"ruin and you'll be brought to ruin".
Context?
The Judeo-Christian premise for our destroying the earth?
by daystar 40 Replies latest watchtower bible
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daystar
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LittleToe
Oh the joys of being online at the same time - synchronous rather than the usual asynchronous posting - LOL.
We keep missing each other's edits.
Rev.11:18.
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daystar
Ah yes, thanks for reminding me of that contradiction. Funny for God waited all the way until Revelation to decide to reign in just how far His people are allowed to subdue it.
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LittleToe
It's only really since the industrial age that we find man raping the planet. Is 1600 years notice not enough?
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daystar
It's only really since the industrial age that we find man raping the planet.
And only since then that he's really had such a capability.
Is 1600 years notice not enough?
Do you really need to ask that? We're pretty darned stubborn creatures.
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LittleToe
Seems like God uses a "Just in Time" production methodology
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daystar
Seems like God uses a "Just in Time" production methodology
LOL!!
Again, though:
"Far from having made 'all objects sacred' Christianity, in the wake of the Bible, has emptied the world of every sacred dimension. The biblical and Christian idea of a divine transcendence manifested in the creative act of God, the very idea of God the Creator, disenchants the whole world, and the world remains only an object created by the voluntary will of the Lord. From such a perspective, the world is only a 'sign' of a presence, the 'other.' The sign of another world or hidden world (Nietzsche). It can no longer be intrinsically the site of the sacred. It becomes a simple object appropriated by human reason, in conformance with the injunction in Genesis, which enjoins man to rule the earth. What the ancients called the 'soul of the world' suddenly disappears. In this way the slow process of 'disenchantment' of the world begins, as described by Weber."
Do you not think that by relegating the divine to a plane above and superior to the material one rather than one in union with the material that there is potential for abuse as the sacred does not then reside within the creation, except for potentially, perhaps, within man?
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daystar
I have this same problem with Buddhism's maxim, for example, that "all is suffering" then insisting upon detachment.
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Leolaia
Edited to add: Surely you don't so soon forget the time-worn Rev.11:18, where God is said to "..bring to ruin those ruining the earth."?
Which refers to moral corruption, in an allusion to Leviticus, i.e. defiling the earth with sin. It has nothing to do with ecological pollution, which is what the Society wants it to mean.
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Narkissos
Alain de Benoist here is hardly original: this is a very common (and imo generally valid) analysis of the effects of Judeo-Christianity, which can be traced back to the rejection of older naturistic religion which ancient Israel shared with all its neighbours: the very notion of creation ex nihilo empties nature of its ontological rooting in divinity, making it little more than the background for the divine-human drama which is all that matters. Things rather than beings. It climaxes in the Protestant rejection of "natural theology". The "stewardship" pattern is all the theological basis which remains to deal with the environment, and it seems to be insufficient to deal with present environmental issues (note that the very notion of "environment" belongs to the same anthropocentrist perspective).
Otoh Judeo-Christianity did not fall from heaven and obviously filled a need of the human civilisation (including culture and technology) as much as it created it. It is a symptom as much as a cause.
The new event (which had not yet happened in the time of Revelation, whose meaning was hardly environmental in its historical context... 11:18 alludes back to Genesis 6, and the "sons of the gods" story) is the saturation of humanity. All religious talk prior to the industrial revolution belongs to a context where man was the weaker one against nature. He had to fight a superior and overwhelming environment to rule. Now this has changed.
As a side note, de Benoist is a respected thinker, but he is also the major guru of the neo-pagan segment of the French far right, which does not invalid his points but at least raises some questions about the potential consequences of his anti-humanism -- nazism worshipped nature too...