1 result for (book:nome AND session:862 AND stemmed:law)
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
The law in your country says that you are innocent until proven guilty. In the eyes of that law, then, you are each innocent until a crime is proven against you. There usually must also be witnesses. There are other considerations. Often a spouse cannot testify against the other. Opportunity and motive must also be established.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
So, dear reader, look at the law as it stands in this country with somewhat more kindly eyes than you have before — for it at least legally establishes a belief in your innocence, and for all of its failings, it protects you from the far more fanatical aspects, say, of any religion’s laws.
Religious laws deal with sin, whether or not a crime is committed (pause), and religious concepts usually take it for granted that the individual is guilty until proven innocent. And if you have not committed a crime in fact, then you have at least sinned in your heart — for which, of course, you must be punished. A sin can be anything from playing cards to having a sexual fantasy. You are sinful creatures. How many of you believe that?
(Deliberately:) You were born with an in-built recognition of your own goodness. You were born with an inner recognition of your rightness in the universe. You were born with a desire to fulfill your abilities, to move and act in the world. Those assumptions are the basis of what I will call natural law.
You are born loving. You are born compassionate. You are born curious about yourself and your world. Those attributes also belong to natural law. You are born knowing that you possess a unique, intimate sense of being that is itself, and that seeks its own fulfillment, and the fulfillment of others. You are born seeking the actualization of the ideal. You are born seeking to add value to the quality of life, to add characteristics, energies, abilities to life that only you can individually contribute to the world, and to attain a state of being that is uniquely yours, while adding to the value fulfillment of the world.
(9:29.) All of these qualities and attributes are given you by natural law. You are a cooperative species, and you are a loving one. Your misunderstandings, your crimes, and your atrocities, real as they are, are seldom committed out of any intent to be evil, but because of severe misinterpretations about the nature of good, and the means that can be taken toward its actualization. Most individual people know that in some inner portion of themselves. Your societies, governments, educational systems, are all built around a firm belief in the unreliability of human nature. “You cannot change human nature.” Such a statement takes it for granted that man’s nature is to be greedy, a predator, a murderer at heart. You act in accordance with your own beliefs. You become the selves that you think you are. Your individual beliefs become the beliefs of your society, but that is always a give-and-take.
[... 10 paragraphs ...]