Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Sharia and Freedom - Religious relativism is a destroyer of conviction By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, October 20, 2012
āMulti-religious
prayer almost inevitably leads to false interpretations, to
indifference as to the content of what is believed or not believed, and
thus to the dissolution of real faith.ā So wrote Joseph Ratzinger in
1986. Even then, the man who would later become Pope Benedict XVI was
renowned as a singularly deep thinker on the finer points of religious
belief systems ā to say nothing of the sweeping themes. As head of the Vaticanās doctrinal office, Cardinal Ratzinger was ruminating on the World Prayer Day for Peace,
forged by his legendary papal predecessor, John Paul II. Though he was
among the pontiffās closest advisers, Ratzinger was uneasy about John
Paul IIās grand gesture: taking center stage in a spectacle of
interfaith solidarity. Flanked about him were leaders of the worldās
religions. Even Shamanism took its place among Roman and Eastern
Orthodox Catholicism, Protestant sects, Judaism, Buddhism,
Zoroastrianism, and, of course, Islam ā all joined in an iconic,
ecumenical quest for āpeace.ā It was as if there were but one civilization, one single, common way
of looking at the world. It was as if there were a talismanic aura about
āpeace,ā such that the word connoted a universal value, impervious to
inquiry about its meaning to the variegated voices uttering it. Was this
āpeaceā the mere absence of war? Hadnāt the 20th century already proved
that there were evils worse than war? Was āpeaceā an absence of war
achieved by appeasing malevolent oppressors? Or was it an absence of
such oppressors because they had been righteously defeated ā because
liberty and equal opportunity, undergirded by the rule of law, had
triumphed? Details, details. Surely a tidal wave of banners, splaying
āpeaceā in a Babel of tongues, would wash away such impertinent
questions.
In a nod to the host locale of this iconic display, the eventās
legacy came to be known as the āspirit of Assisi,ā that city of deep
spiritual redolence. Ah, but deep spiritual redolence . . . for whom?
Assisi is a holy city if you are a Christian. To other religious
traditions, it is just another dot on the map. To a fundamentalist
Muslim, it would be better understood as a coveted city than a holy one. What makes it sacred
in Roman Catholic lore, its witness to what the faithful take to be
ultimate truth, would make it anything but a place of reverence in
classical Islam. Nevertheless, papering over these distinctions is our convention, is
it not? And nowhere is that manifested more clearly than in the cloying
homage paid by the West to things Islamic. The ostentation with which
the U.S. armed forces revere the Koran ā indeed, āthe Holy Qurāan,ā
as our top commanders unfailingly refer to it ā borders on parody:
mandating, at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for instance, that a copy
of the book be distributed to each detained jihadist (notwithstanding
that each construes it to command war ā I suppose I should say, holy war
ā against the West), the said delivery carried out by a white-gloved
military guard, who must, if at all feasible, be a Muslim. Who cares what the Koran and the other sources of Islamic scripture ā
the hadith and the authoritative biographies of Islamās warrior prophet
ā actually say? We are to regard them as āholy,ā the same adjective our
official lexicon ubiquitously attaches to cities like Mecca, Medina,
and Qom ā even as the word āChristmasā is purged as a modifier of
ācarol,ā ācard,ā ātree,ā āpresent,ā āparty,ā and ācelebration.ā In the
West we no longer acknowledge, much less celebrate, what distinguished
us as the West. Such distinctions, though, were the inspiration for Cardinal
Ratzingerās clarion note of caution against multi-religious prayer.
Religion as cosmetic reverence shorn of substantive content is a virtue
only the postmodern, post-doctrinal West could love: itsself-congratulatory elites having evolved beyond anything so quaint as
doctrine and arrived at . . . nihilism. Ratzinger knew better. Doctrinal
differences never lose their salience because it is doctrine that
defines a believer. To airbrush our differences ā even for the
well-intentioned purpose of elevating āpeaceā as a transcendent value ā
is to deny the essence of who we are. Thus should multi-religious prayer be a rarity, Ratzinger admonished ā
āto make clear that there is no such thing . . . as a common concept of
God or belief in God.ā Far from religion, religious relativism ā
oblivious of doctrinal content, eroding real faith ā is a destroyer of
conviction. The philosopher cardinal grasped, moreover, that the obverse
is true: Real faith has such transcendent power that religious
relativism ā this ācommon concept of God,ā this nihilism swaddled in
politically correct reverence ā cannot compete. National Review
