ufuk kocolu: The price of Monotheism:
13 February 2012, 7:43 pm
ufuk kocolu
The price of Monotheism:
February 13
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Gökhan Yu liked this
Having lived for hundreds and thousands of years on the terrain of
secondary religious experience and in the spiritual space created by the
Mosaic distinction, we Jews, Christians, and Muslims (to speak only of
the monotheistic world) assume this distinction to be the natural, normal,
and universal form of religion. We tend to identify it unthinkingly with
religion as such, and then project it onto all the alien and earlier cultures
that knew nothing of the distinction between true and false religion. - ufuk kocolu
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Whoever obeys the laws lives as a stranger here on earth. Thus we read
in Ps. 119:19: “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments
from me.” Staying true to the law means living as a stranger on earth, even
in the Promised Land. The law circumscribes a counterfactual order that
compels its people to dwell in the world without entirely being assimilated
to it. Monotheism fosters an existential unhomeliness. This estrangement
from the world is what is meant by “progress in intellectuality.” - ufuk kocolu
Ritual cultures or cult religions typically
operate on the assumption that the universe would suffer, or even
come to an end, if the rites ceased to be observed in the prescribed fashion. - ufuk kocolu
