War, Faith and Reason

I'll be in Roanoke, VA until Monday to attend (and photograph) a friend's wedding. I'll suspend blogging until I return.

But I will leave you with 3 thoughts to ponder. Two are below; the 3rd is in the previous post.

From the poem Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen (which is in the opening to Chris Hedges' excellent book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning):

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*

(* It is sweet and meet (fitting) to die for one's country).


And from Friedrich Nietzsche:

"Christianity and the Emotions":

Within Christianity there is also a great popular protest against philosophy: ...To this end, it denies virtue as it was conceived by the philosophers - as victory of reason over emotion. It condemns rationality in general, and challenges human passions to reveal themselves in their extremest grandeur and strength as love of God, fear of God, as fanatical faith in God, as the blindest hope in God.