Category: The Dish

Losing Faith Through Reason

From the achieves, Philip Wentworth’s 1932 article on how college destroyed his faith:

It is no accident…that the groups which are demanding ever more stringent laws to regulate our private lives are identical, almost to a man, with the religious groups in the population. It makes no difference whether they are Protestants clamoring for stricter enforcement of prohibition or Catholics agitating for stricter legislation regarding the dissemination of birth-control information. In both instances increasing pressure is being brought to bear upon government to take over the practical functions of religion–and for the obvious reason that religion, in its decay, is no longer able to do its work in the world.

Face Of The Day

Nargiskhinmaungwinafpgetty

A baby cries as he is held by his father in Dedaye township, some 48 kilometers south of Rangoon on May 9, 2008. Polling stations opened on May 10 in parts of cyclone-hit Burma, as the military regime asked voters to approve a new constitution just one week after tens of thousands of people died in the storm. The military delayed the vote for two weeks in the areas hardest-hit by Cyclone Nargis, including in the main city and former capital of Rangoon. By Khin Maung Win/AFP/Getty.

Quote For The Day

"Under modern conditions, where almost everyone lives in communities in which diversity has taken the place of consensus, certainty is much more difficult to come by. Relativism can be described as a world view that not only acknowledges but celebrates the absence of consensus. So-called post-modernist theorists like to speak of narratives and, in principle, every narrative is as valued as any other. The moral end result of this world view can be captured by imagining a television interview with a cannibal. “You believe that people should be cooked and eaten. I certainly don’t want to be judgmental, but the audience will be interested. Tell us more.” (Laughter.) This is not all that fictitious.

Fundamentalists respond to the same situation of certainty-scarcity by seeking to regain absolute certainty about every aspect of their world view. No doubt is permitted. Whoever disagrees is an enemy to be converted, shunned or, in the extreme case, removed. The last two centuries of history have made it very clear that there are secular as well as religious fundamentalisms. Both relativism and fundamentalism threaten the basic moral order without which no society, least of all a liberal democracy, can exist: relativism because it makes morality a capricious game, fundamentalism because it balkanizes society into mutually hostile camps that cannot communicate with each other," – Peter Berger, in a dialogue on Relativism and Fundamentalism: Is There A Middle Ground?

A Poem For Sunday

Iris_bucharica_flower1

New

The long path sap sludges up
through an iris, is it new
each spring? And what would
an iris care for novelty?
Urgent in tatters, it wants
to wrest what routine it can
from the ceaseless shifts
of weather, from the scrounge
it feeds on to grow beautiful
and bigger: last week the space
about to be rumpled
by iris petals was only air
through which a rabbit leapt,
a volley of heartbeats hardly
contained by fur, and then the clay-
colored spaniel in pursuit
and the effortless air
rejoining itself whole.

–William Matthews