In the last analysis the great irony is found in Bacon. "WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Ellul: “Every magical means, in the eyes of the person who uses it, is the most efficient one. In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and ‘the higher powers,’ just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.” This latter observation also recalls Walter Benjamin’s observation that “technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.” The master symbol is materialism without spirituality shared by all ethnic groups. The Satanic psychopathic predator is a human being who bleeds like we do when pricked. Our social systems create kinds of human beings. The West optimizes psychopathology in a different way than China or Russia and children, like corn grow as good ears and bad alike. Berdyaev writes -Man as it were has grown tired of spiritual freedom and is prepared to renounce it in the name of power, with which to order his life, both inward and outward. Man has grown tired of himself, of man, has lost the confidence in man and wants to leap off to the supra-human, even though this supra-human be a social collective. Many of the old idols have been toppled in our time, but many new idols have likewise been created. Man is so constituted, that he can live either with a faith in God, or with a faith in ideals and idols. In essence, man cannot consistently and ultimately be an atheist. Having fallen away from the faith in God, he falls into idolatry. We can see the idol-worship and the fashioning of idols within every sphere -- in science, in art, in statecraft, and in national and social life. And thus, for example, Communism is an extreme form of social idolatry.”
"Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (Николай Александрович Бердяев) (March 18, 1874 – March 24, 1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher. He was often referred to as a Christian existentialist, though his thought differs in significant ways from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as other existential thinkers. Nevertheless, Berdyaev embraced key existential ideas, particularly that of freedom. For him freedom was the fundamental metaphysical reality upon which all else is based. From the primary notion of freedom he developed his own existential interpretation of ultimate truth in terms of subjectivity rather than objectivity. In doing this, he offered a critique of modern rationalism and instead vigorously defended the intrinsic value of the human person and the creative life of the spirit."
Christian dogma—Huxley’s target—had already set the stage for a 'god/atheist' debate during the centuries-long ‘conversion/conquest' of 'pagan/heathen' Peoples into Christendom. Conversion meant the death of ‘gods’ immanent in 'nature' and denial of existential equality of ‘man’, 'animal’, and ‘nature’. Huxley’s effort to ‘kill god’ built on these prior god deaths, which, by the way, were also a ‘clerical/intellectual’ project: The Church deployed literate monks and missionaries as emissaries and advisors to pagan kings, seducing them into empire with the promise that they would become rex rather than dux: They would wield power over their people rather than emerging from among them. That they and their people would then be under the emperor was of course the clerical goal—the termination of independent peoples. In a sense, the construction of Christendom was a Fall. Domination of original peoples by an imperial clerical apparatus.
It also fits the ‘god/atheist' story that the economic context of the debate was ‘man’s’ industrial domination of the natural world, displacing modes of human/nature relations that were at least quasi-religious.
In the last analysis the great irony is found in Bacon. "WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Ellul: “Every magical means, in the eyes of the person who uses it, is the most efficient one. In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and ‘the higher powers,’ just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.” This latter observation also recalls Walter Benjamin’s observation that “technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.” The master symbol is materialism without spirituality shared by all ethnic groups. The Satanic psychopathic predator is a human being who bleeds like we do when pricked. Our social systems create kinds of human beings. The West optimizes psychopathology in a different way than China or Russia and children, like corn grow as good ears and bad alike. Berdyaev writes -Man as it were has grown tired of spiritual freedom and is prepared to renounce it in the name of power, with which to order his life, both inward and outward. Man has grown tired of himself, of man, has lost the confidence in man and wants to leap off to the supra-human, even though this supra-human be a social collective. Many of the old idols have been toppled in our time, but many new idols have likewise been created. Man is so constituted, that he can live either with a faith in God, or with a faith in ideals and idols. In essence, man cannot consistently and ultimately be an atheist. Having fallen away from the faith in God, he falls into idolatry. We can see the idol-worship and the fashioning of idols within every sphere -- in science, in art, in statecraft, and in national and social life. And thus, for example, Communism is an extreme form of social idolatry.”
Berdyaev!
Berdyaev?
yup. read him in college.
"Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (Николай Александрович Бердяев) (March 18, 1874 – March 24, 1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher. He was often referred to as a Christian existentialist, though his thought differs in significant ways from the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as other existential thinkers. Nevertheless, Berdyaev embraced key existential ideas, particularly that of freedom. For him freedom was the fundamental metaphysical reality upon which all else is based. From the primary notion of freedom he developed his own existential interpretation of ultimate truth in terms of subjectivity rather than objectivity. In doing this, he offered a critique of modern rationalism and instead vigorously defended the intrinsic value of the human person and the creative life of the spirit."
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Nikolai_Berdyaev
Christian dogma—Huxley’s target—had already set the stage for a 'god/atheist' debate during the centuries-long ‘conversion/conquest' of 'pagan/heathen' Peoples into Christendom. Conversion meant the death of ‘gods’ immanent in 'nature' and denial of existential equality of ‘man’, 'animal’, and ‘nature’. Huxley’s effort to ‘kill god’ built on these prior god deaths, which, by the way, were also a ‘clerical/intellectual’ project: The Church deployed literate monks and missionaries as emissaries and advisors to pagan kings, seducing them into empire with the promise that they would become rex rather than dux: They would wield power over their people rather than emerging from among them. That they and their people would then be under the emperor was of course the clerical goal—the termination of independent peoples. In a sense, the construction of Christendom was a Fall. Domination of original peoples by an imperial clerical apparatus.
It also fits the ‘god/atheist' story that the economic context of the debate was ‘man’s’ industrial domination of the natural world, displacing modes of human/nature relations that were at least quasi-religious.