Your Quote of the Day

"Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable."
-- Francis Bacon

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

I assume that Mr King was making a claim to be knowledgeable and owning a fine, superior and conscientious intelligence.

He could have been a good atheist.

Why would you assume so?

Even someone without a fine, superior and conscientious intelligence, let's say a decently educated individual, can see how dangerous a willingly ignorance is.

You might be surprised, tim, to discover how many things you are willingly ignorant of.

What has "good" got to do with atheism ed?

I think that 312 million people having fine, superior and conscientious intelligences would wreak havoc. That 312 million people think they have a fine, superior and conscientious intelligence is bad enough. All of them actually having a fine, superior and conscientious intelligence doesn't bear thinking about.

It seems to me that sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity is a necessary condition for civilised life. But I understand why you would seek to distance yourself from such a proposition.

"It is not how much or how little you have that makes you great or small, but how much or how little you are with what you have."
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

Are you assuming that you have already found your own (to much of your surprise)?

Your bent for twaddle has leaked from the atheism/deist threads into the general threads, spendi. A sign you may be starting to believe your own patter.

Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds.
- Felix Adler

Charles Dickens finished writing "The Old Curiosity Shop" at 4am on January 17, 1841. The story had been in serialization for ten months, and Dickens had been in torment over the planned ending, unable to bring himself or his characters to face the death of his heroine, the all-sacrificing Little Nell:

"I tremble to approach the place a great deal more than Kit; a great deal more than Mr. Garland; a great deal more than the Single Gentleman.... I am slowly murdering that poor child. It wrings my heart. Yet it must be."

Having lived with Nell, serially speaking, for so long, his readers felt the same dread, and in the preceding months they had written to Dickens by the hundreds to ask that Nell be spared. But the legendary testimonials of anguish — for example, the American readers who anxiously shouted "Is Nell dead?" to the steamer captain delivering the fateful last installment to the New York docks — are matched by the scoffs at Dickensian sentimentality. Most famous of the latter is Oscar Wilde's "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." A third category of reader, among them the postmaster of the real village at which the fictitious Nell was supposed to have died, saw an entrepreneurial opportunity. He managed to organize a hoax which was so convincing — details included a faked burial entry in the local church records — that many literary travelers paid to visit Nell's 'grave' in Tong, Shropshire. As in many other tales of this sort, the gullible literary travelers are usually described as Americans, arriving with their copies of the book or china figurines of Nell. Source: http://ow.ly/sGgjP

This was the post you replied to ed---



Give it a go eh? Blurting that nonsense is a waste of time. It is difficult to imagine who you are trying to impress. It most certainly is not anybody in possession of a fine, superior and conscientious intelligence. And, as such, defeats your post which began this exchange.

I am unimpressed with the both of us at this juncture.

What have I done wrong ed? I thought King's quote ridiculous and provided reasons.

I think civil rights had the economic wind in its sails just as abolition did. No twee principles enter the case just as they don't now with the eager consumption of goods manufactured in Asian sweatshops with low standard buildings, diet, medical care, infant mortality and human rights and inadequate compensation for events such as occurred at Bopal.

King set his sails to catch the wind better than others did. He was as vain as vain gets. And the quote you provided proves that.

Holier than thou ****.

The man was goading us to be better than that. He would not have been silent about the way the world's wealthiest working classes are being driven to the same level of poverty as in third world countries. He wanted people of every stripe to get together and resist the economic forces degrading us all. Which is a big part of why the media went negative on him in his last months.

"You may have your way. I may have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way it does not exist."
Friedrich Nietzsche

You make the assumption, ed, that the "economic forces" are degrading us all and that it is "good" to resist them.

When people of every stripe get together take to the hills mate. That's my advice.

A big part of why Media went negative is that it knows that and the hills are not a place any of the higher staff fancy coping with for longer than a tourist visit.

When life in our nations degrades to the point it is heading, more and more rapidly, you just might revise that notion, spendi.

I have no notions to be revised ed. I can swing into sentimental notions in support of, or in opposition to, both sides of such a dispute: with a flick of the wrist.

I can do soft-focus, pink-tinted Ludditism just as easily as I can shove it in the dustbin.

Swallow it whole is my motto. But I'm not skint I will admit.

The theology, as I understand it, is that scientific society turns us all into a greyish plasticity of automata and that the only source of redemption is evil.