Word: precept
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...Shortly after 4 a.m., some 200 followers of Mohammed had seized the mosque, using weapons concealed inside 14 coffins. They demanded that the worshipers recognize Mohammed as the long awaited Mahdi (messiah).* At first, the worshipers could not believe any harm could come to them, since it is a precept of Islam that no blood be shed inside a mosque; by nightfall they knew that they were hostages. Blood had already been shed within the mosque; when several guards had tried to arrest Mohammed and his band, they had been killed. Outside the locked doors, Saudi authorities were baffled...
...late Chairman Mao Tse-tung. the Peking government has embarked on a policy of winning new friends, discrediting and, if possible, isolating the Soviet Union and, above all, acquiring the capital, technology and expertise to transform China into a superpower by the year 2000. Scuttling Mao's sacred precept of national self-sufficiency, China's leader have called for "a New Long March," toward modernization. There are mythic overtones to that phrase: Mao's original Long March of 1934-35, from Kiangsi to remote Shensi province, was the crucible that forged the Communist Party in China...
...which any curious Alice can easily lose her orientation. Definitions of language differ among physiologists, behaviorists, linguists and philosophers, with the gloomy Ludwig Wittgenstein once suggesting that even if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Sapient quadrupeds and "talking" lesser primates could also challenge a sacred precept of Western culture: that man is superior to nature...
...ECONOMIST, the phenomenon is a paradox. Modern societies have become increasingly concerned with distribution--with dividing the pie--when it is clear that the great majority of people can raise their living standard only by producing a larger pie. Certainly, this development seems to contradict the basic economic precept that people desire to simply increase the amount of material goods they possess as their primary economic motivation...
...Bliss proves by example as well as precept that he is conscious of every minute. Reading time for his little book is about one hour-if one can spare the time...