ahavafriend

"...Dr. Burton was neither the first nor the last to comment that marriage is a hindrance to "all good enterprises.” “Woman inspires us to great things," remarked Alexandre Dumas, "and prevents us from achieving them.” The bitter Friedrich Nietzsche believed marriage (if not women, in general) a distraction from philosophical pursuits. It is a commonplace that most important writers, artists and philosophers have been bachelors, or in the least effectively single in the way Abelard, Franklin, Rousseau, Milton, Thomas Paine and Shakespeare remained. “Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men,”wrote Sir Francis Bacon (not a bachelor, but perhaps wishing he were). H.L. Mencken, who once suggested bringing back the dollar-a-day bachelor tax (it was worth that much to be single) likewise commented on the superiority of the bachelor only to Mencken it was the bachelor's great intellect and creativity that kept him single, not the other way round. "The bachelor's very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own.” Who can argue that a brief catalog of famous bachelors reads like a roll call of the architects of Western Civilization?:

Pierre Bayle
Robert Boyle
Johannes Brahms
Samuel Butler
Robert Burton
Ludwig van Beethoven
Johannes Brahms
Giacomo Casanova
Frederic Chopin
Nicolaus Copernicus
Eugène Delacrois
Rene Descartes
Gustave Flaubert
Galileo Galilei
Edward Gibbon
Vincent van Gogh
Oliver Goldsmith
Thomas Hobbes
Horace
David Hume
Washington Irving
Henry James
Franz Kafka
Immanuel Kant
Soren Kierkegaard
Charles Lamb
T. E. Lawrence
Meriwether Lewis
Philip Larkin
Gottfried Leibniz
John Locke
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sir Isaac Newton
Blaise Pascal
Alexander Pope
Marcel Proust
Maurice Ravel
George Santayana
Jean Paul Sartre
Franz Schubert
Benedict de Spinoza
Arthur Schopenhauer
Herbert Spencer
Adam Smith
Stendhal
Jonathon Swift
Nikola Tesla
Henry David Thoreau
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
Leonardo da Vinci
Voltaire
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Similarly the contributions of the many (ostensibly) celibate medieval monks and theologians (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Desiderius Erasmus, Michael Servetus) were essential in dragging Europe out of the dark Age of Faith and paving the way for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
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Vance Packard, in his 1962 book The Pyramid Climbers, noted that, “In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him…[However] the worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn’t married. Is it because he isn’t virile? Is he old-maidish? Can’t he get along with people?” By contrast, the married man was the steady one, the stable lot, not least because, in Tallyrand’s memorable phrase, "a married man with a family will do anything for money.”
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Of the 50 percent of couples that successfully weather the storms of holy matrimony, a mere 38 percent allow that their marriages are happy ones. Yet for all this doom and gloom the happily unmarried man is not opposed to love. Far from it. More likely he idealizes love more than his married counterpart. “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing,” notes Goethe. “A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Today's relationship gurus warn that marriage must be treated not unlike a job. "When you bring the work strategies that you use in the workplace at home, you can be really successful," says one marriage expert, which brings to mind the words of Robert Burton—that marriage is the last and best cure of romantic love.

And why shouldn’t the bachelor be as cynical as a roomful of reporters? His male friends are forever praising his great fortune. "Is it generally known that bachelors privately receive encouragement and approbation from married men?" asks Ade. Much, however, remains unsaid. The bachelor's married friends seldom speak of their troubles, though their eyes betray a deep-rooted sorrow and a tragic lonesomeness, not least due to an unfilled desire for male companionship. “If you are afraid of loneliness,” warned Chekhov, “don't marry."
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It was once held that the female—in her dual tasks as mother and wife—played a vital role in tempering the testosterone-fueled excesses of the young male. “Women have always been the carriers of morality and the shapers of the next generation, which seems to me to be far more important than working 60 hours a week in a law firm,” says Robert Bork. Sinclair Lewis, in 1922, drew this memorable portrait of the civilizing influence of women in his novel Babbitt: "Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin." Sir Francis Bacon maintained that, “wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men…are more cruel and hardhearted (good to make severe inquisitors), because their tenderness is not so oft called upon.” And George Gilder likewise notes that "Men need durable ties to women to discipline them for civilized life, or they become a menace to society and themselves… and tend to live short and destructive lives." Well, that depends on the women, I should think. I doubt the ambiguous state of civilization attained by the average coed featured in a typical Girls Gone Wild video has much influence on today's young man, save to make him hot and bothered. Indeed it would not be difficult to make the case that contemporary women are more in need of the good old civilizing influence than are men.
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Washington Irving was one well acquainted with this sentiment: “With married men their amorous romance is apt to decline after marriage…but with a bachelor, though it may slumber, it never dies. It is always liable to break out again in transient flashes, and never so much as on a spring morning in the country; or on a winter evening, when seated in his solitary chamber, stirring up the fire and talking of matrimony....”

