That "Parasitic" Roman Empire

greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoch arden • 2 hours ago • edited I don´t need to read you "slowly," dear soul. I suggest you pick up your intensity paying attention to my points, and let your vision scan the horizon for the beauty of Jesus´ legacy in struggling human hearts through history and culture. Only Buddha, Gandhi, Anthony the Great, and their ilk are as beautiful to inhale and refresh lactic acid build up in tired and sore soulful brainpower. 1. Mary Baker Eddy also called Evil unreal and non-existent, as a woman with a brother who went to Dartmouth in the 1800s. She did it explicating her quite impressive and worthwhile approach to Christianity. However, empirical observation in Jesus´ legacy of University-based scholarship gives us the tools to examine the proposition a little more closely. As Gandhi demonstrated in his interfaith Christian-Hindu practice reading the Gita and Bible significantly and regularly with great admiration for Jesus, British brutality was not the total absence of good. AN Whitehead, a colleague of B Russell who attempted an alternative to Einstein´s geometric gravity theory, reflected that Evil is Good that is destructive, while Good is creative. Thus, Maimonides´ formulation has some merit, but is not sufficient in its explanatory scope. Malcolm X was saved from his depths of crime by the Nation of Islam´s formulations (that included Christian Science derivatives....), and individually reached for standard Islam and support of the Civil Rights movement as an Afro-American. Although he was assassinated, so was JFK and later, RFK. The balance of "evil" has to be evaluated. CIA whistleblower Philip Agee was a Catholic when he broke with the CIA to reveal their dirt in South America. In his savvy, he evaded their agents, writing the account of his fugitive years. He married a German and was able to commute between Cuba and Germany for the rest of his life as an activist. His balance was in the right measure, much as Gandhi´s was, as an individuated Christian-"Catholic." FD Roosevelt and Eleanor are important add-ons, exceptionally vivid in their demonstration of Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity and its pro-social goodness. He shook the pro-social tree to see what fruit would fall, so to speak, with his New Deal platform experiments, and chafed at the isolationist bit led by the conservative businesspeople, but as Hitler´s, Stalin´s, and Tojo´s evil billowed and blitzed, still got Lend-Lease going and the unprecedented peacetime draft, before his vision of the UN bore fruit. He even quickly forgave the Ruskies when Stalin´s Poland-predatory canines dripped less than their backstabbed wound. The Bertanaffly-Capra levels of the Systems Theory of Life now helps illuminate emergentism, no less, giving a stronger sense of Levels of Analysis and the implications for Orders of Reality. With Gandhi´s, Agee´s, and FDR´s respective kinds of savvy, we see the creativity of love and good as a Higher Order of Reality in the face of evil, the relative absence of good, oriented towards destructive antipathy, and a Lower Order of Reality. Jesus´ Resurrection by God can be understood as demonstrating that shift in Orders of Reality, his atonement, and its new level of potentialization. The Buddha had achieved an impressive parallel and complementary achievement in 500 BC/E. enoch arden greenpeaceRdale1844coop • a day ago I explain. Read slowly. 1. According to Maimonides evil is the absence of good. 2. The Roman Empire demonstrated complete absence of good starting from the assassination of Caesar when it changed its civilisational orientation. Its separation from the Hellenistic civilisation resulted in cultural and intellectual decline which continued after the fall of Rome. 3. In contrast to Greece, Rome produced nothing. No science no technology. The only Roman contribution in mathematics was the murder of Archimedes. It was a gigantic economical, scientific and cultural parasite. A dead end civilisation. 4. The RCC was the main reason of the 1000 years of the Dark Ages until the Greek science and philosophy returned to Europe after the fall of Constantinople. The RCC forced people to use Latin and didn't allow them to read the Bible. All this was fortunately finished in the 17th century by the great butchery of the Wars of Religion. • Reply • Share › 2. In your analysis of the Roman Empire, you try to label it as demonstrating a "complete (evil)." You don´t show much literacy in psychology, anthropology, or sociology to be speaking in such broad strokes, and that is really essential. I recall you knew the value of Fibonacci, for one. That is the kind of attention to detail through insights like Freud-Reich-Jung type psychology, or Gordon Allport´s individual psychology that is necessary, beyond even T Carlisle´s "Heroic individual model" of history, perhaps even approximated in Wm James´ views. Spartacus had been a rebel slave with some glimmerings of good, and Octavian´s stalking his uncle Caesar´s assassins gave a great show for history, as his reign also provided some kind of stability in the birth of Jesus. Apparently there was a census that led Jos and Mary to Bethlehem for Jesus´ birth. The Roman Senate had appointed Herod "King of the Jews" at some point, recorded not least of all by Josephus in the 90s, all tidbits of the massive reams of goodness in humanity still retained since the Paleolithic, the origins of life, captured even in the OT´s "God saw that it was good." The expression of evil is more specific, not general like you portray it. It is your own assumptions that need to be examined, showing the good of Socrates and his method. In introspection, we are brought to Jesus´ teachings "Clean the cup on the inside", and the legacy of the ascetic monk Anthony of the Desert. Socrates no less had been spurred by a supernatural event, as Plato didn´t fail to record. Socrates´ friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle woman at the Delphi Apollo Temple, "Who is the wisest man in Athens?" She breathed her vapors or the like, and replied, "Socrates." It was such an incomprehensible response in human terms that Socrates was spurred to begin asking the wisest men he knew of in Athens questions that resulted in Socrates´ own emergence as a supremely important figure. In naturalistic terms, that event becomes coincidence, but remains incoherent in light of shamanic and prophetic experience. It only becomes coherent in shamanic anthropological terms, and spiritual-religious and prophetic terms. It becomes transpersonal, and indicative of a transcendent reality. While Descartes later developed one level of secular introspection, Jung´s eventual post-Freudian reasoning resulted in his integrative Higher Self. Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoch arden • 18 minutes ago 2-3. Your assessment of cultural and intellectual decline "with its separation from Hellenistic civ and after the fall of Rome" is all Greco-centric and not literate in the all-important meaning of Jesus, his loving integrity, and his legacy. Roman society was the central structure in which Christianity spread and rose in status to take over Roman society. The failure of Emperors to honor Jesus´ integrity, along with any unloving, intellectually obsessed focus on doctrinal creeds occurred as it did, requiring understanding first, not judgment. The Fall of Rome ended the standard Roman imperial hierarchy, which was replaced by a more modest monarchical figure, and other spreadout tribal figures. Ancient Greek and Roman pagan philosophy was sustained in Neoplatonism until 529, and snuffed. The Eastern Empire was put on the alert by the rise of Islam in 622 AD/CE. Just as you don´t learn how to ride a bicycle by reading Plato, much less debating Plato, you get on a bike and ride it. Charles Martel defeated Islam with an insightful pragmatic Christian humanism guiding his careful preparations by 732. Charlemagne united things, defeating the skirmishing Saxons. The Crusades actually challenged the persisting Emperor of the East when the Western Crusaders plundered Constantinople, it´s interesting to note. Modern pretensions are based on University-based society from monastic schools that were "cooking and marinating" at that time, not in pagan or pseudo-pagan philosophical Roman but post-Roman Christian church times. Pope Leo I is associated with the repelling of Attila the Hun, not the doomed Emperor Valentinian III or his doomed general Aetius. Even before Leo´s act with Attila, I recall St. Catherine being associated with a miracle in Paris or the like. With Charlemagne then later, Alcuin of York, and other monks, became the worthy celebrities of Christian history, no matter how much they are looked over for the neoplatonist and other pagans that modern rationalists ogle at. Then came Thomas of Aquinas and Bishop R Grosseteste, a little before Joan of Arc, Luther, and Vesalius as highlights. 3. "Rome produced nothing...." Your rationalism deceives you. You condemn ideologically instead of evaluating by adequate, necessary, and sufficient categories. This is historiography, and ancient Greece´s intellectual advances perished in their privileged or marginalized elitism, relegated into neoplatonic documents. Their culture had expanded extensively under the profligately enthroned Alexander the Great, and fragmented after his youthful assassination tempted four generals into Civil War. As Rome conquered their Greek "sweets" in parcels, the Roman imperial show provided a nice backdrop for the meaning of law and government, not "nothing." It is Christian University-based education in its breadth of academic and modernized philosophical capacity that is qualified to evaluate. Not simplistic over intellectualized rationalism. Roman imperial law and senatorial governance was insufficient, not "nothing." Augustus Octavian deified Julius Caesar and started a trend on top of dictatorship, showing the spiritual-religious weakness of egotism again after Alexander the Great´s own self-deification. Pontius Pilate has been identified in a monumental stone and in rings, helping establish archeological evidence for Jesus. Roman documents like Pliny the YOunger no less. Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Origen, and so on all have documents surviving of their part in managing the rise of Christianity to the new demands of expansion and cultural development of a new society. Virgil´s work and the treacheries of egotism, even in the Christian emperors, is vital in its moral implications for modern citizens blitzed by corporate-consumer ignorance and its unsustainable and cruel rising tides. 4. Your regurgitation of the "RCC caused the Dark Ages" is scientific materialist anti-Christian and anti-spiritual ideology, meaning unexamined assumptions in particular. The Roman Church is what existed before Luther´s spark, first of all. I´ve outlined already above how the church didn´t primarily end philosophy as rationalist anachronistic myth wants to paint the lens. They forged a new society in the real world, with human beings of diverse tribal backgrounds unprecedentedly assuming the religion of the fallen society they were invading. Spellbound by Rome´s past reputation? Its image still broadcasting from the Eastern outpost? And some able to grasp the significance of a God with loving Commandments and crucified Son who was Resurrected and ascended. The wars of Religion in Christianity, of denominations, in fact, reveals not "Christianity," but what we can now classify as human bio-psychosocial tendencies in need of spiritual practice more than church creeds and doctrines of membership. It is thus that University-based moral philosophy, stimulated no less by scientific natural philosophy, led to Religious Tolerance as in the pioneering work of Hugo Grotius and John Locke, and life of French Catholic in Protestant Holland Rene DesCartes. Then came Christian Deist T Jefferson, and then Social Gospel FD Roosevelt and settlement house Eleanor, after Swedenborgian CC Bonney´s 1893 Chicago Parliament of World Religions, Wm James Varieties in which he elevates Mary Baker Eddy´s legacy openly. It is the University and social movement related US-EU-UN community of nations under human rights, with Islamic and US profiteering type hold outs that is the current socially constructed condition defining unsustainable trends and the potential for resurgent integrity in Jesus´ legacy. Gandhi and Kasturbai were a fine example. Mohammed Yunus´ pro-poor Grameen Bank from Bangladesh. Wangari Maathai´s Green Belt Movement in Africa. Via Campesina spanning continents linking Gandhi´s legacy with liberation theology Catholic and ecumenical type activists from Catholic, right-wing evangelical dominated Latin America. Put it all together. Connect the dots. Get things straight. It´s all there in front of your eyes, and for everyone to see. Only it´s my Harvard liberal arts Bio Anthro, MSc in Intl Rel that seems to be the beacon standing on the shoulders of giants. Step up here with me, anytime. For Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Eleanor, and Rev MLK, et al. And not least of all, your own best self-interest. • Edit • Reply • Share › − Avatar greenpeaceRdale1844coop enoch arden • 2 hours ago