[Why did modern historians believe the rhetoric of the Pagan Romans?
Traditional pagan Romans blamed Christianity for their decline.
Naive and self-absorbed modern intellectuals took their words at face value.]
[Before his conversion, Paul was not so different from other members of the Jewish elite. He yearned for recognition, not for material goods.
What type of recognition?
Paul wanted to be recognized as more righteous than his peers.
He was not covetous, like those other grasping elites.
Oh yes, he was better.
He enforced the Law.]
[Obligations went from responsibilities to words.
The words of the Law put the majority in bondage.
Common folk (the so-called “deplorables”) were required to meet traditional family and tribal obligations.
They were never adequate when it came to ritual purity. They were good people, but they were cast as losers
All they could hope for was to avoid accusations of thinkanti-object, that is, rumors that would ruin one’s life and relations.
Does that sound vaguely familiar for today’s (2017) America?]
Summary of text [comment] page 83
[Back to Schoonenberg’s text.]
We exercise our freedom in serving either God or Satan.
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[Does the first singularity confirm Augustine’s social construction of Original Sin?
So far, I noted, in blogs on Anthony Zimmerman’s work, that Augustine’s paradigm looks like the myth of the descent of the soul.
Augustine was once a Manichaean philosopher.
In the Manichaean view, babies are evil.
Why?
They are material.
The incorruptible and good spirit that animates each baby collects corruptible and evil material in its descent.
The details about how this occurs are never quite clear. But, everyone knows the punchline: Babies are eternal spiritual sparks trapped in corruptible mortal flesh.]
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[Our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt we evolved in.
The transition from intuitive reference to projected reference was the first singularity experienced by our species.
To me, this singularity is captured in those early stories of Genesis.
Indeed, all ancient written mythologies of southwest Asia testify to the first singularity.]
[The materialist ideologies of the Cold Battle (1945-1989 AD; 7745-7789 U0’) desired to control this fundament of civilization.
However, if “property” cannot be smelled, tasted, touched, seen or heard, then what on earth is it?]
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[If Rousseau is correct, then the word “property” is a socially constructed term that allows the sensible construction of civilized economic and political systems.
If this coagulation of social and sensible construction did not have surviving power, then it would not exist today.
Civilization, an expression of unconstrained complexity, relies on the social construction of “property”. We project the referent “property” into our experience of the word “civilization”.]
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778 AD; 7512-7578 U0’) in his second discourse, proposes that civilization is founded on the idea of property.
The title of that discourse, by the way, is Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality.
Does that title sound vaguely familiar?]
[The civilizational environment of Modernism supports additional developments, including an expansion of knowledge in the realm of actuality.
This includes knowledge of our evolutionary history.
Today, 50 years after Schoonenberg published, the Story of the Fall walks out of the Modernist crypt of works labeled as “mythology”.
The Story of the Fall is a fairy tale trace of a Real and recent change in the human Lebenswelt.
Speech-alone talk replaced hand-speech talk. This apparently small alteration in the way we talk potentiated unconstrained social complexity.]
