I slacked off badly this weekend and missed not only the last entry but this one (It's actually the 7th as I write this). Update this evening...

Update: This has turned out to be a bad week so far for art and reflection, but I didn't start this site to make lame excuses all the time... I'm heading to work now and must once more put off the update, but I'll make an extra effort to get caught up tonight.

Update 2: Every time I make a major change to this site, I change the sidebar quote. Last time I nearly picked a line from The Natural History Of Nonsense by Bergen Evans, but it wasn't quite in the form I remembered it, and I wanted neither to abridge it nor to expand the size of the sidebar quote. What I remembered was "Belief is the antithesis to thinking... there can be no thought without doubt." Here is the paragraph that contains it:

From the time of the Peasant's Rebellion on, all true democratic movements have been branded as anti-religious. In part this has been an effort to discredit them, and in part it has been a perception that democracy is essentially anti-authoritarian - that it not only demands the right but imposes the responsibility of thinking for ourselves. And belief is the antithesis to thinking. A refusal to come to an unjustified conclusion is an element of an honest man's religion. To him the call to blind faith is really a call to barbarism and slavery. In being asked to believe without evidence, he is being asked to abdicate his integrity. Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no thought without doubt. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyrrany rests on fraud, on getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

As I read this over again, I'm filled with things I want to say about it, but I keep drawing to a halt, as if it would be a message appreciated by none save the choir. I don't consider PaaT to be a soapbox for my politics or metaphysical beliefs, but inasmuch as Bune will concern itself with the value, rarity and fragility of rational thought, it does apply... I shall need to settle my thoughts before I speak further, however, so I'll come back to this next week.

Until.