Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra (b. 1956), Director, Savitri Era Learning Forum (2005), Founder, Savitri Era Religion (2006), and President, Savitri Era Party (2007). Savitri Era of those who adore, Om Sri Aurobindo & The Mother.
That Christianity, including Paul and Augustine, smuggled in Greek presuppositions. And probably other ideas alive at the time, that I don't know anything about. So, it is probable that any big new development is constituted, at least in part, by culture precedent.
I think Nietzsche basically provides the counter to this with his ubermensch.
Kant tried to develop a moral system by borrowing Christian ethics while stripping it of the transcendental.
It's an interesting question. But consider that Cartesianism, Marxist, Hegelian, Phenomenological, etc. ideas all exist in the world and influence it whether or not people subscribe to them officially. Collingwood reads a certain telos into the historical development of thought.
You could maybe try to make some historical case that other civilisations produced something similar (Cyrus the Great is seen by some people as the first one to introduce the concept of human rights), so that at least possibly another foundation could be found.
The argument would challenge the exclusive association of those values with Christianity. They’d argue that stoicism, Epicureanism, et al prefigured much of what became Christianity. They’d emphasize the humanistic stuff came more from the Greek inheritance than the Hebrew.
Christianity is a construct of the roman empire. Abrahamic theology grafted onto stoic philosophy. The sky god has been left behind, we do not need to throw out the philosophy. People can be moral without thinking they are being watched.
Could say it's Greco-Roman first and that we can go back to that and ditch the Judeo-Christian part. Nonatheists can go to natural law of a kind not tied directly to a Christian world view. Then there's evolutionary biology, that Christianity is the egg not the chicken.
Others have mentioned him already but Tom Holland makes this very argument in DOMINION and he has a fine debate with AC Grayling (available on YouTube) who presents the counterargument (not convincingly IMHO)
That our foundations lie in Jerusalem and Athens (Rome too). That Christianity shares ideas with and was shaped by Stoicism and classical political philosophy. The synthesizing role of Neoplatonism.
I think we pretend these values as long as we have enough to eat.
Contemporary politics saddens me primarily because it reveals so clearly our culture's preference for low-quality information that confirms one's priors over high-quality information that challenges them, and short-term instrumentalism over long-term accountability to virtue.
Sengol ho ke Bengol... Hindus shouldnt get carried away too much with these symbolic recognition of some item.. These OPTICAL DELUSIONS are what sway Hindus from REAL issues of their lives.. Lipstick doesnt light your choola...
A majority of Tamilans dont consider themselves Hindus.. they consider themselves Dravids who hold Hindus in utter contempt... Besides.. BJP is seen as a Hindi party.. so even if Modi dances nekkid.. they wont vote for him..
When this RW surge halts and people look behind…they would discover few millionaires being made in the name of ‘ecosystem’ and nothing much!!
Few thugs are milking an organic movement created via hard work of ground workers and those who wanted to see a progressive Indic India.
Right now, we witness the peak of human civilisation but it would be an error to look at it as a cumulative result of merely human efforts. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Baudrillard point to the limits of human speculation and imagination but Sri Aurobindo restores justification.
It's good that the Centre has started apprehending the States as different cultures by recognising some uniqueness and importance. This may be geared towards garnering a few chunks of electoral advantage, but applies plaster to the edifice of nationhood being built in each State.
The Confessions of Saint Augustine, The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Confession by Leo Tolstoy, The Grand Inquisitor Monologue in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Monologue at the end of Ulysses by James Joyce signify various facets of human predicament.
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