Cliches vs speaking from experience

The WAPO has a religion section, and I just got the RSS feed about it, so have been reading it. Actually, so far it's been worthless, but this week all the essays are about Iraq and they sound like Nancy Pelosi's talking points. We even have a cheery looking broad who has an essay saying that dang it we can change religious extremists away from their violence. Well, true, but if he's coming in my hospital with an AK 47 and is high on janga weed, I would prefer a nice Uzzi to a bible.

I emailed them and told them they needed to ask saints about faith, not cheerful academics spouting cliches. Wonder if anyone will read it.

But then I got my rss feed from First things and came across this quote:
It's from Mary Eberstadt.

All men and women fear death; but only mothers and fathers, and perhaps some husbands and wives, can generally be counted upon to fear another’s death more than their own.

To put the point another way, if 9/11 drove to church for weeks on end millions of Americans who had not darkened that doorstep in years—as it did—imagine the even deeper impact on ordinary mothers and fathers of a sick child or the similarly powerful desire of a devoted spouse on the brink of losing the other.

Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, so too would there appear to be few in the nursery or critical care unit, at least most of the time.

In sum, because it treats belief as an atomistic decision taken piecemeal by individuals rather than a holistic response to family life, Nietzsche’s madman and his offspring, secularization theory, appear to present an incomplete version of how some considerable portion of human beings actually come to think and behave about things religious—not one by one and all on their own, but rather mediated through the elemental connections of husband, wife, child, aunt, great-grandfather, and the rest.

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Yup.