What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.
If we think of death in Wedge terms, our assured demise is the ultimate stressor, and thus our motivation to make choices that mean something. Death is the stake that all of us are born with. No matter our triumphs or failures, death will always be waiting. With the end inevitable, it’s only our choices that matter. In other words, life is the wedge between birth and death.
Suffice it to say, breath is the most basic wedge—one that that we’re all born with.
Freedom, which is theoretically only a methodological tool [in liberalism], becomes a positive value; and as such it is equated with other things made into positive values—e.g., the exclusion of “exclusionary” religions promotes a secularist othodoxy; the exclusion of exclusionary philosophies promotes a pragmatic orthodoxy; the exclusion of exclusionary political systems promotes a democratic orthodoxy. No amount of verbal play will keep these “procedural” bans from taking on a positive coloration of orthodoxy in a supposedly value-free system.
Thus I would expect (or hope) that a future religion would transcend tribalism and take a more cosmic stance, expounding a universalist teaching that offers abundant spiritual succor and moral support without having recourse to the Grand Inquisitor’s miracle, mystery, and authority. An inkling of such a teaching is perhaps to be found in the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching.
Philosophy in this book [Speculum Mentis] is crowned queen of the sciences; art, absolutely necessary to us as the first vehicle of explanation of ourselves to ourselves, cannot get beyond its own contradictions, standing as it is athwart our intuition of the world and our expression of our feelings about it (which is which, for heaven’s sake?), defying us to tell the difference between imagined circumstances and our substantive thought.
Sucrose, the chemical name for the subject of this book, is one of three common disaccharides. It is made up of one unit of glucose joined to one unit of fructose. When digested, a mixture of equal amounts of glucose and fructose, called "invert sugar," is produced. There is reason to believe that it is the fructose part of sucrose that is responsible for many of the undesirable effects of sucrose in the body.
N.B. This book was first published in 1972 & re-issued in 2013 with a foreword by Dr. Robert H. Lustig; update with Gary Taubes's The Case Against Sugar (2016).
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