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Re: Temptations
by Monolycus on Dec 23, 2002 - 04:57 PM
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According to Rousseau, the social contract is an a priori condition in order that a society might function. What people like Josef Stalin or Idi Amin do when they rewrite the social contract to serve their own megalomaniacal ends is not a natural progression of the status quo, but an abuse of power.
I am afraid that I must disagree with you about Jesus (Ieshua) having given in to the Third Temptation. According to the legend, Ieshua led by example only. He did not form the Christian Church (the codification of what we know today as Christianity can be heaped on to the lap of Saul of Tarsus) nor is one jot of so-called Holy Writ credited to his personal hand. What Ieshua actually did (if one subscribes to the belief that he existed and did anything) was to present a model by which people could be saved, very much in the same mold as Siddhartha, Mithras or Lao Tsu (although not so terribly close to the actions of Mahandas Ghandi, Confucious or Mohammed). The blame for the Church's denial of free will is the fault of wave upon wave of Grand Inquisitors (beginning with Saul) speaking on behalf of the historical Ieshua*.
I think there might be some confusion about what is meant by "leading" people. In this day and age, our leaders (die Führen) make their sweeping decisions and base their policies on what they feel is in everybody's best interests, but this is not any form of "salvation" which, by necessity, must be an individual and private response to our lives. The kind of "leading" that is done by a genuine spiritual messaniac figure can not, therefore, be coercive... and many (if not the majority) would necessarily miss the point. It is not simply a question of how to entice people to exercise their free will (they do that all the time), but how to demonstrate to them methods by which they can benefit themselves and those around them? Once again, thank you for your time. I am, as ever,
your faithful friend,
~Monolycus.
*I know that I have advocated this before, but I implore you to read The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. All that we have so far said is covered in Part II, Book Five, Chapters 4 and 5. Further, the preceding argument about how the denial of free will stagnates the soul could easily have been covered in the book discussion of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (especially with the inclusion of the final chapter that Pseudonym provided for us!)
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