Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What are these "psychological laws of human behavior" [TIME, April 11 et seq.] upon which Professor Stace et al. claim morality can be based? Why cannot these laws be altered by the individual to suit himself, if they themselves are not grounded in a deeper reality? If charity has no reality except as a pragmatic mode of behavior, an individual could logically devise his own morality when his good appears to conflict with society's good. It then becomes a matter of who has the best opportunity and the most power...
...Mary was nothing less than God himself, she writes, demonstrates that God "had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair . . . He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience . . . He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while...
...Incarnation may be hailed as revelation or dismissed as rubbish, but, says Dorothy Sayers, it cannot be called dull. "That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God . . . is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as News...
Weinbaum began manufacturing his stories during the early '30s. He populated Mars with clever, ostrichlike creatures who could learn snatches of human speech. On Jupiter's moon, lo, he placed giggling "loonies," dimwits with balloon-shaped heads and five-foot necks-not to mention six-inch "slinkers," nasty pests that looked like black rats wearing capes. Science fictioneers credit Weinbaum with two important contributions to their field. Where predecessors had concentrated on gadgetry and ordinary men, he tried to create characters for his non-human aliens, tried to weave his doughpots and other planetary faunas into his plots...
...reader who reads science fiction dispassionately is likely to be struck by how closely the human imagination is tied to reality, even when it deliberately sets out to violate it. Stanley Weinbaum's loonies and slinkers have been seen before. The shapes may be different, but his dream-beasts come startlingly close to what the human race has been running across, for a good many years, in its childish nightmares...