Analogismoi

As early back as 380 BC, in his Republic, Plato is interested in the role of perception on reality. In his famous allegory of the cave he illustrates the primacy of perception over unmediated reality with prisoners who perceive shadows on a wall as reality unaware of the true forms casting them. The metaphor underscores how…

The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606) In our last post we discussed the temptation and the fall from paradise. Today I want to look at the sins of Adam and Eve from a slightly different angle. Whether if it is the totalitarian kallipolis which…

The book of Genesis contains within it a series of stories that each represent a new and growingly sophisticated beginning. The first, lowest resolution, is Genesis 1:1 and God’s creation of habitable order out of chaos. Our last post dealt with the second beginning, the creation of man in Genesis 2:7. With the introduction of…

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”  -Mark Twain   In Genesis, and throughout the biblical stories, we are presented with a world in which human consciousness is of paramount importance. The modern world has seen its share of objections to the idea that human consciousness matters from the Club of Rome types and…

In this week’s Main Project post we continued our discussion of the creation. After the heavens and earth were separated, but before Man was brought forth, God’s creative action differentiated the cosmos bringing forth the world and its denizens as we know it. With each step of the creation of order God’s final pronouncement on…

Earlier this week we spoke about the pattern that God sets at the beginning of time in the opening lines of Genesis. I want to spend a little more time talking about this pattern as it is absolutely crucial going forward. The first two lines of Genesis are In the Beginning God created the heavens…

Several weeks ago we discussed how action is the cradle for thought. As we are getting ready to embark on the project of walking through the biblical stories, it is important to stop for a moment and consider how it is that stories come about. The human story begins some eight million years ago with…

In this week’s Main Project post we began the process of introducing the Bible. Today I want to continue this introduction by talking about the epistemology of the Bible, the natural cognitive framework of man and how these stories arose and became the wellspring for all of western civilization.   One way to look at…

In both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmogonies, the primordial state of the world is chaotic and that chaos must be overcome. In both the Enuma Elish and the Egyptian creation myth the primordial state of the world is that of formless watery chaos. For the Mesopotamians it is the internal embrace of Apsu (fresh water/culture/masculinity/order)…

Karl Marx, in his book Das Kapital (1867), attempts to make the claim that history is a story of power struggles. He sees this primarily thorugh the lens of class conflict and economic control. In the future we will return to this short sighted, dangerous and, frankly, moronic understanding of the world…what is important for…