"The Spiritual Emptiness of Faith" by Robert Tracinski (www.IntellectualActivist.com)"

Today, the Last Battle of the Vietnam War continues. Caroline Glick catches on to the fact that "something refreshing, and indeed, inspiring is happening today in America. There, a debate about the legacy of an unpopular lost war has recently begun in earnest." She finds it inspiring because Israeli culture is still immersed in deep evasion about the lessons of its recent loss in Lebanon—and the whole 15-year-long debacle of the "peace process."

Meanwhile, the man who is partly responsible for this re-opening of the Vietnam War debate, historian Mark Moyar, chimes in with a defense of his thesis that the Vietnam War was both winnable and in America's interests.

I haven't linked recently to any updates about the implosion of the Palestinian "Suicide Bomb Society," because it has all been more of the same. But here's a report that is new—and even more dreadful. Faced with a disaster brought upon them by the religious fanatics of Hamas, the Palestinians are turning to the guidance of…an even more radical Islamist organization, Hizb ut-Tahrir.

But of course, religion is supposed to have many spiritual consolations for the miserable and suffering. It is supposed to fill a spiritual void left by the prevailing secularism of the modern world—right? Except that it turns out it is the most ardent religious believers who actually feel a spiritual void, as revealed by the release of Mother Theresa's private letters, in which she confessed to feeling spiritual "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness," and "torture"—and feeling this, not momentarily, but for decades—even as she proclaimed publicly that "Christ is in our hearts."
But don't worry, says Jesuit priest James Martin in the New York Times: all Christian saints have felt "the 'dark night,' the time when a person feels completely abandoned by God."
As an atheist who believes in the reality of this world and of natural law—and who is thus surrounded every moment of the day by a flood of evidence for the things he believes in—I have never had occasion to feel this kind of metaphysical emptiness and doubt. So much for the superior spiritual consolations of religion.—RWT