Essay on My Hobby – Sewing – Essay 6 ( Words) Introduction: Who are we without our hobbies? Apart from our physical appearances, the collection of the things we do is what makes us distinct from the next person. While there are things we do simply because we have to, Oct 24, · This is a long read and I fully intend to digest it, but I must say that my favorite thing about the PKD books that I have read[0][1] is usually that part The fall of the Soviet Union has left the United States as the only military superpower, and therefore “an easy target for blame when people have felt that their lives were going askew or were being controlled by forces they could not readily see. Yet, to dislike America is
Philip K. Dick: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
Cover illustration by Marion Deuchars. Cover design by Point Five Design. Everyone knows that religion has a dangerous tendency to promote violence. This story is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies, and thing fall apart essay underlies many of our institutions and policies, from limits on the public role of religion to efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East, thing fall apart essay.
In this essay, I am going to thing fall apart essay that conventional wisdom, but not in the ways it is usually challenged by people who identify themselves as religious. Such people will sometimes argue that the real motivation behind so-called religious violence is in fact economic and political, not religious.
Others will thing fall apart essay that people who do thing fall apart essay are, by definition, not religious. In the first place, it is impossible to separate out religious from economic and political motives in such a way that religious motives are innocent of violence. How could one, for example, separate religion from politics in Islam, when Muslims themselves make no such separation? In the second place, it may be the case that the Crusader has misappropriated the true message of Christ, but one cannot therefore excuse Christianity of all responsibility.
Christianity is not primarily a set of doctrines, but a lived historical experience embodied and shaped by the empirically observable actions of Christians. So I have no intention of excusing Christianity or Islam or any other faith system from careful analysis. Given certain conditions, thing fall apart essay, Christianity, Islam, and other faiths can and do contribute to violence.
I will do so in two steps. When we examine academic arguments that religion causes violence, we find that what does or does not count as religion is based on subjective and indefensible assumptions. As a result certain kinds of violence are condemned, and others are ignored. The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about the violence of the putatively secular nation-state.
We like to believe that the liberal state arose to make peace between warring religious factions. Today, the Western liberal state is charged with the burden of creating peace in the face of the cruel religious fanaticism of the Muslim world. The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and themthing fall apart essay, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world.
Their violence is religious, thing fall apart essay, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality. The English-speaking academic world has been inundated—especially since September 11, thing fall apart essay, —by books and articles attempting to explain why religion has a peculiar tendency toward violence.
They come from authors in many different fields: sociology, political science, religious studies, history, theology. If one were to try to prove it, one would thing fall apart essay a concept of religion that would be at least theoretically separable from other institutional forces over the course of history. Kimball does not identify those rival institutional forces, but an obvious contender might be political institutions: tribes, empires, kingdoms, fiefs, states, and so on.
The problem is that religion was not considered something separable from such political institutions until the modern era, and then primarily in the West. Jonathan Z. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. The former group carries on as if the latter did not exist. Kimball is one of the few thing fall apart essay acknowledges the problem, but he dismisses it as merely semantic. We all see many indications of it every day, and we all know it when we see it. Many institutions and ideologies that do not explicitly refer to God or gods function in the same way as those that do.
So does every concept. All may not agree on the periphery of these concepts, but sufficient agreement on the center of such concepts makes them practical and functional. This appears to be a commonsense response, but it misses the point rather completely.
In the first place, when some scholars question whether the category of religion is useful at all, it is more than a boundary dispute. There are some who do not believe there is a center. The problem is precisely the opposite. Their implicit definitions of religion are unjustifiably clear about what does and does not qualify as a religion.
Certain belief systems, like Islam, are condemned, while certain others, like nationalism, are arbitrarily ignored. This becomes most apparent when the authors in question attempt to explain why religion is so prone to violence. Although theories vary, we can sort them into three categories: religion is absolutist, religion is divisive, and religion is irrational.
Many authors appeal to more than one of these arguments. Consider the case of the preeminent historian Martin Marty. In a book on public religion, Politics, Religion, and the Common GoodMarty argues that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and therefore violent. Religion focuses our ultimate concern, thing fall apart essay, and so does politics. Religion builds community, and so does politics.
One would think that he would draw the obvious conclusion that zealous nationalism can cause violence. carries risks and can be perceived by others as dangerous. Religion can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena. Religion-and-violence theorists inevitably undermine their own distinctions.
