lukitas
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Before you all fall in love with Mr. Grillo, read this https://libcom.org/blog/movimento-cinque-stelle-has-protected-system-–-comment-wu-ming-26022013 by Wu Ming a writers collective who have been watching Italian politics for quite a while.
Beppe may be all sunshine, warmth and love, but I distrust a movement that can mix racism with anti-politics. Smells a bit like that other Italian who declared himself to be neither left nor right, and then proceeded to march on Rome with his ‘Fighting Fascists’.
And the fact that the Movimiento 5 Stelle is not a party, nor a movement, but an interweb social forum, a copyright owned by Beppe Grillo, makes me very queasy. Beppe Grillo is not the leader, but he is the owner, the proprietor of M5S.Thanks, but you left me flailing in limbo.
How does the search for truth point to evangelical christianity?
I know as little about The Truth as any other human being, but it has been one of my major hangups for quite a while.
I know my perception of the real is a construct, a simulation made by my brain, using sensory inputs, imagination and a little bit of deduction. Taking into account dreams, misperceptions and false perceptions, acknowledging that The Real exists is already a leap of faith.
Having accepted, as an axiom, the existence of The Real, I need to find out what, outside of my own perception, belongs to that reality. I have to rely on outside sources. Science is a powerful tool, fallible and limited as it is : one cannot always be sure the authors of scientific papers have done their homework, wether they have another agenda than absolute truth, and they may have made mistakes or influenced the outcome in some unknown, unseen manner.
Nonetheless, science is a lot more reliable than history, or the news media. We cannot be sure that Catilina was the perverted bastard Cicero describes : the only witness was his biggest enemy, who was not beyond a spot of histrionics. We don’t know Caligula (or Nero) was as monstrous as described : the describers were political enemies.
We know even less about early christianity. Roman politics was written up by contemporaries, sometimes even protagonists. The closest we can get to Jesus is Three or four letters of St Paul’s, who never even met the man. Mark, Luke, Mathew and John were compiled later, and all of the holy scripture is rife with inclusions, alterations and what can only be described as fakes. St. Peter’s letters are all fakes, the man couldn’t write, and he couldn’t have been very good at Greek.
It would be a lot easier to reconstruct Mohammed’s true words than to do so for Jesus, at least the Qur’an was written down as Mohammed spoke (even though they rearranged his sayings in a rather silly way).
Even so, If you disregard all the ‘doubtful’ material in holy scripture, what remains is powerful and dangerous. What remains is a communist utopia with strong spiritual bent. Maybe one could even deduce a rejection of God as the all-powerful creator : God the Father is the one who is killed in the person of his Son, (who cries out his doubt (disbelief?) at the end : Why hast thou forsaken me?) What remains is the ‘Holy Spirit’ which is what happens when Christians meet in communion, togetherness. God the Creator has taken his hands off his creation; we, ‘the summit of creation’ are the ones tasked with the building of paradise on earth.If that is the sort of truth you are digging for, I can dig it.
Still wonder why you should call yourself evangelical. Such a silly word, like catholic and orthodox, bragging about the ‘authenticity’ and ‘antiquity’ of my particular set of beliefs.Still, if I wanted to join a faith, and my principal preoccupation was The Truth, I would still go for Islam and the Qur’an every time.
Why choose christianity?
If you want to put your faith in an omnipotent and omniscient God, why not go for Islam? They are after all, the only one of the great religions to have a (reasonably) active injunction against usury, the counting of interest.
You are smart, you must have done your homework, so you must know arguments against religions in particular and religion in general. Every one of them is tainted with blood and greed, but the only one to have sustained a nearly global commercial peace for more than a thousand years was Islam. Why choose the only religion that has never stopped proselytizing, never stopped missionary work, never stopped functioning in terms of growth and conquest? Forgive me for being presumptuous, but I really would like to know.great debate, thanks people!
The problem within autocratic regimes was always the succession. Stalin’s dead, Mao’s gone, what do we do now?
Democracy provided an excellent solution with the built-in guillotine. Once every X time, we get a chance to fire the whole lot of them.
I must admit a sort of sympathy, even admiration (with a grudge) for guys like Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin and Trotski.
In a dispute, there can be a point where argument or debate does not any longer suffice. There is a moment where the only argument that we have left is violence. But natural justice demands a fair trial before such violence be meted out.
I humbly propose we should maybe extend the logic of the democratic guillotine : what if any representative, senator, congressman, ceo, found wanting, voted out of office, guilty of coruption, should be immediately guillotined upon leaving office. Why not put some real risk into the games of power? Wouldn’t that be a great incentive for good governance? And just imagine the show : The Public Trial, the March of Shame, and then the Vengeance of the People is carried out in Great Pomp.Spirituality does not necessarily overlap with doing the right thing, it is quite often the contrary. Le Père Joseph was a vicious realpolitiker, but also a grand mystic. D.T. Suzuki was a brilliant zen master, very influential in the cultural upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s, but in the the late 30’s, he described the japanese invasion of China as an act of love through the sword, explained how military discipline was the shortest road to enlightenment for the lay person, etc.
Faith allows well-meaning people to condone and even commit heinous crimes.
On the other hand, faith is an absolute necessity to those who would build another world. We need to believe in a dream, in something that does not yet exist, so that we can make the dream real.
We do need a better understanding of psychology, but I think it is urgent we take a closer look at faith : We cannot do without it, but we cannot really trust it : I think Stalin and Mao were faithful to their beliefs, convinced they were doing what they could to bring a beautiful dream to life, while they brought untold misery upon the people they ruled.
I am terrified at the possibility of seeing new charismatic leaders, joining the people in a mystical union for a better future, the inevitable logic of revolutionary, ‘just’ terror.
But we do need faith in a ‘better’ future. We need to invent the parameters that will stop private foibles like envy and greed from becoming the drivers of society. We do need to believe in the possibility of a fair society, that impossible dream from the new testament : ‘a community of believers, sharing everything’According to Parsons, during the period 1629–44, there were as many as 234,185 insurrections in China, averaging 43 events per day, or 1.8 outbreaks per hour” (Deng 1999:220) (note in David Graeber : Debt, The first 5000 years)
1.8 outbreaks per hour, and there weren’t a billion chinese at the time.
