++> Inspired by a Frank Masingill to Keith Knapp
 ++> PHIL response ["Clever flies"]
 
     Carefully read your following posting and as always.....
     enjoyed it .....some short of the conclusions.
 
 FM> When I encountered Eric Voegelin for the first time as a grad
 FM> student I had only the smattering of education that experience
 FM> in a fundamentalist home, adventures and travels in a great war
 FM> and a rather rapidly obtained undergraduate education could give me.
 FM> When I heard a man of vast philosophical reading and learning who
 FM> had come through the baptism of the Nazi ideological breakdown in
 FM> Europe extracting from the Gospel of John certain essences of
 FM> differentiation in the experience of western man I was unprepared
 FM> for anything except the two opposite extremes of fundamentalism on
 FM> the one hand and atheism on the other.
 
 FM> This led me to ask Voegelin one day in some frustration how one
 FM> could come to such a mature treatment of literature that had
 FM> become canonical such as that which was commonly called the "Bible."
 FM> I told him with some anxiety that it appeared that in order for
 FM> anybody to understand a great part of such literature one must
 FM> expend years in careful study and even then some of the
 FM> understanding would have to be tentative.  I think I was consciously
 FM> or unconsciously BEGGING him to offer some short cut out of my dilemma.
 
 FM> Of course, he did not.  He merely shrugged (as I should have
 FM> expected) and affirmed that this WAS indeed the case.  It was when
 FM> I came to accept that ineluctable circumstance of man (especially
 FM> modern man) that I found myself at least on the road to kicking
 FM> aside much of the unadulterated garbage of "understanding" that
 FM> so drives the fundamentalist mentality which cares little for the
 FM> questions in man's experience but is eager to drive through
 FM> quickly to half-baked ANSWERS capably of being bolstered ONLY by
 FM> mountains of axioms, spuriously aligned quotations, emotional
 FM> preaching and the like.  I had long since encountered the
 FM> "ministerial tone" which made every little country bumpkin imagine
 FM> that through the "spirit" and "reading the book" he could acquire
 FM> in only a few months the authority to tell everybody within earshot
 FM> (later electronic earshot) the absolute truth of existence.
 
 FM> I also learned in the course of life from then on that Fundamentalism
 FM> was by no means restricted to "Christian" fundamentalism but that the
 FM> trouble was ideology itself - something which, as you have no doubt
 FM> observed still wins me bitter.........
 
     ..........not bitter! ......more an exploratory opposition!
 
 FM> .............................opposition here and elsewhere.  Many
 FM> think I should "sell my birthright" and follow the popular mode of
 FM> imagining that there just HAS TO BE lying around somewhere a DOCTRINE
 FM> that is the true one just waiting for somebody to stumble on it.
 
 FM> It appears to be very difficult for us to accept the lot of man
 FM> as we actually do experience it.  We know ourselves as people have
 FM> ALWAYS known it really to be ONLY a PART of a reality we can symbolize
 FM> and within which we can seek knowledge and wisdom (do science AND
 FM> philosophy).  It is only through the myth that we can deal with that
 FM> larger reality in which we PARTICIPATE with our entire being.
 
     .........."only through myth" is heavy to lay upon others!
 
 FM>  For me, words like "faith" and "trust" can be meaningful ONLY
 FM> within such a context.  A world of human beings desparently DEMAND
 FM> more.  A couple of innocent, young Mormon missionaries were at my
 FM> door just a day or two ago YEARNING to supply ME with the TOTAL
 FM> TRUTH OF EXISTENCE which I knew had only been spoonfed to them
 FM> and which they had been admonished that they must believe and
 FM> protect at all cost!
 
 FM> But then a philosopher must take into account the further question
 FM> of WHY most people can see no further than some ideology or set of
 FM> religious doctrines or why if they become embittered and distrustful
 FM> of same they must then leap to the further doctrine of atheism.
 
     ...a little unfair to make a general case. Those satisfied with
     an ideology have found what they need ...many follow complex paths
     not embittered nor distrustful in the way you suggest, nor is it
     always a LEAP to atheism. You tend to oversimplify anecdotals
     into conclusive "knowings". You, yourself,  would not take kindly
     to being so cast into philosophical convenience .....as if, perhaps,
     being cast as just a "confused agnostic" which I know is not so
     simple the case.
 
 FM> The lonliness of an Elijah on the mountain of despair or of Socrates
 FM> in the rejection of a polis which has rejected him is not a comfortable
 FM> paradigm in which the masses can live.  This truth is just as valid
 FM> as the truth that reality cannot be contained within the pages of
 FM> some book or in the imagination of a "possessor of wisdom and
 FM> knowledge."
 
     What we don't know is bigger than we thought ....when we actually
     do the homework! ....the more homework, the bigger "knowing nothing"
     becomes!
 
 FM> Perhaps a robust, secular polytheism IS, as Odo Marquard suggests
 FM> (_Farewell to Matters of Principle_) the best most of us can do in
 FM> a world where the gods are no longer permitted to live.
 
     The gods do live in the pleasures of the private mind that so wish
     them welcome, while we are busy at our unknowable ......or useless
     missions............
                                     _ -
           "One" o' dem  "masses"    @ o ... Dave
 
 
--- Maximus/2 3.01
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