On A Glasslike Sea (standard:other, 2886 words)
Author: Eutychus	Added: Dec 24 2012	Views/Reads: 2664/2046	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A small group examining competing worldviews

“See anything?” Reggie asked his mate with whom he had been sharing the
crow's nest for the past two hours. 

“Not a thing. But with no moon and no binoculars, how can we expect to
see anything until we are right on top of it? Look sharp for a moment. 
I need to relax my eyes,” Fred said and focused his gaze to the 
northwest. 

“What are you looking at?” 

“I'm looking for constellations. I focus with a different set of muscles
and it relieves the headache caused by two hours of focusing midrange.” 


“Let me see... Where's Leo?” 

“That's easy. Right there is Ursa Major. Line up the two stars that make
up the back side of the dipper and follow them to the galactic south. 
There, just above the horizon, is Regulus.” 

“Yes, the heart of the lion. The tail should be just to the north. Half
a minute. Where did Regulus go, Fred?” Reggie wondered, uncertain why 
his focus on the constellation had suddenly been thrown off to the 
point that it had disappeared entirely. 

“Focus closer. Regulus is still there. It's just blocked from view.” his
friend who had transferred over from the Oceanic after a four year 
stint as lookout said intently. “Do you see it?” 

As Reggie spoke a word of astonished agreement Fred had rung the ship's
bell three times and then reached for the telephone. 

“Is there anyone there?” Fred shouted into the device that he didn't
quite trust to deliver news this important. 

“Yes, what do you see?” sixth officer James Moody asked. 

“Iceberg right ahead!” 

********************** 

The Sunday evening service began with a song, prayer, and Pastor
Douglas' promise to get right into the material after a quick recap of 
last week's discussion. 

The series, which the pastor had titled War of the Worldviews, had been
covering the lenses through which various cultures had looked at the 
world at different times in history in an attempt to understand why the 
world was in the place it had arrived at. Because of Kyle's connection 
to the history aspect of the series, being a tenured member of the 
local high school's history department, he sat with his extended family 
with pencil and clipboard of paper at the ready for when it came time 
to take notes. The pastor's review covered Modernism and its roots in 
the European Enlightenment, a system of viewing the world based on the 
theory of the man who starts with his thoughts on a given matter and 
builds his worldview block by block based upon nothing more than his 
own powers of reason. 

“And while Modernism gave divine revelation a greatly reduced role in
how we understand the world, it at the very least made the assumption 
that the mind is a mirror of nature, meaning that the reality our mind 
perceives does in fact correspond to how the world really is. Based on 
this presumption, Modernism set the stage for great advancements in 
technology and Modernists used that technology to achieve mastery over 
the natural world, hoping to usher in a Utopian age in which the 
individual could understand his place in the universe based solely upon 
reason. 

“Unfortunately, reason proved insufficient to prevent two world wars and
could not keep the last century from being the bloodiest in history. 
And because Modernism failed to live up to the promise of prosperity 
through reason, that disillusionment has resulted in what has come to 
be known as POST-modernism, a worldview which rejects to a large degree 
reliance upon reason. Postmodernism values the experiences of the 
individual, a relativity that values a little bit of everything but 


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