The Concept Of Prayer

Tucson Weather Today

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"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
--Mark Twain


The Folly Of Prayer

Is prayer ever answered? Of course not. In fact, religious and philosophical objections to the very study of prayer's efficacy exist. Many interpret Deuteronomy 6:16 "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test"to mean that prayer cannot, or should not, be examined.

The fact is, God never answers any prayers. The entire idea that "God answers prayers" is an illusion created by human imagination.

source:

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
--Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

(Mark Twain)

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I have been paying attention to some of the words being bandied about by some of the interviewed GOP candidates and it seems to me that their high-flown rhetoric contains many 50-cent words, of which the actual meaning they quite evidently do not correctly comprehend.

One of those words is:

existential [eggz-is-TEN-shul]
adjective
1. of or relating to existence.
2. concerned with existence, especially human existence as viewed in the theories of existentialism.
3. (of a proposition) affirming or implying the existence of a thing.

Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject -- not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.

Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher, though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual -- not society or religion -- is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically").

Existentialism


"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." 
--Mark Twain

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Did You Know . . .?

Macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs.

Ingestion of macadamia nuts by dogs has been associated with a nonfatal syndrome characterized by vomiting, ataxia, weakness, hyperthermia, and depression. Dogs are the only species in which signs have been reported.

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WORD FOR TODAY

apparatchik [ah-pah-RAH-chik]
noun
1. a member of a Communist apparat
2. an official or bureaucrat in any organization


"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
--Mark Twain

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This Is Who I Am