamaican speech patterns.
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  • If the situation is (question Job, disaster, question God), then God moves. He can either play (Answer to Job) or (⌐answer to Job), i.e. answer Job and defeat Job’s challenge, or leave Job suffering, Job’s challenge unanswered and the creation to collapse. If God plays (⌐answer to Job), God and Job lose, as the evils (disaster) and (challenge) leave Job suffering and the creation into meaninglessness and collapse. Wait a minute, where does Dog answer Job's why-question? In my bible, Dog just shouts Job down, brags, throws wanton threats and explains nothing. In what way does that count as an answer to a why-question? It is a completely different speech act in my book.
    ellauri153.html on line 374: the meaninglessness: s cannot be given an interpretation at all, since
    ellauri153.html on line 381: meaningless systems from pointless evils or evils with reasons from meaningful systems.1069
    ellauri153.html on line 554: Now that the problem of evil has been exposed as a conceptual confusion, the way is clear for a Jamesian science of religions and worldviews. The methods of grammatical description can be extended to the practices and ways of sense-making in different worldviews: how they give meaning to moral practices and how do they approach the intelligibility of the world? What practical responses do they have for coping with evil? For example, the grammar of seeing-as for models and metaphors can be applied to the metaphors in the Hebrew Bible for God’s activity to understand what it is to see the world as God’s creation. The grammar of virtues can be used to describe Buddhist practices and explore, how these approaches contribute to the human good. Similar approaches can be taken to secular worldviews as well. These descriptions can then be used to assess the worldviews through dialogical encounters between them. However, one thing should be clear. There is no point in devaluing the world by arguing for the meaninglessness of life or atheism on the basis of evil, or in giving justifications for evils that can stand in the way of divine or human meliorist projects of fighting for justice. To paraphrase the judgment of the Divine Judge in the Book of Job, such approaches are not even wrong. They are as meaningless as life itself.


    ellauri164.html on line 504: The third and final chapter in Moses’ life is the chapter that Scripture spends the most time chronicling, namely, his role in the redemption of Israel. Several lessons can be gleaned from this chapter of Moses’ life as well. First is how to be an effective leader of people. Moses essentially had responsibility over two million Hebrew refugees. When things began to wear on him, his father-in-law, Jethro Tull, suggested that he delegate responsibility to other faithful men, a lesson that many people in authority over others need to learn (Exodus 18). We also see a man who was dependent on the grace of God to help with his task. Moses was continually pleading on behalf of the people before God. If only all people in authority would petition God on behalf of those over whom they are in charge! Moses was keenly aware of the necessity of God’s presence and even requested to see God’s glory (Exodus 33). Moses knew that, apart from God, the exodus would be meaningless. It was God who made the Israelites distinct, and they needed Him most. Moses’ life also teaches us the lesson that there are certain sins that will continue to haunt us throughout our lives. The same hot temper that got Moses into trouble in Egypt also got him into trouble during the wilderness wanderings. In the aforementioned incident at Meribah, Moses struck the rock in anger in order to provide water for the people. However, he didn’t give God the glory, nor did he follow God’s precise commands. Because of this, God forbade him from entering the Promised Land. In a similar manner, we all succumb to certain besetting sins which plague us all our days, sins that require us to be on constant alert.
    ellauri182.html on line 104: Symbolism appears throughout Yoshimoto’s story. For the protagonist, kitchens symbolize places of contentment, safety, and healing. Mikage claims, “to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul.” When she is despondent, her dreams of kitchens keep her going. She takes to the kitchen and learns cooking as a way of overcoming feelings of meaninglessness and despair; cooking represents her new attitude toward life. Like kitchens and cooking, food also plays a symbolic role in the story. Mikage is constantly presenting her friends with food; her life changes when she takes a job at a cooking school; and the climax of the story occurs when Mikage brings a dish of special food to Yuichi in his secluded hotel room. Eat my shorz.
    ellauri244.html on line 567: Part Four focuses on the period several hundred years after Jonathan and his students have left the Flock and their teachings become venerated rather than practiced. The birds spend all their time extolling the virtues of Jonathan and his students and spend no time flying for flying's sake. The seagulls practice strange rituals and use demonstrations of their respect for Jonathan and his students as status symbols. Eventually some birds reject the ceremony and rituals and just start flying. Eventually one bird named Anthony Gull questions the value of living since "...life is pointless and since pointless is by definition meaningless then the only proper act is to dive into the ocean and drown. Better not to exist at all than to exist like a seaweed, without meaning or joy [...] He had to die sooner or later anyway, and he saw no reason to prolong the painful boredom of living." As Anthony makes a dive-bomb to the sea, at a speed and from an altitude which would kill him, a white blur flashes alongside him. Anthony catches up to the blur, which turns out to be a seagull, and asks what the bird was doing:
    ellauri285.html on line 770: use of different arbitrary parameters would give different positivity ratios, thus the precise values for the lower and upper critical ratios based on the arbitrary parameters, Fredrickson and Losada´s 2.9013 to 11.6346 ratios, are meaningless;
    ellauri375.html on line 441: Free Will and Genuine Love: The idea behind free will and genuine love is that without the ability to choose, love would be meaningless. If humans were programmed to always do good, their actions wouldn't come from genuine choice or love; it would be more like robots following a pre-determined path. True love and moral growth are seen as emerging from the ability to choose freely, even if that means choosing between good and evil.
    ellauri375.html on line 518: Ahha! The meaning of life is not joy nor struggle nor growth but God's unknown plan. I can relate to that. The answer matches the question in its meaninglessness. Why should the future be any better than the past anyway.
    xxx/ellauri179.html on line 197: It could be “the cod of the hunter,” or “the cod of the bullfighter,” or (most fittingly) “the cod of the sea.” It didn’t matter what cod one chose — just as long as it provided rules for living a life of rectitude and dignity in an otherwise meaningless universe. Bets are off about the outcome of a war, says Hem's cod, for instance.
    xxx/ellauri193.html on line 466: London mayoral hopeful Laurence Fox used the launch of his manifesto to defend his right to call people “paedophiles” on Twitter, citing free speech and claiming it is just a “meaningless and baseless” insult.
    xxx/ellauri224.html on line 137: David Walsh of World Socialist Web Site wrote: "The 'hope' now Moore expresses near the conclusion of the work that we might 'get rid of the whole rotten system that gave us Donald Trump' is empty and meaningless, in so far as he continues to support one of the principal props of that rotten system, the Democratic Party. Whatever occasional insights and striking imagery it might offer, Fahrenheit 11/9 is false and dishonest at its core."
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