On Doubt (doubt can be good for you)
Definition exercise: freewrite for 5 mins. on the benefit of doubt.
Doubt
(Latin dubium, Greek aporí, French doute, German Zweifel).
A state in which the mind is suspended between two contradictory propositions and
unable to assent to either of them.
To waver in opinion or judgment; to be in uncertainty as to belief respecting anything; to
hesitate in belief; to be undecided as to the truth of the negative or the affirmative
proposition; to be undetermined.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)
Doubt 'til thou canst doubt no more...doubt is thought and thought is life. Systems
which end doubt are devices for drugging thought.
Albert Guerard
Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
Clarence Darrow
US defense lawyer (1857 - 1938)
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
Edith Sitwell
English biographer, critic, novelist, & poet (1887 - 1964)
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742 - 1799)
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Gerry Spence, 'How to Argue and Win Every Time'
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?