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Socrates was a believer in One GodAncient Greek culture was the last truly pagan civilization wasn't it? Yet the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus foreshadow deism a belief in The One transcendent Absolute with monist and pluralist reciprocals of mass, energy forms and substance. Didn't Socrates believe in God and Plato describe the realm of forms of The One later elaborated more fully by the neo-Platonist of the 3rd century Plotinus? The Enneads of Plotinus provide a schematic analogy for the way of The One emanating ideas that 'ossify' over stages under the control of The Intelligence into the Universe, potential universes and all forms of all things. So besides slavery, wars, industry, architecture and the errors of paganism accompanied to wine and art the Greeks moved toward an intellectual knowledge of the One true God from which all things emanate and for which Jesus Christ is the sole door of renormalization for fallen humanity unto the perfection of The One(who is three).Voted for by GaryCGibson.
Christianity has existed 2011 years so far, the classic age of Greece lasted perhaps 300 years. Below I will write of some of the history of magna-Grecca, yet Christian culture is a living thing, the end of which yet cannot be written.
Christian influences have supported modern civilizations efforts to comprehend the cosmos and to effect an humanitarian freedom in God that is compatible with all manner of human culture. Greek civilization of the ancient era was divided in city states, contentious and fraught with strife. Self-destructive civilizations aren't unknown in history.
Human perceptions have an implicit conditioning enabling people to perceive the four-dimensions of space time; modern cosmological and philosophical researches may enable human beings to perceive extra dimensions of space and time one day with technical assistance. If so it will be on the basis of a society leavened with the bread of faith in Jesus Christ, while the ancient Greek progress dies out long ago except in philosophy that joined with ongoing spiritual researches into the nature of God.
Prehistoric Greek culture was much like that of the balance of the land north of the Europus; savage. It was only though millennia that settlements allowed the constructions of societies to develop that bring more intense cultural development and social order. The Minoan culture was the first to arrive in Greece and bring a written language and culture concatenated from the ancient civilizations of the south. The Minoan cultures demise was sudden as it's home islands were obliterated except for that of Crete in a Krakatoa like explosion circa 1500 B.C. A local civilization followed-that of Agamemnon and Trojan legends, yet mankind was still led by oppressive royal societies as its best form of governance except in Ur, circa 2000 B.C. God called Abraham out of Babylon and into the desert and Israel in a relationship destined to bring about the major change in human history-a government by a transcendent God of love and respect for mankind by one another, though human original sin would make them fall short of achieving perfection even of democracy.
Classical Greece embodied the contradictions of mankind's relations with itself. A cluster of city states each with a different form of government developed bring them to war incessantly with each other. Athen's and its limited franchise democracy one out and had a league of Delos over-taxing the resources of the other members to pay for things like building the Parthenon. Sparta declared war on Athens after its completion and began the end of classical Greece.
Sparta was the worst of Greek government development with a homosexual butch elite warrior caste annihilating any social order besides war and training for war. Sparta created nothing lasting for posterity except some military victories of dubious necessity. Greek, known by Greeks as Hellas, in Sparta provide slaves named helots to serve of interest of the arrested social order of warriors. It would take the Roman Republic to actualize the society unifying Athenian and Spartan government values to perfect the idea of a Republic.
Servility and savagery are each opposed to democratic individualism..
Tacitas wrote of German society around the time of Christ'
"25. The rest of their slaves have not, like ours, particular employments in the family allotted them. Each is the master of a habitation and household of his own. The lord requires from him a certain quantity of grain, cattle or cloth, as from a tenant; and so far only the subjection of the slave extends.21 Hid domestic offices are performed by his own wife and children. It is usual to scourge a slave, or punish him with chains or hard labor. They are sometimes killed by their masters; not through severity of chastisement, but in the heat of passion, like an enemy; with this difference, that it is done with impunity.22 Freedmen are little superior to slaves; seldom filling any important office in the family; never in the state, except in those tribes which are under regal government.23 There, they rise above the free-born, and even the nobles: in the rest, the subordinate condition of the freedmen is a proof of freedom."
European society needed to be lifted out of it's savage paganism over the next millennium...
Decadent imperialism followed the Roman Republic, yet Christian culture flourished to provide a unity to stand against the invasions of the Umayyad Empire under the false prophet Mohamed. Pope Gregory led a defense against the Umayyad crusades of invasion of Europe that reached Rome, France and the Aegean Islands. Christianity was the motivating cultural element that led Europe out of the pagan re-civilized social structures and into first the imperial structure and then with the reformation and the Dewitt Brothers democratic revolution in Holland into the world's first general government for the masses movement in the form of democracy. While the papacy had become corrupted by worldliness fr a time, it moved Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox and others to form independent and general literacy so people could read the Bible in their own language for themselves...God's teleos had drawn mankind out of a planet of the apes and into one moving to democratic individualism.
Christian movement reflected in ensuing mirrored democratic movements against imperial rule from Rome. Christianity was the motive for invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440.
