Why I Became a Libertarian and a Philosopher: When Christians speak about human sin nature in the orthodox sense they are really speaking about metaphysics (the essence of existence). So, when they tell you that your nature is totally depraved what they are really doing is describing your absolute metaphysical state. And this means that you are not really totally depraved, as though you can exist distinct from your existential moral wasteland, but are actually DEPRAVITY ITSELF. Which means that you arent really you, but are rather a blind force of evil, unable to make any kind of rational distinction between good and bad because, due to your metaphysical nature your consciousness is irrelevant. You only do, see, and hear evil, always, period. And since your epistemology (how you know, understand, or believe anything) is ipso facto a direct function of your metaphysical state, once man is said to have a sin nature, it is assumed that he is existentially an abject moral failure. As such, he is automatically disqualified from apprehending TRUTH. This is why the modern evangelical movement, which is really neo-Calvinism, which is really old pure and uncut Calvinism, makes endless appeals to dying to self and to submitting to the authority of the pastors. Since YOU are both blind and deaf to morality and truth, someONE needs to compel you (i.e. FORCE you) into right thinking and behavior. And the pastors who have been called by God represent this authority to you. Somehow only THEY have been absolved of their depravity; only THEY possess the divine insight into TRUTH. (Though they often lie and declare that they are not in fact absolved; like people lie and say that total depravity does not mean that man is entirely evil...well, they either lie or are ignorant of what they really believe.) Needless to say that this is merely a Christian manifestation of the exact same kind of evil thinking which has been the root of every genocide, war, and despotism in the history of the world. The thinking formally began as Plato, up through Augustine, reaped its most virulent and metastasized religious version in the Protestant Reformation, moved on to Kantianism, to the Hegelian dialectic, to Marxist Collectivism, to National Socialism, and is once again rearing its evil head as modern evangelical Christianity, republican party moral conservatism, the progressive democratic political movement, and last, but certainly not least, Islamic Jihadism. The lie that you are not you but are owned and defined by the GROUP (collective, people, nation, state, tribe, church body, culture, race, party, laws of physics/nature, etcetera) is the devils lie.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 15:12:44 +0000
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