--- Kendall Clark <kendall at monkeyfist.com> wrote:
> Sorry, that doesn't clarify what you mean, in my
> view. At any rate,
> whatever you mean by 'sacred', the view that Singer
> argues against
> seems rather different, so it's probably moot.
Kenall, you are right. I was not very clear. Actually I mean something very simple. I live as if there is no God above and that life does not point to anything outside of itself. In other words, I am not living for a better hereafter, or for a future reincarnation, or even to end all incarnations in nirvana. So this life is all there is, and I try to live it well, get into it (not flee from it or deprecate it as some adumbration of a platonic higher sphere). So for me, my life (and other lives) are precious, are sacred. Is that clearer?
As so often, Nietzche is the Minister of my church ;) as in the following statement:
The greatest weight -- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness
and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable
times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and
everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence
-- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass
of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you
once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I
heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps
crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?"
would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself
and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage http://sports.yahoo.com/