Human psychology evolved under in the social milieu of constrained complexity. Currently, humans live in unconstrained complexity. What has this done to our minds? These topics are addressed in various parts of An Archaeology of the Fall, particularly in chapters 8C and 11B.
Summary of text [comment] pages 83 and 84
Note Schoonenberg’s comment: In our freedom, we serve God or Satan.
[For the past few months, my blogs riffed off of page 83.
The thought experiment where I choose ‘something’ served as a tool for investigating Schoonenberg’s passage on responsibility and freedom.
Redemption is freely choosing to be responsible.]
[Normal contexts follow the logic of exclusion. However, exclusion is difficult to attain.
Sin enters through destructive ideas in the mirror of the world.
Law enters through the self-justification of I, seat of choice.]
[My associations show that the bondage of personal sin already reflects a normal context (the thought experiment, the mirror of the world) both beyond and within the person.
Perhaps, the bondage of sin and the bondage of a religionsovereign are not so different.]
[At this part of his text, Schoonenberg focuses on personal sins. He points to the bondage of sin for the individual.
Yet, in the hazy distance, the words of an (infra)sovereign religion linger.]
Summary of text [comment] pages 83 and 84
Schoonenberg writes that, when the Son of God invites us to the service of the Father, that service will have a liberating character. We are redeemed. We are free from that other servitude that may be called “bondage”.
Summary of text [comment] pages 83 and 84
[Welfare and other transfer payments are particularly deceptive.
When does getting something for free (one of the ways that the government attains its objectsorganization) sound like an “responsibility”?
Yet, it imposes the unavoidable: The recipient must vote for the Party of Larger Government.
In order to do that, the recipient justifies “himself” through state propaganda.]
Summary of text [comment] pages 83 and 84
[Laws are written in words. These words impose the unavoidable on others.
Why do legislatures exempt themselves from their own legislation?]
[Modern propaganda asserts that sovereign words (pro-object rhetoric and legislation) do not change incentives’
This assertion underlies the static economic analysis that always fails to predict the cost of central government impositions.]
Summary of text [comment] page 83
[The rules of the camp depend on the capricious will of the sovereign director-dictator.]
Summary of text [comment] page 83
[What does Giorgio Agamben mean by the term “homo sacer” (Latin for “sacred man”).
In the camp, the sovereign holds the individual under the law as one to whom the law does not apply.
Why does the sovereign hold but the law not apply?
The subject is deemed a thinkanti-object, who has conscienceanti-object. So “his” very thoughts are crimes.]
