On 31 Dec 2014, at 20:12, '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]>
To: everything-list <[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.
Which comes from the ONE of the greeks, mixed with the Jewish legend.
Well, if you forget the superstition, it has some important relation.
Monotheism is a reflexion of parmenides or Plotinus monism.
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;
With some definition, fearing God is a nonsense. We should fear the
devil, but not God. But of course this aspect of the thing is not yet
retrieved from arithmetic. I hipe it will, but I am not 100% sure.
Open problem. How much can e say that god is good, like Plato thought?
We don't know yet.
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.
I can make sense. No one is Godless. Godless people confuse God and
some hero of fairy tale.
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.)
Like the star were Gods, but we know better, and adapt the vocabulary.
If not we sustain the dogma in the field, and, as we can see in my
case, we stop the progress.
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?
Why? They use it before, and the main attribute of God is that it has
no name, so it is good to use the substantive instead. Creating a new
name automatically will make us believe that the name is important,
and so would be gravely misleading. It would make more complex the
comparison. During a period, I use "One" in the place of "God". This
led people to believe that I was advertising for Plotinus in a
misleading way. God is the very general term. Just look at "God" in
the wikis, you will see that the same term "god" is used in quite
different meaning, which is useful when doing science, as we must be
neutral since the start.
When I presented my thesis in France, I suppress all "religious" name,
but the atheists were still saying the same bs on it.
Let us just keep the scientific attitude, and let us try to go beyond
the vocabulary issue. The monotheistic theologians are, in general,
less wrong than the atheists on even the God of the machine. (That is
what makes some strong-atheists nervous, but it is just because they
cannot say "I was wrong").
Bruno
-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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