Posted by Sigismund on July 29, 2008, at 17:44:26
In reply to Re: 'So?', posted by Sigismund on July 29, 2008, at 15:48:28
>The first is that Bush, Cheney and Blair have access to a higher and secret knowledge, which permits a more penetrating insight, and allows a different standard of right and wrong.
>I don't know if this means they are really Gnostics??
I don't want to be uncivil about Gnostics. Mani and the Manichean Thinkers (there's a band name for you) were subtle thinkers. Neither they nor Augustine would have thought that the world could be made free of evil (by the use of violence!), as our current leaders sometimes seem to believe.
I wonder if Bush saw himself as a vessel of wrath, whom God insructed to strike?
Maybe those exciting days are behind him?The gnostics were a bit different, believing that the world had been created by a God who was either evil (or incompetent?).
Given that this world can only function by creatures eating each other, I have some sympathy with this view.Somewhere EM Cioran remarks that Bach is proof that God was not entirely so.
I went looking for the quote but thought this was so good I brought it back instead.
"Every act over which the minds luminous malediction fails to preside represents a vestige of ancestral stupidity. Ideologies were invented only to give a luster to the leftover barbarism which has survived down through the ages, to cover up the murderous tendencies common to all men. Today we kill in the name of something; we no longer dare do so spontaneously; so that the very executioners must invoke motives, and, heroism being obsolete, the man who is tempted by it solves a problem more than he performs a sacrifice. Abstraction has insinuated itself into life and into death; the complexes seize great and small alike. From the Iliad to psychopathology there you have all of human history."
poster:Sigismund
thread:842677
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20080728/msgs/842901.html