Friday, June 8, 2012

Chris Hedges: Resistance and Faith, Faith and Unbelief - Prague Spring 1968

From Jesse's Cafe:

The impulse to freedom and democracy always seems weak and hopeless when matched against the forces of oppression, because aggressive oppression is always more single-minded, having already crushed internal dissent and perspective, and is generally better organized and equipped.

And yet even the greatest tyrannies have fallen, always. This is because they carry within themselves the seeds of their own renewal and return to balance, or utter destruction.

As in most human things, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness, and it is their inability to master and evolve that strength, to reform and achieve sustainability, that brings them crashing down, every time. Their strength is their weakness, in its overreach and self-absorption.


I am sure that Hedges would agree that, as a person, he is subject to the same impulses, the same tendencies, the same foibles, the same snares of pride, harsher moments and failures to love, that he descries so capably in their more extreme manifestations of the abuse of faith and humanness.

I would have liked to have seen a little more expansion of the continuum of unbelief to include the uncertainty of agnosticism versus the certainty of atheism, for I believe that to be a fateful threshhold which one crosses with their own 'leap of faith' as it were, that being the difference between 'I do not know' and I am certain enough to declare and commit myself, whether it be for faith or for unbelief. - Jesse


At Their Extremes, Most Belief Systems Become Indistinguishable From their Putative Opposites.

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.kr/2012/06/chris-hedges-resistance-and-faith.html

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