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RE: Dutch Court Orders Bill Gates to Appear in Person to Defend against Charges of Crimes Against Humanity
it seems to come down to faith in things higher or more fundamental than human laws. that is why even as a non-christian i can deeply relate to people who live for god, rather than for the nihilistic icons and wordly ideologies of "the (fictional) world"
they generally seem to have retained more of their human-ness or their 'instincts' as you put it. they do not pathologically reference current ideology to justify their actions, rather they reference their religious ideology and the words of jesus which is in many senses more aware of human abuse of power than the average atheist.
an objective view depends entirely on our frame of reference, which is why the smartest people can be absolutely lost in the sound logic of a mind construct whose foundation is erroneous.
god as a foundation makes people accept that not everything in the world is as it may seem or that we have all the answers yet. it's just that christianity may not be the roots of our culture but rather the first major attack on the roots of our culture because it assumes and presupposes certain ideas that may already lead one down a potentially unfactual path, for instance the idea that god is transcendant rather than omnipresent in all of life, that i am here and god is somewhere else. it spawns the idea of causality, of separation between a this and a that which does have apparent merit talking about the physical world, but falls short on realizing the interconnectedness of all things or the very sober realization that "things" do not exist any more than our obsessive need to divide and sort everything into little bits for the social convenience of being able to talk about them.
i like recommendations, will read that article after a shower. it's very good to read you again, many blessings to you
I respectfully disagree. Before Christianity, and even within the large cities or empires that already existed at that time, there were no official ten commandments. Which are for everyone to understand.
The fact that lying (or bearing false witness against someone) is considered wrong is only so self-evident to all of us BECAUSE it is based on Christianity and well documented. If you took away this self-understanding, what would remain?
The other commandments, such as not deceiving anyone (for one's own benefit), not killing anyone for the sake of murder, not disregarding the honouring of parents as father and mother qua their authority over their children, officially came into being under Christianity.
Greek and Roman law only included Greeks and Romans or those who were subject to this law. If you entered their territory as a foreigner, you were not under their protectorate, but could be killed or taken advantage of, but no one was responsible for an ordinary foreigner/expatriate. All rights were based on territorial law, but not as a generally applicable order outside one's own borders.
There were certainly similarities to the Christian order, but at what point do you want to describe this as ‘our cultural roots’? Rather than going further back in time and thereby making it much more difficult to find the roots, it makes more sense to recognise that Christianity unified something that had previously existed in countless fragments in the form of smaller tribal cultures and that these many different clans were characterised by the fact that they acted according to the principle of conquest and enslavement of competing clans or foreign countries and that revenge was a completely legitimate concept, just like human sacrifice (killing own tribes people for the gods).
Christians put an end to human sacrifice and instead created a new symbolism for it, moved on to animal sacrifice, gave that up too and finally, with Jesus, achieved the complete substitution of all sacrifices to be brought to death alive through his martyrdom.
If you interpret it as an ‘attack on our previous roots’, I would fully agree, but at the same time say that I see it as a legitimate attack. Christians, uniquely in human history, have recognised that the monogamous relationship between a man and a woman, marriage, is not only a sacred but a thoroughly pragmatic relationship that must be entered into with foresight and follows a life discipline. Instead of finding marriage either completely unimportant or regarding polygamy as the ideal or stoning women who have committed adultery, as in other cultures, Christians have introduced much milder punishments.
Their best idea was to officially place the woman under the protection of the man, because they saw crystal clear that no woman in the world is protected when men decide to subjugate her or treat her like fair game.
Only idiots twist this fact and make the husband the enemy of the wife. But women who lived as normal people hundreds of years ago (not the nobles or royal/imperial retinue) have always known that their fathers, husbands and sons were their only life insurance.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, I would speculate that Christianity may never have reached its full bloom, but has suffered a great deal of damage to its image through the institutional churches and organisations, which should please the devil immensely. I'd recommend reading Rachel Wilsons book "Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation'
The separation between God and man is established as a way of thinking for the important reason that you first have to be able to think the separation in order to understand being united at all. If ‘everything is God, and God is in me and I am in God’, this saying - taken on its own - would just be meaningless babble.
Only when I am able to make this separation in the bright moment of my schizophrenia do I experience the pain of this act in its full dimension. Because in that moment I have rid myself of my conscience, that which immediately speaks to me again when I reunite with God. But because I cannot express linguistically that ‘I am God’, because my prayer cannot be addressed to myself, but must remain addressed to something higher, outside myself. Does that make sense to you?
As a human being, you know that you are not the river or the mountain. Neither is the mountain or the river a human being. This separation is a physically objective reality. But that does not stop you from admiring or honouring the connections of this creation.
Any form of prayer makes you feel that this boundary is very fluid when you are in a contemplative state. But after a prayer, you get up again and you make food, argue with your people, sin and err. Christians have well recognised that everyone sins and the commandments didn't come about because no one would break them, they came about BECAUSE they are broken. Christianity is an extremely intelligent system. That there are also other intelligent forms of religion: Notwithstanding. I study them and respect them, but I won't convert. What would be the point? I'm rooted in it.
I thank you for giving me the food to make an objection and also to clarify my mind and free write an answer. I hope you don't mind that my answer got long.
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