On 31 Dec 2014, at 20:24, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/31/2014 11:12 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
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.)
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.
Read Plato, because that *is* exactly what he did. Transforming a
popular intuition into a science. The abtract principles are the ideas
in the Noùs, the second primary hypostase.
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.
Like in science, a term can admit different interpretation, like line
and plane in different algebra, or like group, sets, etc. But we keep
the name, as if we change the name, we lost the different
interpretations of the *same* abstract concept. We do this with
everything in science, but are still influenced by the dogma when
forbidding the doing of this is theology.
If you don't like the meaning, just let us change the usage and the
attitude. New names would only augment the confusion, and prevent
people to compare their intuition with the facts.
Bruno
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
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
