Word: preceptions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Brown's editorial is also similar to the Peninsula issue in that he asserts things that are simply wrong. According to Brown, Gomes says we have "no way of drawing any legitimate precept from the Bible of the Fathers." I don't know whose sermons Brown has been listening to. Certainly not Gomes's. I've heard every sermon preached in Memorial Church this year and I remember quite clearly hearing Gomes say not once but many times that the Bible is the source of moral precepts. The writers of Peninsula cannot both champion the cause of open debate...
...considered the magnitude of the freedom that Gomes has won us through its absence, whereby we are at liberty to estimate every inconvenient argument drawn from the Bible or the Fathers as false and deceitful. The Rev. Gomes has powerfully demonstrated the impossibility of thence deriving any moral precept, and thereby won us a perpetual liberty from their gloomy and awkward dictates...
Since (as he has taught us) we have no way of drawing any legitimate moral precept from the Bible or the Fathers, we discover all moral matters to be doubtful. And by the Rev. Baxter's precept we discover that, in all doubtful things, we are entitled to liberty. How pleasant a license is this doubt, and what a well-deserved sop for the distressed conscience...
...citizens from such invasions of privacy. The basic principle is laid out in the U.S. Privacy Act of 1974, which at least in theory restricts the government from taking computer data gathered for one purpose (say, the census) and using them for another purpose (say, tax collection). Another guiding precept is that unique numerical identifiers -- like Thailand's ID numbers -- should be avoided because they make dossier preparation temptingly easy. That is why the American Civil Liberties Union gets so upset when a Social Security number is used beyond its original intent...
...novels or so, and reviewers have continued to praise him, especially for his dialogue -- though with diminishing patience, as if having an uncanny ear and using it were a bit too easy. This drives the author a little crazy when he thinks about it, and he thumps down a precept that could be carved in stone: "Dialogue is character is plot." In a shrewd book published last June, On Writing, he approvingly notes that John O'Hara, a novelist he admires above almost all others, would tell a whole chapter with dialogue -- a husband and wife, for instance, punching with...