Since ancient times, people have behaved in very inhumane ways to other people. This obviously continues in our time. One hopeful promise of the Venus Project is a social situation where resources are utilized to house, feed, educate, and stimulate the creative core of many people who are now marginalized and oppressed. In this understanding of the fulfillment of the Law secular humanists and Christians are in harmony. For Christians “supernatural” Law contains Natural Law. At AST, David Dean (https://youtu.be/Hi4W5a8-wP4 ) has expressed the idea that today the “real” has been reduced to the material. When we depend on solely on human motivation and resolve to bring “heaven”, history shows us that greed, power, privilege and pride distort and ultimately destroy our utopias. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has written extensively on the false division of religion and reason.
Stoics believed that everything was composed of matter.... They believed that this divine "fire," or God, generated the universe and would one day take the universe back into itself through a great conflagration. This cycle of creation and conflagration is repeated eternally.Stoicism was thus deterministic. Things are the way they are and can't be changed. To find true happiness, they believed one should understand the course of nature through reason and simply accept things the way they are. In contrast to the Stoics, Paul taught that God is personal and not a part of this universe. He also taught that there would be a judgment to come, not a giant conflagration leading to another cycle.(1)
Paul determined that the Law was not sufficient. It limited our relationship to the Divine and the extent to which we could be formed as disciples of Christ who would seek freedom, Love, inclusion, mercy and forgiveness for and between all people. Stoic thinking rests on Law and is confined to the orderly, finite and material. Christ invites living in the messy, infinite and mystical which are the characteristics of humanity that are in the image of God. Heaven is lived now in the struggle for freedom from greed, power, pride and privilege which too often brings human utopia to a real end.
(1) The World of the Apostle Paul - Leadership University. Retrieved March 14, 2015, from http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/apospaul.html.
I must start this reply with another quote from Jacque who said, "Utopia, if it is ever established, will die then." His meaning was that to stamp something and say, "this is the best that can be achieved," is false. We see no examples of systems, of any kind, that in reality do not exist in flux. So The Venus Project in contrast to Utopia, is an example of what is referred to as "An Emergent Society." Which means, existing in a constant state of improvement. Today we only adhere to 2 systems which we refer to as established and we understand that all others will undergo continuous updating. Those two systems are the political system and the monetary economic system. (The two that have fashioned our servitude). So your concern that utopia cannot be maintained is valid. I share it.
ReplyDeleteAgain your reflection appeals to history when you said, "When we depend on solely on human motivation and resolve to bring “heaven”, history shows us that greed, power, privilege and pride distort and ultimately destroy our utopias." The first part I would like to examine about your statement is the word "heaven." Since we are appealing to history for the argument lets replace the word "heaven" with "the power of mechanical flight" and go back to a time when this had not yet been accomplished. Often times people who were not educated the field of aeronautics at this time, would still offer their opinions, based as well as they could, on their interpretation of the world around them. Without sufficient information in aeronautics, they would say things like, "If God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings." Of course it was not only widely, but majorly seen as impossible that the Write Brothers would be successful in their scientific task. Fast forward and we see that not one person is able to sustain an argument against the ability for humans to obtain the power of mechanical flight, if that person is allowed to watch an aircraft in flight. The argument dies.
When you say that "greed, power, privilege and pride" distort and ultimately destroy our utopias." We should try our best to understand that statement as scientifically as possible. First is it a fact or an opinion? Second is it true? Third, if so, what do we as HUMANS have the power to change in order to eliminate those conditions if indeed they are what is holding us back?
It is easy to stamp something with "not in a million years" and move on. What takes far more investment is to say truthfully, "I don't know." That is what we need. That is what the Write brothers said. "Why doesn't she take off?" - "I don't know. But we should try to find out." Not, "Because God doesn't want us to fly" or "Because its never been done before." Science doesn't care for statements like that.
The Venus Project addresses the concern of greed and differential advantage and proposes final solutions to those issues, which are testable, repeatable and falsifiable. We may not be able to bring Utopia or Heaven to Earth without God's help. But surely we can do a lot better than this.