From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2014 5:34 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Democracy
On 30 Dec 2014, at 01:38, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Alberto G. Corona <agocor...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2014 10:27 AM
Subject: Re: Democracy
>>The Soviet union can be formally considered a "democracy". There is nothing
>>external or formal that may distinguish a democracy from any other regime.
>>Since every modern state has the same elements. All of them use the
>>momenclature of the age. The word democracy is the most overused world in
>>this century togeter with "scientific".
No word comes close to matching the overuse of the word "god" however.
Yes, ... and no.
For the greeks "God" was just a pointer to the truth we are searching, through
theories and observation. It led to math and physics, + inquiry about which one
is more fundamental, and what might still be beyond math and physics. That use
of God remains in some language expression, like when we say "only God knows",
which means "I don't know".
But that is how the word was used in the Hellenistic period; I was referring to
modern usage that has associated it with a monotheistic value system. A few
examples “a God fearing” man (or woman) is upstanding, moral and considered (by
other god-fearers at least) to be superior to those who do not fear god; whilst
by comparison describing a person as being godless is usually a form of ad
hominem insult. A Godless person is assumed to be (by the God-fearing sheeple)
of lower moral caliber and someone who cannot be trusted.
God is a word that may have meant something to the people of Hellenistic
Mediterranean basin, but the word symbol has become highly loaded with value
judgment during the era of the prevalence of the three Abrahamic cults of
monotheism (and perhaps earlier even with Persian Zoroastrianism the mother
monotheist religion that gave birth to the later usurper Abrahamic faiths that
violently supplanted it for the most part.)
It is hard to change the common usage of a word as deeply embedded in a given
matrix of meaning as the word God (with a capital ‘G’) has become in the three
Abrahamic monotheistic cultures.
Wouldn’t it be better to invent a new word – unsaddled by all that Abrahamic
baggage – to describe that which ancient Greek philosophers were describing
when they used this word?
-Chris
Then, when the science "theology" has been recuperated by politics, and when
religion get institutionalized, the term God has become the name of some hero
in some fairy tale, and the science behind has been put under the rug, and is
still taboo today (which I can understand for the Church's employee, but not
for the atheists, which should on the contrary be open to the coming back to
reason in that field. Eventually I conclude that atheism is *really* the
religious mirror of christianity. They have the same notion of God (even if it
is used only to be denied) and they have the same notion of primary matter
(modulo some details).
So God is both not enough used (it means the unknown fundamental reality,
simply) and overused (idolatry, blasphems, argument by terror (like with hell),
etc.).
Bruno
-Chris
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