"How the West Really Lost God"

[kaur]

How the West Really Lost God
By Mary Eberstadt

A new look at secularization.

For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners. Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous story of the madman who runs into the marketplace declaring that “Gott ist tot,” and in sociology as the “secularization thesis,” it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear. As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion’s premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/p...w/7827212.html

[Mark O'Neill]

How the West Really Lost God
By Mary Eberstadt

A new look at secularization.



http://www.hoover.org/publications/p...w/7827212.html

Ok, I will go where angels fear to tread - What exactly is your point relating to Small Wars by posting this?

[goesh]

Whoever has God in their corner wins....????

[Mark O'Neill]

Whoever has God in their corner wins....????

Hmmm...... Goesh, I can guess which demographic this one is going to appeal to... there goes all the hope of objectivity and reason...

[goesh]

Allah's Water

Your flowing thoughts are not the attraction
that binds us together on this sacred earth
His oneness is the stillness
but who can bring you to silence
and how do you enter His garden
if you can't hear His thunder of silence?
amidst your constant movement
dedicated to flesh and its support
forever thy focus
and all thy pillars to uphold its transience
when He upholds the very sky without pillars
you flow to neither the beginning nor the end
like drops of rain upon the sand
converging into torrents of motion
that came from His stillness
by attrition will you hear His silence?
what manner of loss can I impose
to hasten thee into the water
and drift back to Him?


(18th century Sufi mystic, attribution unknown)

I see it more as a homily on the dichotomy of polytheism (secularism) and monotheism and not so much a poem, demonstrating the imbalance of life as we know it and suggesting that conflict is from a mystical standpoint a form of celebration and not resolution.

[Mark O'Neill]

I see it more as a homily on the dichotomy of polytheism (secularism) and monotheism and not so much a poem, demonstrating the imbalance of life as we know it and suggesting that conflict is from a mystical standpoint a form of celebration and not resolution.

I would give that sentence a High Distinction for post-modernism 101.

And resubmit any Subaltern or Intern who tried to get a sentence like that past me!
I am having a Forest Gump moment - what does that sentence actually mean in English??? - (I only did a sub-major in English Lit).

[SteveMetz]

OK, I've tried and tried to resist, but you keep posting poetry, so now I feel compelled.....

Baghdad April

Who would have thought even minutes ago
Blackhawk swept from the taupe
Medieval California Kuwait to the quivering sandust of Talil
Sweat, Al-Hilah, Marine bird, older than damp crew, machine
Smell, vibration ammo cammo scraped paint web belts, still
Tighten gray roar and chaos, nose down, brown. Just get us there.

Now green. For ten thousand lives this river ran brown with blood
Helping reeds limber bodies once passed as blind. Just get us there.

Down, then BIAP, destruction for glory
Spurts and unthinking tremors, the shakti of nonduality,
Bills unpaid as crushed planes kneel lame,
Torn tarmac shattered with dust
Fade, then the comic book cantos: a prince of
Babylon, sword of Assyria, builder of Ur, heavens perturbed,
Trauma hung close in crumbled glass, a facade (yet more)
Meaning deep to those who looted that brief cosmic day
Missed by those who watched.

Stories, reprise, thunder run
Endless dust nights of expendable men
blind (they must have been)
To spin a rusty truck against a tank
With only, what? passion? hate?
fear?
Perhaps no thought at all
Except to hope the engine would start (or not)
and no one else would see.
No matter. They are now mist, counters in a game.

We hurry, are watched, relief, no love and
Bomblets are toys, slipping through dry canals with a last black smoke
to please a small hand as
Green towers turn red, mating in the night.
Somehow we must have known (even a
first summer wind will dry the eye). Yet
Rank on file is an army of shrouds, mist,
And hot days turn gray, crafting wry smiles.
Then fade. Finally,

to destroy and build, Shiva in web gear
While somewhere a bridge is lost. But what?
Who is destroyer, who a builder? We know
Often great power is only owning the detritus.
Still there is BIAP, flight out, home, strong shoulders and
Hiphop, path to insanity and relief.
And then, a tiny point of blood receding on the glass.

[Mark O'Neill]

OK, I've tried and tried to resist, but you keep posting poetry, so now I feel compelled.....

Baghdad April

Who would have thought even minutes ago
Blackhawk swept from the taupe
Medieval California Kuwait to the quivering sandust of Talil
Sweat, Al-Hilah, Marine bird, older than damp crew, machine
Smell, vibration ammo cammo scraped paint web belts, still
Tighten gray roar and chaos, nose down, brown. Just get us there.

Now green. For ten thousand lives this river ran brown with blood
Helping reeds limber bodies once passed as blind. Just get us there.

Down, then BIAP, destruction for glory
Spurts and unthinking tremors, the shakti of nonduality,
Bills unpaid as crushed planes kneel lame,
Torn tarmac shattered with dust
Fade, then the comic book cantos: a prince of
Babylon, sword of Assyria, builder of Ur, heavens perturbed,
Trauma hung close in crumbled glass, a facade (yet more)
Meaning deep to those who looted that brief cosmic day
Missed by those who watched.

Stories, reprise, thunder run
Endless dust nights of expendable men
blind (they must have been)
To spin a rusty truck against a tank
With only, what? passion? hate?
fear?
Perhaps no thought at all
Except to hope the engine would start (or not)
and no one else would see.
No matter. They are now mist, counters in a game.

We hurry, are watched, relief, no love and
Bomblets are toys, slipping through dry canals with a last black smoke
to please a small hand as
Green towers turn red, mating in the night.
Somehow we must have known (even a
first summer wind will dry the eye). Yet
Rank on file is an army of shrouds, mist,
And hot days turn gray, crafting wry smiles.
Then fade. Finally,

to destroy and build, Shiva in web gear
While somewhere a bridge is lost. But what?
Who is destroyer, who a builder? We know
Often great power is only owning the detritus.
Still there is BIAP, flight out, home, strong shoulders and
Hiphop, path to insanity and relief.
And then, a tiny point of blood receding on the glass.

Steve,

Brave stuff,

I would offer a review except that it is 2230 on a Friday night here and my brain is fried after wrestling with a piece of my monograph that is not appearing on the page as my brain wants it too. Alas, I am always a far better writer in my head when I am thinking my thoughts rather than trying to write them down

I wonder if the world is ready for poetry rather than prose in my COIN strategy monograph? I suspect not .. especially since my creative poetry ability is more like some of those USMC limericks recently posted on another forum..