From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2015 3:36 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Democracy
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.
Perhaps you are referring to the Jewish mystic concept of the sephiroth kether
(kether means crown in Hebrew) it is that which is manifest yet cannot be
named; the first divine emanation out of pure abstract space… that is without
form or definition yet which fills and animates all things…. The divine spark
so to speak.
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.
I find those definitions of God far more palatable than I do the Manichean
dystopic vision, of a universe divided between the opposing forces of good and
evil.
>>We should fear the devil, but not God.
Or as some spiritual traditions maintain the devil is merely a manifestation of
our own ignorance and impoverished state of being cutoff form our spiritual
being. The devil is a paper tiger… not to say that evil does not exist, but
evil is ultimately a manifestation of profound spiritual ignorance – at least
amongst some spiritual traditions.
So perhaps if I could re-phrase the phrase above to say that we should be
mindful of our ignorance, for inner ignorance is what cuts us off from the
infinite eternal divine infusion of being.
>>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.
Perhaps God evolved.. perhaps the version of reality we exist in evolved from
earlier renditions and over infinite recursion into previous renditions in this
hypothesized behind the scenes reality configuration space the holistic
principle gradually evolved. Why not a Darwinian type process perfecting God
itself so that our God is the result of a long line of preceding Godheads.
Everything I see both outside myself and when I look within is an evolving
maelstrom of barely ordered chaos, balancing on that creative knife edge
between static order and total incoherent chaos. The galaxies, the stars in
them, the sponge-like riverine mega structures of dark matter upon which
galaxies ride. The quantum leaps of electrons between electron shells but never
between. Everything seems a swirl of evolving forms. And so it is within our
own selves; we are far from static beings (even the dullest amongst us)
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 used possessively by most people who use the word to describe some
special supernatural entity that they know about and will be good to them but
whom is going to damn everyone else (all those who does not believe as they do)
to eternal damnation and torture… sadistically punishing them in often
shockingly rendered and detailed accounts of these divine torture chambers
(sub-contracted out to the devil… or as they say Mr. D)
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?
Because of the endless useless and most often moronic arguments the word causes
amongst people who use it. It has become loaded with Judeo-Christian-Islamic
overtones that have polluted its meaning and poisoned its usage to be a word of
hatred, death, punishment, damnation and all manner of intensely negative
emotions and experiences.
>>They use it before, and the main attribute of God is that it has no name,
Sounds a lot like the descriptions given for kether (the crown or godhead
perhaps) it is formless potential, nameless and without definable attributes
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.
I understand your hesitance to use an inferior word that describes one facet of
what the word God describes – such a say the word “One”, but God is not neutral
for by far most people who use it and therein is the rub.
>>When I presented my thesis in France, I suppress all "religious" name, but
>>the atheists were still saying the same bs on it.
Dogmatists will be dogmatic whatever the colors they may be wearing.
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").
I agree with that… with a scientific attitude towards theology; after all – at
least IMO -- exploring the mind of God is the most interesting pursuit in the
universe… if by God, we understand a deep mystic re-binding thread of some
unfathomable un-nameable essential something (or other).
-Chris
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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