Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
>
> Well, cousin. It has been sixty years and Jews still have no secure
> country even though places that both Christians and Moslems find sacred are
> thus only because the Jews made them so. Not only that but the
> intellectual capital that created both of those stories came from this
> little group of 14 million world wide.
(Few in number also were
the classical Greeks who gave us the idea of the polis:
the peer space of speech and action, which Hannah Arendt
called an "anarchy" because in it no persons were
ruled by others -- as in Marx's vision of the communist
future where "the administration of things will replace
the government of men" --> including representative
so-called democracy which is really more like delegatocracy --
the "admirable Greek people" who also gave us philosophy....)
> I've often wondered where the size
> of the Jewish people made it fit in the great religions of the world.
> There are a couple of billion Christians and over a billion Moslems.
[snip]
With all due respects, jewish persons have many
secure "countries", such as Rockland County New York USA.
There are even -- mirabile visu! -- some orthodox jews
who seem to understand the difference between spiritual
life (die geistige Welt) and dead soil (blosse Stoff):
http://netureikarta.org/
If it had not been for Hitler, the Zionists' worst
fear might have come true: Not the fear of jews being
persecuted and killed (which can always be turned to good use
by the Zionists!) but the fear of Judiasm as
a parochial belief system (including, of course, its
mutilation of baby boys) disappearing from living
social life. If it had not been for Hitler,
G-d might have "died" from lack of interest -- while,
in exchange, scholars of jewish extraction might
have continued to contribute mightily to the
further advance of Universal Culture (physics,
phenomenological/hermeneutical philosophy and social
sciences, etc.).
But it's not just jewish persons who make life in this
world more miserable than it has to be because of
fantasies they entertain about the dead: Even the classical Greeks,
with -- as Bruno Snell described it -- their very different
gods who raised man up instead of putting
man down -- even the classical Greeks had
their
Antigone: "The dead make the longest demands on
us; we die forever."
--
"...Light is really the source of all
being.... [A]ll material in nature, the
mountains and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has
been spent, and this crumpled mass
called material casts a shadow, and the
shadow belongs to Light."
(http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/jpg/Kahn_Salk.html)
Thus, in a derivitive way which is forgetful of its
origin, even beliefs in a "promised land" or a "homeland" bear the mark,
for one cho can interpret them in terms of that origin,
of light and hope and not just "man's heritage of underworld"
(--Sophocles, "Oedipus at Colonus"). For our "origin"
is ahead of us -- it is the good which is always beyond being,
or, as Ernst Bloch spoke of it in his _The Principle of Hope_:
"...the root of history is the working, creating human
being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has
grasped himself and established what is his, without
expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in
the world something which shines into the childhood of
all and in which no one has yet been: homeland."
Next year -- and why not this year at last already? -- in
the true Jerusalem, which, to borrow a phrase from
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, perhaps echoing Nicholas of Cusa --
is "everywhere and nowhere".
If not us, who, if not now when?
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
