At 08:29 07-05-2002 -0800, Julie Smith wrote:
I don't know what "non-manicheist Christian" means. I guess I have something new to learn today.
In Manicheanism the world is divided in good and bad or even in good and evil - god and evil persons, good and evil peoples, good and evil nations, etc. The ones that don't think like me or don't practice my faith are...evil. The other characteristic is that the "goods" are good in everything (even when they do evil things, like bombing the others countries) and the "bads" are bad in everything (even when they do or say good things). In "manicheist Christianity" the other (evil) can be, depending on the moment, people from Islam, the atheists, the Judaists, the communists, etc. The French epistemologist Bachelard wrote many years ago that science needed to be "psycanalyzed", in the sense that many scientific concepts (like work, power, etc) were still anthropomorphic and pre-scientific. (no, Bachelard was NOT a marxist, neither a freudian - that would make him evil to many manic heists...). Similarly I think that the acts of many "people of faith" should be "psycanalysed" in the same sense - we would discover that a lot of evil is normally covert by "faith" and "love" (and I have not wrote "men of faith" to avoid that you could think that I was referring only to American Catholic priests and bishops...). In your answer, dear Julie, there was something that confused me - your endorsement of the phrase "Divine Operating Plan". Believe me: only in capitalist America could such phrase have been invented... (Maybe the problem of the world, assuming that a God exists or ever existed - which I doubt - is that the "Divine Strategic Plan" (which was good) has been transformed in a bad "Tactic Plan" and in a worst "Operating Plan" by Himself or by man and women that honestly thought (and still think) they are following His plan. Being a convicted atheist, that once had a strong Christian education, there is something I would like to say to politics everywhere and to many other people, including in this list - please, when you want to talk about Him, please consider thoroughly if you are not using His name in vain. That's why I prefer to ear about the Taoist tradition or even the Buddhist tradition - no God is present in the words that may or not be present in the actions. After all, Sharon and Bush are men of faith, aren't they? Aren't they? Abracos Artur PS: it's interesting that your adress is @mosquitonet. Do you know waht is a "mosquito" in Portuguese? * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
