looking forward to this!!

same!

maybe it can be more successfully rewritten as a double negative: a country doesn't not have the right to police it's border. or better: a country requires no legitimisation by anything or anyone to police its border.

Atheism and theism, if that's its opposite, look equally mad. But what then is faith? It is at least to not suffer the meaningless doubt that God exists; it is at least to not go spiritually cold; it is at least to live trustingly in Him; it is at least to heed His word.

I will own that I find it hard to know what to make both of the idea that one could really *believe* one's friend Jones exists and of the idea that one could believe or doubt that the ground of being, being itself, truth and love itself, the logos, exists.

Now Anscombe is obviously talking about religious faith. To have faith, I think she says, is to trust that what's written or spoken or heard within comes from God and so also to believe it.

I might, *in certain circumstances*, muster a genuine doubt that this letter was from him, or believe he died after posting it. Or Jones may, as Anscombe later suggests, be a stooge: a bunch of friends were all along masquerading as a pen friend. But this changes the subject.

I don't mean we could believe him whilst yet disbelieving or doubting his existence. I do mean that it's not clear what sense "doubting Jones' existence" (and therefore, believing that he exists too) would have here (vide On Certainty).

I feel like it's ok for me to just say that I'm ill, when I've got a cold, without having to specify that I'm physically as opposed to mentally ill.

wanna put a plug in for beginning with general human wretchedness!

Thank you :). And yes, it's pleasingly indiscriminate in that regard. I was a little reluctant to take the psychological route re biblical healing at first lest it be seen as post-enlightenment miracle-bashing. But really what's more miraculous than the possibility of restored love thru forgiveness?

I guess one can do a nazi salute without intending to. ... But only, I think, if one knows what one is? ... A further question again is what one does or doesn't mean by doing it.

I saw a man on the underground hail a cab the other day :)

It’s what I perceived as the conflation of righteousness with self-righteousness that was a turn off for me. (Much of the content to my ear, in itself, wasn’t so bad). By the way, and more philosophically/ less psychologically, “self-“ is here as elsewhere such an interesting prefix.

What I typically find more helpful from psychology, than general claims of a sort which would please Meehl, say, is new concepts. These, qua concepts, don't make predictive or causal claims - but they give me ways of bringing someone's disturbed function into view.

The statement about the poison was supposed to characterise the very concept; but the generalisations of which you now write appear to be empirical in form. ... But I agree that they are not often sound. ...

To be pedantic (no!), it seems to me, by contrast, a quite peculiar sentence! Does a poisonous liquid really have the DISPOSITION to kill (those who drink it)?