Happy New Year!

When our Collective Imagination fails, we get reductionism in Science, fundamentalism in Religion, fascism in Politics.

Are we there yet?
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God's will or not?

You won't read this in main stream media.

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The Second Coming (for the last time)

One of the most famous poems in the Western world is The Second Coming by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.  Everyone has read it, or at least has heard some parts of it read to them, or seen those parts in print.  Most anthologies include it.
The well-known phrases are:  "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" or "The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity".  And finally,  "...what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
These lines are favored by the impressionable young for their magical music as much as their apocalyptic promise.  The pundits of the world, on a slow day, will summon a vision of the Beast slouching toward Washington, approaching either from the Left or the Right, according to their ideological bent.  The poem has become a cliche.
I confess to having liked the poem while confessing also that I never understood it.
The problem, for me, lies in the title and theme.  The original Second Coming refers to a biblical prophecy that foretells the return of Jesus Christ, or the Messiah.
However Jesus did not slouch toward Bethlehem.  Neither did Mary, but it must be clear to all that whoever slouches toward the metaphorical Bethlehem to bear the Beast must be the Pregnant one, not the Beast itself.  Otherwise we are dealing with an event as unusual as the Virgin Birth.
Or it is just a bad metaphor formed from the conflation of Beast and Bethlehem infused with an evil slouch.
Flannery O'Connor overplayed the metaphor when she wrote the following:
"...nothing harder than Christian realism.  I believe there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, and that I have reported on the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories  (her short stories, ed. note)  described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
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Religous Questions

In Egypt, once, a man in a morgue, believed dead, rose up and called "Where am I?" An attendant nearby died from the shock. Was this exchange of lives arranged by God?

What kind of a man would sire a family only to abandon it, to be weak and inattentive? God would not do that, would He?

Yesterday, today and tomorrow, people will be killing and dying for God. Why?

What can one say about a world where mass murderers have 'spiritual advisors'?
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