On 12/31/2014 11:12 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
*From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] *On
Behalf Of *Bruno Marchal
*Sent:* Tuesday, December 30, 2014 5:34 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: Democracy
On 30 Dec 2014, at 01:38, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
----- Forwarded Message -----
*From:*Alberto G. Corona <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
*To:* everything-list <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*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.)
And it's not just monotheism. Polytheism, which was also Greek, conceived of gods as
supernatrually powerful immortal people - not as "truth" or some abstract principle. This
was a natural progression from animism in which the world was animated by spirits and
unseen agents which were not people but had human-like motivations and could be
manipulated, propitiated, mollified by shamans. As humans began to dominate nature in the
early city-states it was natural to start to conceive these unseen agents as super-humans,
rather than nature spirits.
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.
The meaning of a word is defined by it's usage. To use it in some unique way is simply to
mis-communicate.
Brent
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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