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Blame it On Moses - The Mosaic Distinction Introduction - Blame it on Moses: The Exodus introduced evil into the world Timeline from Creation - to the Mosaic Distinction True/False, Good/Bad, Heisnberg's Dilemma
Are tolerance and belief diametrically opposed? Is Christianity obsolete? If tolerance is foundational in the modern age, and if Christianity claims first dibs at the truth, and if the spiral of violence that has plagued the history of religion is to end, then the answer perhaps is yes: Tolerance and Christianity are diametrically opposed - this is more or less the implications from Egyptologist Jan Assman's Mosaic Distinction. Assman regards Moses as a major milestone in the history of religion, not unlike what happened to Adam and Eve after eating the forbidden fruit: A sudden distinction between true and false in the context of religion. Previous to Moses, religion was based mostly on the attributes of purity and impurity, or between sacred and profane, but the notion of false gods was non-existent. "The divinities were international because they were cosmic..No one disputed the reality of foreign gods or the legitimacy of foreign ways of worshipping them" With the introduction of the belief in a single god, the world turned upside down: the new religion was of its nature, an anti-religion, excluding everything that came before it as paganism. The Ten Commandments then, created the potential for hate and violence. The concept of sin had entered the collective consciousness, with only one possible alternative: The Exodus had to be reversed, that is, forget about a distinction between true and untrue in the context of religion. Let us all just get along, and do whatever we want.. Contrary to the Christian assertion that the greed for money is the root of all evil, as far as Assman is concerned, the Exodus, or the "Mosac Distinction" is the source of the evil, distorting religion and bringing intolerance into the world. In looking at Assman's Mosaic Distinction, Jospeh Cardinal Ratzinger writes: "The question of truth and the question of what is good cannot be separated from each other. If we can no longer recognize what is true and can no longer distinguish it from what is false, then it becomes impossible to recognize what is good" the distinction between good and evil loses its basis" Elizabeth M. Anscombe summarizer her teacher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein's views as follows: 1. There is not such thing as being true for a religion 2. Religious faith can be compared to a person being in love as opposed to being persuaded that something is true or false. According to Wittgenstein, "..it would make no difference to the Christian religion whether or not Christ had actually done some of the things recounted concerning him or whether he had existed at all." "Renouncing the claim to truth, which would be renunciation of the Christian faith itself, is here being sugared over by allowing faith to go on existing as a kind of being in love., with its lovely subjective consolations or as a kind of a make-believe world side by side with the real world." [RFN1] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, on Wittgenstein's view.
The "feeling religion" - "Action is art, speculation is science, religion is the sense of and taste for the infinite" F. Schleiermacher
"If all utopian model ..lead to dead ends, yet at the same time the Christian certainties are powerlessly..toppling, then we have to come to terms with the fact that there are not more answers available to our demand for transcendence" - J. Fest "If a religion can no longer be reconciled with the elementary certainties of a given view of the worlds, it collapse. But, on the other hand, religion needs some authorization that reaches beyond what we can think up for ourselves, for only thus will the unconditional demand it makes upon man be acceptable". Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
References: RFN1: Ratzinger, J (2004) Truth and Tolerance Sarvepalli Gopal(1989) Radhakrishnan; a Biography, p.17 Heisenberg, Tel und das Ganze F. Schleiermacher, Uber die Religion J. Fest, Die schwierige Freiheit
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