"We must always harbor a certain amount of doubt"

That's a really wise thing to say. It's something I've been trying to learn for all of my adult life, ever since I first read Yeat's wonderful line: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity". It's a really tricky balancing act. Obama said we need doubt to temper our passions. And that's exactly right, though I know a lot of people who misinterpret that and think it's an advocacy of wishy washiness.

what the President said. It's about becoming so wrapped up in a goal that we forget how important it is for the means to be ethical. An example of the worst being filled with passionate intensity, is Randall Terry.

belies the dishonesty or error of the other.

Doubt is what prevents Blasphemy, the most dangerous of all sins according to the nuns I grew up around. Personally, I think Bush's War, a War desired and promoted by pseudo Pro-Lifers, is pretty clear proof of that fact.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.



Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?