"If next week he named Dick Cheney as his running-mate and revealed that he spends his spare time drilling for oil in wildlife habitats, the only surprise would be that it took him so long.

Of course there's nothing much new in what the senator has done. In the lexicon of modern American politics, it's called a pivot. You campaign hard to the party's extreme in the primary election, where the base voters tend to be. Then, when the nomination is secure and there are no more idealists to be humoured, you pivot back to the centre. The only difference is that in Mr Obama's case the pivot is so hard and so fast that the entire Democratic Party is suffering from whiplash...."

The Fates have been kind to me. When you hear people saying harsh things about American youth, you will know how wrong they all are. So many times that now they have become commonplace, I've seen incidents that make me know that we were never soft, never weak.

Many of my friends are now dead. To a man, each died with a nonchalance that each would have denied was courage, but simply called a lack of fear and forgot the triumph. If anything great or good has been born of this war, it should be valued in the youth of our country, who were never trained for war, who almost never believed in war, but who have, from some hidden source, brought forth a gallantry which is homespun, it is so real.

Out here between the spaceless sea and sky, American youth has found itself, and given of itself, so that a spark may catch, burst into flame, and burn high. If our country takes these sacrifices with indifference it will be the cruelest ingratitude the world has ever known.

You will, I know, do all in your power to help others keep the faith. My luck can't last much longer. But the flame goes on and only that is important.

"In France, after the First World War, the teachers’ unions launched a systematic purge of textbooks, in order to promote internationalism and pacifism.

Books that depicted the courage and self-sacrifice of soldiers who had defended France against the German invaders were called “bellicose” books to be banished from the schools.

Textbook publishers caved in to the power of the teachers’ unions, rather than lose a large market for their books. History books were sharply revised to conform to internationalism and pacifism.
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In Britain, Winston Churchill warned that a country “cannot avoid war by dilating upon its horrors.” In France, Marshal Philippe Petain, the victor at Verdun, warned in 1934 that teachers were trying to “raise our sons in ignorance of or in contempt of the fatherland.”

But they were voices drowned out by the pacifist and internationalist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s.

Did it matter? Does patriotism matter?

France, where pacifism and internationalism were strongest, became a classic example of how much it can matter.
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During the First World War, France fought on against the German invaders for four long years, despite having more of its soldiers killed than all the American soldiers killed in all the wars in the history of the United States, put together.

But during the Second World War, France collapsed after just six weeks of fighting and surrendered to Nazi Germany. At the bitter moment of defeat the head of the French teachers’ union was told, “You are partially responsible for the defeat.”

Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mauriac, and other Frenchmen blamed a lack of national will or general moral decay, for the sudden and humiliating collapse of France in 1940.

At the outset of the invasion, both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards — except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

Did patriotism matter? It mattered more than superior French tanks and planes. ..."

"The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet." Romans 16:20

"It is a false gospel which says that you are ok and God just wants to improve you. No, God wants to remove all the false foundations and beams you have erected in your house and replace them entirely with new ones. The gospel is not about moral improvement but about making a new man. Our inability to grasp this means that we have a serious gap in our apprehension of the gospel. Our identity as Christians is subverted when the holes in our lives are filled with anything other than Christ. Our relationship to God and others suffer as a result.

I want you to take a close look with me at a passage in 2 Peter 1:3-8.

If you are going to take away anything from this article, take this away: The reason, Peter says, that your Christian life is ineffective and unfruitful and still laden with sin is not because you have not tried hard enough, but rather, that you have forgotten the gospel … forgotten what Christ has done for you. You have forgotten to apply the gospel to every situation.. The ramifications of this are profound. And take note, Peter also says that in the gospel He has provided everything we need for life and godliness NOW. This is why it is so essential for Christians to gather together every week to encourage one another and hear the pastor remind us what Christ has done, and is doing for us, through the Holy Spirit who unites us to Him. The people Peter describes in the above passage are nearsighted and blind to how the gospel applies today for them as Christians."