Christianity is a living culture founded upon a transcendent faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God; ancient Greek culture is dead. Ancient Greek culture, or cultures more accurately are one of the great research subjects of archeology however beginning more than 25,000 years ago with excavations done at the Francthi cave in the neolithic period of hunters moving through the ages to farmers and the emergence of Minoan culture centered at the island of Thera/Santorini before its end with the apocalypse of volcanism giving rise to the legends of Atlantis.
Jesus Christ ended the pagan era of humanity substituting atoning and renewing spiritual faith in the Absolute post-temporal creator of temporality and much more. The Christian culture began with the physical appearance of Jesus Christ on Earth with His birth in Bethlehem circa October, 3 B.C. The laws of God were then written on the hearts and minds of believers as the prophet Jeremiah had related they would be centuries before. Christian culture brought the end of animal sacrifice and misguided beliefs in inanimate objects as gods. The spiritual draft of Jesus Christ was the central cohering element in the rise of western Europe to civilization. From the remarkable writings of the 1st century apostle Paul 4th/5th century Augustine to the 15th century physicist Isaac Newton and contemporary Christians the Christian culture is a remarkable motivating force in human creativity and ingenuity.
Ancient Greek cultures after the end of the neolithic period were known as bronze age cultures. They developed in mainland Greece (Minoan), Turkey (Anatolian) and in some Aegean Sea islands (Cycladic). A transitional culture developed between the late neolithic and bronze ages called today the Korakou culture with simple mostly non-metallic artifacts extent. It has red colors and good pottery and was a decent, modest culture in the beautiful land. The following Minoan culture named for King Minos was a brilliant early culture giving rise to the first European alphabetic scripts discovered...linear A. The following Mycenaean culture was the legendary culture of King Agamemnon and later the heroic age written of at its end by the Homeric poets circa 1100 B.C.
The war with Troy and intercultural conflict helped bring the end of Mycenaean culture. Aeolian, Ionians and Dorian tribes people invaded the weakened culture flowing over the borders of the culture creating an age of darkness lasting nearly four centuries until reformation of an archaic post-Mycenaean civilization in Attica around the year 750 B.C. The city state of Athens would produce some of the greatest creative minds of ancient world history before the Christian era...Parmenides, Heraclitus., Protagoras, Anaximander, Alexander, Sappho, Euripedes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great etc. With the appearance of the apostle to the gentiles Paul and his oratory at Athens describing the unknown God to the Athenians at the Agora through which Socrates had once walked and talked with his fellow philosophers the end of the decadent and pagan era of Greece after the end of the golden age of 5th and 4th century Athens began. The Christian culture of which Paul bespoke overcame the dominant Roman civilization transforming its natural corruption and downward plunge into a faith that would motivate the Emperor Constantine to refound a Greek Byzantine culture on the Dardanelles bridging the old world and new; bring lands north and south of the Mediterranean into one fold that would survive the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Christianity became the genius of a transcendent universal spirit moving the people of the world into a teleos of God, the end of which cannot be presently known. More than 2000 years old already Christian culture may reach the stars, for the world may pass away but the words of Jesus Christ will last forever.


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Molzahn
November 21, 2007
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correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Plato put to his death for denouncing the gods (and imposing his teachings unto youth)? He was sending the message that everything had an explainable, finite quality; and that the gods were simple labels on readily explainable phenomena -I'm sure neo-platonists had a more christian influenced veiw, but wasn't Plato athiest?
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"Human perceptions have an implicit conditioning enabling people to perceive the four-dimensions of space time; modern cosmological and philosophical researches may enable human beings to perceive extra dimensions of space and time one day with technical assistance"
I think the moment you try to alow understanding of something beyond the preset parameters of perception, it becomes only a rough symbol of what should be abled to perceive (lacking the true spirit of what should be represented). Maybe our perceptions extend beyond the basic four dimensions though, with the only issue being that our conscious recognition does not incorperate beyond what it deams relavent. maybe the answer to understanding beyond four dimensions is to preceive through an unfocused, unfiltering mind.
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Christianity is a influencial, but what of Buddism? Buddism is the important in the Orient far more than christianity.
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again, kudos on the research- it made my day, and surely others will find it enlightening.
GaryCGibson
November 21, 2007
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thanks for your comments
Thanks for your comments, I am just a house-painter remembering some of what I have read before...-about the post...
Socrates was given the hemlock to drink and put to death by the Athenian State-not Plato. Plato is said by some to be the greatest philosopher ever, yet he isn't known to have written anything about himself at all...he wrote the Republic, The Meno and all the other books with Socrates as the philosopher credited with saying all the philosophically leading content. It was Plato that established the Academy that instructed in philosophy (alethia) and carried on the tradition.
Socrates believed in God and Plato did as well by inference. The God they believed in was the One that the neo Platonist Plotinus wrote about six or seven hundred years later. Plato developed the complex idea of the realm of forms, and other people writing that I have read have pointed out that Parmenides is credited with starting the thought paradigms that Plato later developed as the metaphysicaal aspects of the realm of forms that was again more fully developed by Plotinus. Parmenides was a pre-Socratic philosopher worth checking out with a google search.
