Word: benignity
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...kind of incidents cops deal with, the officers say, range from the exciting to the benign, to the absurd...
There remains one basic, unbridgeable divergence between religious doctrine and Darwinism: according to Genesis, nature is in essence benign. In the beginning, there were no thorns, and snakes spent their time not biting people but chatting with them. Only when man fell to temptation did the natural world receive a coating of evil. But according to Darwinism, the evil in nature lies at its very roots, instilled by its creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection is chronic competition untrammeled by moral rules. Heedless selfishness and wanton predation are traits likely to endure. If these things are sins, then...
...this dark, Darwinian view of nature has its saving grace. True, it doesn't let us imagine some idyllic time when nature was benign and the human heart pristine--a time when, as Augustine believed, human flesh had not yet been corrupted by raw desire and self-absorption. On the contrary, our distant evolutionary past was a time when desire was even rawer than now, and self-absorption less nuanced...
...request, he cut down on his use of profanity. Perhaps I was reforming him! He even told me I wasn't such a bad guy after all. As I started enjoying our e-mail parley, I began thinking of the mean initial e-mail messages as silly and benign conversations starters...
What does this mean for the journalism you get? We believe this question arises whether a news organization is owned by an individual mogul or a big corporation. Either way, the owners have the potential to be benign or meddlesome. Some have a tradition of respecting editorial integrity. Others have ideological biases that they push. A few--private owners as well as public corporations--cater slavishly to their advertisers and powerful pals and seek favorable coverage of their personal causes and business endeavors. Most are bad at covering their own financial interests and dealings. And almost all are commercial enterprises...