Word: causeless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...live in the consequences of that immense ambition; we have seen its results, both splendid and ghastly (space exploration, Marxist utopias). If religion taught faith and the mystery of the Causeless Cause (the ultimate secret, God), Newtonism located human intelligence in a cosmos of magnificently impassive reciprocities, celestial mechanics working by God's infinitely reliable and predictable cause and effect. Perhaps Newton merely codified what we intuitively knew (equal and opposite reactions, for example). As Einstein said, "The conceptions which he used to reduce the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience itself, from the beautiful...
...theologian in us speaks of evil and has the floor when outrages against children are committed. For evil is a concept that blossoms out of the causeless, and crimes against children seem the least explicable of human brutalities...
...afterward "the war continued on and off like a chronic disease." He had passed his university exams when the North won its victory and the Americans flew away, and therefore, as a suspect intellectual, he was sentenced to a re-education camp. Brutality in the camp was casual and causeless; what was learned in addition to parroted Marxist self-criticism was fear, hunger and aching homesickness. Jade and the others trapped rats for their guards' suppers and stayed alive by holding back some of the meat...