A View Of The Divine By Humanity After A Comet/Nuclear Holocaust!
Wrote this back in 1996 on local.talk at WKU (could only be seen by students on campus, and not public to the rest of USENET), but more and more I am needing to quote it, so moving a copy of it to my NOTES on FB:
A View Of The Divine By Humanity After A Comet/Nuclear Holocaust!
> Greetings,
>
> I and another guy have been arguing this issue through e-mail
> for quite a while now. I would appreciate a fresh opinion -- or
> several fresh opinions. The topic we are debating is what the effect
> of a world wide holocaust (roughly 80% of modern human population
> dying simultaniously -- evenly dispersed in most areas) would have
> upon organized religions. How we got into this debate is a completely
> different story that I won't use to bore any newsgroup readers. More
> specifically, I'd like to now what people think that the effect of
> such an event upon the Catholic Church in Latin America would be --
> would the Church survive or not?
>
> Please respond by posting. Thanx in advance.
>
> C U on the other side,
> SCG Zaboem
> free-lance speech writer
>
>
Well, the first point I would like to make is that since we are all mortal, we are all going to die, it's just a question of when. I tend to agree with A. Whitney Brown of SNL fame, and that if the world is going to be destroyed through Nuclear Holocaust, I would much rather prefer to be at ground zero rather than to slowly suffer and eventually die a year or two later alone, because darn it, I'm a people person! 😁 However, I think such global destruction would much more likely come about from a runaway comet, like the Shoemaker-Levy comet that hit Jupiter.
Religion comes from the Latin - Religue (Re-lee-gae) meaning to bind oneself to God. The Torah (Law) was what the Jews believed helped bind them to God. So with other religions, some tradition or law is what binds the believers to their deity or deities. The German theologian Karl Barth said that the minute you tried to do systematic theology, you immediately put the great "I Am" (best translated, I am who I am, or I am going to be who I am going to be) into a box, yet the very nature of the "I Am" should and does shatter any boxes that we use to define the Infinite and the irony is that as finite beings we try too hard to make God into our image and definition. Rather, it is us who should allow ourselves to become more like the image of our creator, and so Jesus could say to Nicodemus that the Wind blows where it pleases, you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going, and so it is with all who are born of the Spirit (Wind).
Both Catholics and Southern Fundamentalist Protestants tend to equate Christianity with culture, however, Christianity is a catalyst that itself does not change, but any culture it encounters, it will bring about a change that seeks to bring the culture into the value systems of the Kingdom of God. Thus it is more our cultural identity that separates the many fragments of Christianity, and the culture of other religious traditions that result in a fragmentation of the understanding of the Divine. Of course atheism, humanism, process philosophy, and skepticism, and most deconstruction would see humanity itself as the divine. Of course, like Plato, they never quite explain the demi-urge and unlike Plato, they never speak of a World of Forms, but rather insist that Chaos and Hades, which by their very definition have no life or soul, can somehow provide and nurture both life and soul. If this is the case, then we must submit to the likes of Darwin and accept that we are little more than bastards and bitches with an evolutionary advantage of the most complex and advanced neural network (brain) and then we must also acknowledge that great patron saint of the Nazi's, Nietzche, and realize that only the strong survive, so if you must go the way of the Dodo, so be it, what is of paramount importance is that you strive to be and become top dog.
But enough of these gravy train stories of humanism (* http://youtu.be/3xy5DmPIOx4). If the world's population was reduced by 80%, God would still be GOD (I am going to be who I am going to be). It would only be our understanding that would change. And since Christians should be continuously re-evaluating their relationship with their God, they will find that trying to understand an Infinite God demands that their understanding of Him is eternally a learning process that should never come to completion. Hey, what do you know, tomorrow really is a new day after all, for better or for worse.
Ever on the Cutting Edge,
Paradox at bratcgw3@pulsar.cs.wku.edu
bratcgw@wkuvx1.wku.edu
Paradox@trader.com
PS>As far as South American Catholicism is concerned, I think it would simply accelerate in its present trend towards Liberation Theology, which is very much like early Protestant Reformation Theology, but with even more conviction in regards to the injustice experienced by the peasant class.
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Original NOTE/BLOG from USENET local.talk at WKU (private group on Vax/VMS platform on WKU campus) along with comments can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/10224341695799079/ where the post had been migrated to on Facebook on February 2, 2015 - I have migrated over here to Google Blogger since Facebook has removed NOTES in a list from Profiles & who knows when they shall outright just delete them.
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* Youtube reference added later, as YouTube did not exist in 1996.
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See also: How did NASA's trip to Mars with the Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1971 lead to the formation of the Shroud Of Turin Research Project? https://haqodeshim.blogspot.com/2020/11/how-did-nasas-trip-to-mars-with-mariner.html
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See also: The Holographic Universe and the Father of the Heavenly Lights . . . https://haqodeshim.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-holographic-universe-and-father-of.html
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