Subj : EUROPE                                                   [2]
To   : Bob Eyer
From : Frank Masingill
Date : Wed Oct 25 2000 01:30 am

 BE> production of tools of greater and greater sophistication.

 BE> We are the only species which can read a book and acquire all
 BE> the knowledge of our forbears without having to relive their
 BE> struggles.

 BE> That's why progress happens and why it MUST happen.

 BE> And that's why Religion has no monopoly of the subject of
 BE> salvation.

        Bob, as you know, I have always taken you AND your
philosophical conclusions seriously because, for one thing, you are
pleasingly articulate and KNOW precisely that and why you are a
Modern in philosophy.

        Let me ask you a question, if I may:

        Eric Voegelin, in one of his volumes, remarks that "things
do not happen in the astrophysical universe; the astrophysical
universe together with all things in it happens in God."

        Let us agree that he is using the Platonic-Christian
symbolism, "God" as the "Ground of Existence (Being), and that he
wishes to be understood as assigning ultimate mystery and divinity
to this ultimate reality so far as Man is concerned, again taking
these words as with ALL language elements to be symbolism with
beginnings in the minds of men at points in history, as "quality"
and "quantity", e.g. begin with Cicero as far as known.   

        I am attempting to discover what it is with which you truly
replace this symbol and related symbols and the differences in
meaning thereby intended.   

        Thus, in that sentence quoted from Voegelin, with what word
or phrase would you replace the last word?  Instead of "God" would
it be "the inflated ego of man."  I'm guessing you DO have
difficulty with a phrase like that although I'm not sure why.  Would
the replacement be an abstract entity like "Progress" with the
abstraction, despite Whitehead's warning, concretized to illustrate
all that Man can accomplish provided Man gives up searches for any
truth of existence beyond HIMSELF that serve only as distraction.
This, after all, IS the center of our debate, is if not.  

        I'm not attempting to match wits with you in a situtation of
our respective stores of "factual" knowledge of either history or
philosophy.  I'm trying to find out how you stand WRT the QUESTION
itself, i.e., the question of origin and destiny. 

        I believe that you DO make a distinction between my
questioning search as a ground for intellectual debate among
confreres and the ridiculous preaching of dogmatists who use the
"God" symbol with the authority of a "Word" as an imperious
relegation of intellectual debate to the regions of an infernal hell
peopled with all of the enemies of the dogmatist-ideologue who
opposes science with all of the fibre of his being.  

Frank

--- PPoint 2.07
 * Origin: Maybe in 5000 years (1:396/45.12)

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