Usrah

Aku takde la selalu sangat layan buku-buku pop ni, tapi kebosanan yang lazim melanda aku setiap penghujung quarter membuatkan aku mencari jalan keluar dari mengulangkaji subjek untuk final exam. Lantas aku membuka buku-buku yang tersadai di rak ebrary (e-library) aku. Di sini aku terlintas sebuah petikan menarik untuk dikongsi tatkala kekeringan artikel:

“…our modern culture imposes extremely difficult demands on human beings. It has certainly empowered us, opened new worlds, broadened our horizons, and enabled many of us to live happier, healthier lives. Yet it has often dented our self-esteem. At the same time as our rational worldview has proclaimed that humans are the measure of all things, and liberated us from an unseemly dependence upon a supernatural God, it has also revealed our frailty, vulnerability, and lack of dignity. Copernicus unseated us from the center of the universe, and relegated us to a peripheral role. Kant declared that we could never be certain that our ideas corresponded to any reality outside our own heads. Darwin suggested that we were simply animals, and Freud showed that far from being wholly rational creatures, human beings were at the mercy of the powerful, irrational forces of the unconscious, which could be accessed only with great difficulty. This, indeed, was demonstrated by the modern experience. Despite the cult of rationality, modern history has been punctuated by witch-hunts and world wars which have been explosions of unreason. Without the ability to approach the deeper regions of the psyche, which the old myths, liturgies, and mystical practices of the best conservative faith once provided, it seemed that reason sometimes lost its mind in our brave new world. At the end of the twentieth century, the liberal myth that humanity is progressing to an ever more enlightened and tolerant state looks as fantastic as any of the other millennial myths we have considered in this book. Without the constraints of a “higher,” mythical truth, reason can on occasion become demonic and commit crimes that are as great as, if not greater than, any of the atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalists.”