Dettabeynenson

“Facts and Belief (The Sonnet)

No belief is worth losing your humanity over,
No intellect is worth losing your kindness over.
Facts, faith, reason, religion all come later,
First and foremost we must humanize our behavior.
If a belief or intellect makes you a better person,
More power to your belief or intellect I say.
But if they become a hindrance to your humanity,
Throw it immediately like poison far, far away.
Beliefs have cast shadows of wars throughout history,
Facts have provided weapons for those wars.
Then again beliefs have taught us to love our neighbor,
Facts have helped us fight calamity and disorders.
Let all beliefs and facts be guided by a warm heart.
Warmth alone will make our world fit for human birth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“There are some feminist-inspired commentators who have charted society from the point of view of gender, often brilliantly, but there are many more clinging on to the old concepts, especially in politics, social policy and academia. There has been a collective reluctance to submit the whole area to scrutiny, and a widespread refusal to see this talk of crisis as anything other than sexist fearmongering. Instead of accepting that the old 'truths' of feminism are due for an overhaul, numerous attempts are made to breathe life into the old concepts and politics. This is somewhat worrying since women who think like this now have more influence than ever before in many western governments.”
― Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

“It was the extension of the model of male power into more nebulous aspects of behaviour which eventually lost feminism much of its wider support.”
― Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium?

“You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority