Category Archives: Defining Religion

07/19/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DO

[Three ideals substitute for a divine Trinity, allowing sovereign power to contextualize itself as the anthropological actuality in objectrelation.

Each post-religious enlightenment godhead calls for and justifies the exercise of sovereign power, according to its manifestation of the three ideals.

The past 370 years continue the so-called Wars of Religion.

The Peace of Westphalia (in 1648 AD) is the starting point.

Post-religionist enlightenment godheads are conjured.

Then they battle among one another.]

07/10/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DH

[The Russian Soviet Communist Godhead embodies this potential:

Liberty (of the state to own all property)

Equality (of all citizens in state ownership of property, with the party speaking for the citizens)

Fraternity (among members of the Communist Party. Party members assure liberty and equality, and challenge the bourgeois, who are the source of all failure.)]

07/6/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DF

[What is the lesson?

A post-religionist (enlightenment) godhead wins every battle among the enlightenment gods in the 20th century.

American citizens do not win the so-called Cold War.

Big Government Liberalism win the Cold Battle among the Materialist Ideologies (7745-7789 U0’).

Big Government Liberalism is a sovereign religion.]

07/5/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DE

Summary of text [comment] page 82

[Today, certain semiotic scholastics may be labeled post-modern.

In the same way, I call certain enlightenment and modern thinkers post-religionist.

Schoonenberg is not a post-religionist (enlightenment) thinker.

He is a modern who witnessed the horrors of modernism.

He tries to find a way out of the interpellation of the post-religionist (enlightenment) godheads.

Unfortunately, he writes right at the time when a new set of enlightenment gods enter into conflict.

In 1960, the conflict rages between two ideologies of materialism: Soviet Communism and Big Government Liberalism.]

07/3/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DD

[In place of the myth of Genesis, Enlightenment thinkers propose (what they think is) a true (as opposed to false) scenario.

It goes something like this:

Humans are naturally good and well-intentioned.

Then, civilization came along with the concept of property. The self-centering condition of ownership blocks their good and well-intended natures.

Hence the slogan from the French Revolution goes like this:

Liberty (from property)

Equality (of property for all)

Fraternity (through our good and well-intended natures)]

06/29/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DB

[Moderns insist. The stories of Genesis are mythology. Why? They wanted people to convert. They wanted them to abandon their Christian mythologies.

For the modern, the stories of Adam and Eve are false.

Original Sin, a doctrine relying on the stories of Adam and Eve, is also false.]

06/28/17

Man and Sin by Piet Schoonenberg (1964) 2.3 DA

[Today, 50 years after Schoonenberg published, I may delineate threads that link the themes.

First, let me start with the idea that Modernism was built on mythologies.

For the modern, mythology associates with the word: “False”. The dichotomy is true versus false. Mythology is false.

For the premodern Christian, mythology associates with the word: “Deception”. The dichotomy is true versus deception. Pagan myth is deceptive.

Why?

The original Christians are all converts. They abandon their Greek, German, Roman and other mythologies. Yet, those religions still call them to return.]