[lit-ideas] Re: The 'Near-Eastern' influences on the Greek philosophy, sc...

  • From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 10:56:53 -0700 (PDT)

--- Scribe1865@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Plus Omar hasn't even contested that the Greek
> political system was an 
> original development, something pointing away from
> authority-based divine 
> intermediary systems, whether Sennacherib's or
> Hitler's. 

*Well, we haven't even gotten to discussing the
influence of monotheistic religions. However, anyone
who looks at the US Declaration of Independence will
see that it does not invoke the Athenian democracy -
which btw denied any political participation to women
and slaves, and was arguably less 'democratic' than
the the early Islamic Caliphate. Instead, it invokes
the myth that:

all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men...

Further, these ideas are not supported by argument or
evidence, but they are held to be "self-evident." This
is a a piece of mythical thinking if there ever was
one. Of course, it is known that the Founding Fathers
were in practice not guided entirely by mythical
beliefs; for example, the above fictions did not
prevent from taking a rational approach to slavery.
Still, one might hesitate to dispense with such myths
entirely.

My argument has been that the ancient Near Eastern
influence on the 
modern 
world has been to load us with mythic thought, which I
previously 
called 
"sunstroke religion," hobbling us at a time when our
technical capacity 
makes it all 
the more important to get our collective act together.


*Mathematics, architecture, astronomy, medicine etc.
would hardly qualify as 'sunstroke religion.' As to
metaphysics, it is not obvious that the Greek use of
the rationalist method there enabled them to arrive at
a better understanding of ultimate reality than is
expounded, say, in the Bible or in the Kuran.

O.K.




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