According to Juergensmeyer, religion exacerbates the tendency to divide people into friends and enemies, good and evil, us and them, by ratcheting divisions up to a cosmic level. Religious violence differs from secular violence in that it is symbolic, absolutist, and unrestrained by historical time. Juergensmeyer undermines this distinction in the course of his own analysis. For example, what he says about cosmic war is virtually indistinguishable from what he says about war in general:.
Looking closely at the notion of war, one is confronted with the idea of dichotomous opposition on an absolute scale. War suggests an all-or-nothing struggle against an enemy whom one assumes to be determined to destroy. No compromise is deemed possible. Such certitude on the part of one side may be regarded as noble by those whose sympathies lie with it and dangerous by those who do not. But either way it is not rational. War provides an excuse not to compromise. This is true even if the worldly issues at heart in the dispute do not seem to warrant such a ferocious position.
At times Juergensmeyer admits the difficulty of separating religious violence from mere political violence. If true, however, they subvert the entire thing fall apart essay of his argument, which is the sharp divide between religious and secular violence, thing fall apart essay. Other theorists of religion and violence make similar admissions. According to Parekh. Although religion can make a valuable contribution to political life, it can also be a pernicious influence, as liberals rightly highlight.
It thing fall apart essay often absolutist, self-righteous, arrogant, dogmatic, and impatient of compromise, thing fall apart essay. It arouses powerful and sometimes irrational impulses and can easily destabilize society, cause political havoc, and create a veritable hell on earth.
It often breeds intolerance of other religions as well as of internal dissent, and has a propensity towards violence. People create absolutes out of fear of their own limitations. Absolutes are projections of a fictional limited self, and people react with violence when others do not accept them. Religion has a peculiar tendency toward absolutism, says Wentz, but he casts thing fall apart essay very wide net when considering religion.
The price of consistency, however, is that he evacuates his own argument of explanatory force or usefulness. A more economical title for his book would have been Why People Do Bad Things. The capitalist knows that money is just a human creation, the liberal democrat is modest about what can be known beyond human experience, the nationalist knows that a country is made of land and mortal people, but the religious believer puts faith in a god or gods or at least a transcendent reality that lays claim to absolute validity.
It is this absolutism that makes obedience blind and causes the believer to subjugate all means to a transcendent end. Of course Christian orthodoxy would make the theological claim that God is absolute in a way that nothing else is. The problem is that humans are constantly tempted toward idolatry, to putting what is merely relative in the place of God. It is not enough, therefore, to claim that worship of God is absolutist.
The real question is, what god is actually being worshiped? However, the question is not simply one of belief, but of behavior. Matthew personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.
Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. Now let us ask the following two questions: What percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? For most American Christians, even public evangelization is thing fall apart essay to be in poor taste, and yet most endorse organized slaughter on behalf of the nation as sometimes necessary and often laudable.
In other countries or other traditions the results of this test might be very different. So-called secular ideologies and institutions thing fall apart essay nationalism and liberalism can be just as absolutist, divisive, and irrational as so-called religion. People kill for all sorts of things, thing fall apart essay. If the conventional wisdom that religion causes violence is so incoherent, why is it so prevalent? I believe it is because we in the West find it useful.
In domestic politics, it serves to silence representatives of certain kinds of faiths in the public sphere. The story is told repeatedly that the liberal state has learned to tame the dangerous divisiveness of contending religious beliefs by reducing them to essentially private affairs. In foreign policy, the conventional wisdom helps reinforce and justify Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world, especially Muslims, whose primary point of difference with the West is their stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere.
The liberal nation-state is essentially a peacemaker. Now we only seek to share the blessings of peace with the Muslim world.
Things Fall Apart essay
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The fall of the Soviet Union has left the United States as the only military superpower, and therefore “an easy target for blame when people have felt that their lives were going askew or were being controlled by forces they could not readily see. Yet, to dislike America is Oct 31, · “If Glasgow fails, then the whole thing fails,” he tells a news conference in Rome, after a meeting of G20 leaders. pm Girl, 2, dies after suspected car accident in Tel Sheva Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Struggle Between Change and Tradition. As a story about a culture on the verge of change, Things Fall Apart deals with how the prospect and reality of change affect various characters. The tension about whether change should be privileged over tradition often involves questions of personal status
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