[In Augustine’s time, mothers know this.
They also know that their babies could die long before they were old enough to acquire secret knowledge.
Baptism is like a ticket out of a Manichaean trap. Mothers want their children baptized in order to redeem the baby’s spiritual spark within its material evil.
Plus, they wanted it done without delay.]
[So the question becomes: How do I redeem the spiritual spark that makes up my true self?
Redemption is promised through secret knowledge (gnosis) that guides the ascent of the soul.]
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?]
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[How did speech-alone talk potentiate unconstrained complexity?
Consider the word “property”.
Property is not a thing. One cannot see, hear, touch, taste or smell the referent. The referent cannot be pictured or pointed to.
The purely symbolic word ‘property’ did not exist in hand-speech talk. Its referent cannot be imaged or indexed.
Speech-alone talk can label anything, even non-sensual things like “property”.
Real things and patterns no longer receive iconic and indexal words. Instead, we project iconic and indexal qualities into words that label things that we figure must be real, like the word “property”.]
[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.]
Summary of text [comment] page 82
[50 years after Schoonenberg, the following statement cannot be denied:
Post-religionist (enlightenment) religions build on mythology, not science.
Also, they adapt to the civilizational environment of Modernism.
They battle one another for domination.]
