KK> A good example comes to mind in some of the new 'plain language'
 KK> trnslations of the Bible.  In the old KJV, Jesus is made to say
 KK> something like "When thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of
 KK> light."
   When I encountered Eric Voegelin for the first time as a grad student I 
ad
only the smattering of education that experience in a fundamentalist home,
adventures and travels in a great war and a rather rapidly obtained
undergraduate education could give me.  When I heard a man of vast
philosophical reading and learning who had come through the baptism of the
Nazi ideological breakdown in Europe extracting from the Gospel of John
certain essences of differentiation in the experience of western man I was
unprepared for anything except the two opposite extremes of fundamentalism on
the one hand and atheism on the other.
   This led me to ask Voegelin one day in some frustration how one could come
to such a mature treatment of literature that had become canonical such as
that which was commonly called the "Bible."   I told him with some anxiety
that it appeared that in order for anybody to understand a great part of such
literature one must expend years in careful study and even then some of the
understanding would have to be tentative.  I think I was consciously or
unconsciously BEGGING him to offer some short cut out of my dilemma.
   Of course, he did not.  He merely shrugged (as I should have expected) and
affirmed that this WAS indeed the case.  It was when I came to accept that
ineluctable circumstance of man (especially modern man) that I found myself 
t
least on the road to kicking aside much of the unadulterated garbage of
"understanding" that so drives the fundamentalist mentality which cares 
ittle
for the questions in man's experience but is eager to drive through quickly 
o
half-baked ANSWERS capably of being bolstered ONLY by mountains of axioms,
spuriously aligned quotations, emotional preaching and the like.  I had long
since encountered the "ministerial tone" which made every little country
bumpkin imagine that through the "spirit" and "reading the book" he could
acquire in only a few months the authority to tell everybody within earshot
(later electronic earshot) the absolute truth of existence.  
   I also learned in the course of life from then on that Fundamentalism was
by no means restricted to "Christian" fundamentalism but that the trouble
was ideology itself - something which, as you have no doubt observed still
wins me bitter opposition here and elsewhere.  Many think I should "sell my
birthright" and follow the popular mode of imagining that there just HAS TO 
E
lying around somewhere a DOCTRINE that is the true one just waiting for
somebody to stumble on it.  
   It appears to be very difficult for us to accept the lot of man as we
actually do experience it.  We know ourselves as people have ALWAYS known it
really to be ONLY a PART of a reality we can symbolize and within which we 
an
seek knowledge and wisdom (do science AND philosophy).  It is only through 
he
myth that we can deal with that larger reality in which we PARTICIPATE with
our entire being.  
   For me, words like "faith" and "trust" can be meaningful ONLY within such 

context.  A world of human beings desparently DEMAND more.  A couple of
innocent, young Mormon missionaries were at my door just a day or two ago
YEARNING to supply ME with the TOTAL TRUTH OF EXISTENCE which I knew had only
been spoonfed to them and which they had been admonished that they must
believe and protect at all cost!  
   But then a philosopher must take into account the further question of WHY
most people can see no further than some ideology or set of religious
doctrines or why if they become embittered and distrustful of same they must
then leap to the further doctrine of atheism.  The lonliness of an Elijah on
the mountain of despair or of Socrates in the rejection of a polis which has
rejected him is not a comfortable paradigm in which the masses can live.  
his
truth is just as valid as the truth that reality cannot be contained within
the pages of some book or in the imagination of a "possessor of wisdom and
knowledge."  
   Perhaps a robust, secular polytheism IS, as Odo Marquard suggests
(_Farewell to Matters of Principle_) the best most of us can do in a world
where the gods are no longer permitted to live.
Sincerely, 
                                     Frank
                                                                              
                                                       
--- PPoint 2.05
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