Socrates was accused of corrupting youth by instructing them in philosophical method and critical thinking about politics and everything else regarding opinion, or theory of knowledge (epistemology). He had the option to leave Athens and live in exile but choose not to but instead to perish saying that the state had nurtured him and he would accept their judgment. The Athenian state compared to the modern state in America was a very simple democracy. There had been an oligharchy that did not trust the demos or populus. Today in the U.S.A. tran-national corporate interests and over influence nationally by a globally owned broadcast media have corrupted and obfuscated the democracy in the United States and brought it close to the corporate collectivism envisioned by Mussolina, helped in by Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler, admired as a fullfillment of Marxist worldly economic dialects and an ephenermal, stagnating uncreative entity that morphs too easily into decline and fall, war, chaos and autocratic rule even by a special central committee.
Plato and Socrates had it easy comparatively in contemplating the ideal state. Today Americans must decide for themselves if a nation is worth having, if capitalism is pure or corrupted by mob control, if capitalism is the highest possible progress in economic actualization for individual interests or if new economic systems supported by federal policy could be invented and so forth. The founders were for national interests before transnationalm interests, and even Plato wrote about the Republic as one state-the Romans did well with that until they became a trans-national empire too diverse for coherence as subverted by a plethora of problems and pleasures.
Molzahn
November 22, 2007
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keep 'er rolling painter-sensei
it was socrates? haha I mix them up sometimesso you are aquianted with an abundance of history too? I love finding new things to look into. I took a wander through the fall of the roman empire and found this site "http://killeenroos.com/1/Romefall.htm"
so perhaps the push in iraq is encouraged by government as to avoid this stagnation? ensuing warfare so as to avoid or delay the ephemeral quality of being a superpower.
I myself am from Canada, so I'm curious, is there any history parallel you know of between canada, and a possible closly tied culture to the Romans? (were there any other nations which felt the fall of the romans?)
What are your thoughts on how the chinese nation operates, keeping its currency at lower than actual value to benefit from being a mass producer (causing all sorts of problems with currency around the world). Staying its stance, so that at any point in time it could cause the american government to go into bankruptcy (as it owns 30% of governmental bonds). the moment it properly adjusts its currency it'll find problems like canada is (our manufacturing sector has taken a hit since our dollar has been on the rise).
In short, what's your interpretation of the ecconomical world of today?
GaryCGibson
November 23, 2007
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thanks again
-yet I am painting today, so I haven't much time to reply.Arnold Toynbee wrote a book named 'Mankind & Mother Earth' in 1974-I think it his last- that updated 'A Study of History'...it's quite worth reading still.
I think the proliferation of weapons is worse than ever, and Pakistan is probably going to be a long-range problem with nuclear proliferation-
When the Roman Empire fell in the west and a half millenia more later or less in the east it set the necessary conditions for the rise of western civilization to develop especially with the challenge-response of Muslims and Mongols. The collapse of any global society typically brings AAA chaos to the world, and that could be quite serious. Like the Roman republic the United States will fall if it does eventually by it's own dissipation of it's own nationhood through globalization. Democracy was intended to control capitalism not vice versa, and globalization of a capital corporatism will move the world toward authoritarianism rather than democracy.
Corporations are implicitly autocratic and in no way democracies. Internationally an ad hoc oligarchic social order or even corporatism fascism or communist elite autocratic unified world order with C.E.O.'s and board members and the working proletariat will bring about the collapse of democracy in the United States following the subversion of its energy and transportation independence, borders, language and culture.
Isolation isn't a necessary response or even possible but just a political awareness of the need for support for economic independence in the U.S.A. so far as possible, environmental health without rampant environmental corporate mal-wear practices on the biosphere.
Canadian development has always been interactive with that of the United States from the times of John Cabot, The Bay Company, Wilfred Laurier and later to American intervention in France in the first world war. Crown Prince Ruprecht's desperate and failed yet brilliant final offensive was halted in part by the newly arrived American army forestalling further Canadian casualties for more years in a stalemated conflict that had already taken 40,000 Canadian lives.
Plainly a collapse of a global economy is worse than a national economy-and a reason to keep some national independence alive. There are many potential apocalyptic scenarios today (I write a little science fiction too) such as weaponized rabbitpox genetically modified to attack human speed up with stem cell wilding techniques to tempt deranged scientific neophyte political theoreticians. I will go put some paint on the building and leave off with this sort of stuff-
Von Mises and Hayak disagreed about monetary policy and what real capital is, so I won't try to become technical on that aspect of the global monetary policy that has gone well past Breton Woods-it would be good if Galbraith were still around to comment in his incisive way. It is possible that trans-humanism will devastate all economic and social rationality and simply grow the problems away when necessary with state dictated cabbage patch sentences.
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