I Listen To Bach A Great Deal.

This Is Not To Say That Joy Is A Compensation For Loss, But That Each Of Them, Joy And Loss, Exists In Its Own Right And Must Be Recognised For What It Is ... So Joy Can Be Joy And Sorrow Can Be Sorrow, With Neither Of Them Casting Either Light Or Shadow On The Other.

I Sometimes Am Discouraged By What Seems To Be A Sort Of Conventional Disparagement Of Humankind. I Think Often People Feel That They Are Doing Something Moral When They Are Doing That, But That's Not How I Understand Morality. I Much Prefer The "everyone Is Sacred, And Everybody Errs" Model Of Reality.

[john] Calvin Treats Experience As Essentially Visionary And Revelatory From Moment To Moment, Addressed To The Individual Perceiver, The Individual Soul. Where This Is Assumed Preconceptions Can Only Distract And Obscure, Though, Of Course, As Human Beings We Can Never Wholly Free Ourselves Of Them.

Of Course, Mysticism Is Very Hard To Isolate Because, Given The Kind Of Consciousness That I Was Sort Of Instructed In As Religious Consciousness; That Borders On Mysticism So Closely That It's Hard To Know Whether You Qualify Or Not, Or Whether Mysticism Is Artificially Isolated When It Is Treated As A Separate Thing From Experience. Obviously, Mysticism Can Be A Form Of Madness, But Then Consciousness Can Be A Form Of Madness.

Protestantism, Of Course, Is Much More Explicitly Divided Into Different Traditions - The Pentecostals, The Anglicans. But There Is The Main Tradition Of Protestantism That Comes Out Of The Reformation And That Produced People Like Kant And Hegel And So On, Who Are Not Normally Thought Of As Being People Writing In A Theological Tradition, Although Hegel, Of Course, Wrote Theology His Whole Life.