From: pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey)
Subject: Re: wearing pagan/pentacle jewelry
Organization: The Duck Pond public unix: +1 408 249 9630, log in as 'guest'.
	<fYkffUi@quack.sac.ca.us> <2B60E4D4.25060@news.service.uci.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 1993 19:59:47 UTC

In article <2B60E4D4.25060@news.service.uci.edu> 
cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>In article <fYkffUi@quack.sac.ca.us> 
pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey) writes:
>>In article <1993Jan22.204251.2609@rtfm.mlb.fl.us> 
>>joshua@rtfm.mlb.fl.us (Joshua Geller) writes:
>>>pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey) writes:
>>>>There is a reason for this. Before Christianity really, good and bad
>>>>were seen as a pair, an inseparable pair. 
>>>by who? the jews? the buddhists? the zorostrians?
>>Pagans of course.
>>Webster's II:
>>evil - The word *evil* is ultimately related to the words *up* and
>>*over* and to the prefix *hypo-*, "under, beneath." The basic sense of
>>*evil*, which is now lost, was therefore probably "exceeding proper
>>bounds" or "overreaching," and the word did not signify merely the
>>absence of good.
>>Does it all fit now?
>I think making this kind of sweeping statement of a religious umbrella
>term gathering cultures and civilizations from Anatolia to the New World
>is going a bit far.

Why?

>Suffice to say that the JCI's appear to be the
>first to see EVERYTHING in such black and white terms, which may and I
>think does relate to the monotheistic worldview -- there's our god(tm)
>and everything that's not our god(tm), and what isn't our god(tm) is
>obviously bad. 
>Please note, for the metaphorically chalenged, that this is a PARADIGM
>label I am using, and I am certainly not saying anything of the kind
>that JCI adherents are incapable of more than dualistic thinking.

A'ight, then I'll play the adversary. I will say that the bulk of C/I
adherents are *incapable* of more than dualistic thinking. As evidence, I
present Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan of the Christian Coalition and
Republican Parties respectively and the current theocracy of Iran. Will
that be sufficient or should we also consider the history of the two
great conversion religions?

>P.S.: Paul, I think you may be touching on the etymology of the word
>"irrational."  It's original meaning was just that something could be
>expressed as a ratio of any two integers.  This was a near-religiously
>held tenets of the Socratic Greek thinkers, which was ultimately
>challenged and blown out of the water by the proof, worked out by the
>Socratics, that sqrt(2) is irrational.  It so upset their view of the
>universe that irrational came to take on the meaning we now give it --
>something threatening to a worldview.  

Another good example, particularly the part; "something threatening to a
worldview." Government say don't use jah'erb, it make you rebel. Against
what?

>Incidentally, like the dodecahedron, the knowledge of sqrt(2) was
>suppressed by those learned enough to know it; the outside world was not
>to know, as Carl Sagan put it.

The information is there but it is the student who must acquire. Half
the story have never been told and it never will be. When the student is
ready, the teacher appears. A student learns only what a student wants
to learn. The information is there, waiting, at the public library. This
is a wasteland of authentic people leading inauthentic lives, those who
wish to lead authentic lives must of course by definition construct a
path of their own. Teacher says follow me *and* be free, students do
what?