Word: profound
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Whatever shape NASA's future missions take, for now the attention of the agency and the world is on Pathfinder. The data it will be sending back this week may help us understand better that most profound of all mysteries: Did life ever exist anywhere else in the cosmos? Already Pathfinder has revived morale in the global space community. More important, it continued the only known cultural-exchange program anywhere in the cosmos. Mars and Earth, after all, have been throwing rocks and machines at each other for eons. Last summer an ancient Martian meteorite gave the creatures of Earth...
...heirs of the Forty-Niners, the newly liberated telecommuters and mutual-fund-toting retirees and boat people homesteading in Garden City, Kans., writing a Vietnamese-language instruction manual for Windows 95 and declaring with a smile, "We are searching for freedom"--delighted by both the cliche and the profound truth behind...
...today of all days, let us not forget that behind each medal and ribbon, there is a story of heroism yes, but also profound sadness; for World War II was not a good war. From North Africa to Salerno, from Normandy to the Bulge to Berlin, an entire continent lost to fascism had to be taken back, village by village, hill by hill. And further eastward, from Tarawa to Okinawa, the death struggle for Asia was an assault against dug-in positions, surmounted only by unbelievable courage at unbearable loss...
...would work this hard to hash out such an enthrallingly elaborate belief system--the human imagination is depthless, the anthropologists point out--if more profound needs weren't being met as well. At its core, the Myth is a secular way to give the universe meaning, and humanity a renewed place at the head of the table: not only are we not alone, not only are the skies populated by superhuman beings, but their visits here are prima facie evidence that we are of some consuming interest. In Saler's words, the Roswell Myth is "an effort to put enchantment...
...position assumes real moral weight. "Capital punishment," writes Berns, "serves to remind us of the majesty of the moral order that is embodied in our law and of the terrible consequences of its breach... The criminal law must be made awful, by which I mean awe-inspiring, or commanding 'profound respect or reverential fear.' It must remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings." Which is to say, some animals need killing, if only to remind the rest of us animals how to live. By this standard, state executions evince more reverence...