Casey Jones eh-Trouble ahead, trouble behind
Berdyaev sees modern history as the testing of human liberty
Berdyaev:
The technical and economic processes of modern civilisation turn the person into their own tool, they demand from it an incessant activity, making use of each moment of life for activity. Modern civilisation negates contemplation and threatens to completely shove it out from life, to make it impossible. This will mean, that man ceases to pray, that he will no longer have any sort of relationship to God, that he will no longer see beauty and unselfishly know truth. The person is defined not only in relation to time, but also in relation to eternity. The actualism of modern civilisation is a denial of eternity, is an enslavement of man to time. No one instant of life thus is of value in itself, nor has relationship to eternity or God, every moment is but a means for the one following, needing all the more quickly but to pass away and be replaced by another. The exclusive actualism of suchlike a sort changes the relationship to time -- there occurs an acceleration of time, a mad chase. The person cannot hold on amidst the flooding current of time, in this actualisation of each moment, it is unable to think about matters, it is unable to conceive of the meaning of its own life, since meaning is always revealed in relation to eternity, and the flood of time is of itself incomprehensible. Indisputably, man is called to activity, to work, to creativity, he cannot only meditate. The world is not merely a stage-show for man, a spectacle.
And in another book-Humanism rebels against medieval subjection in affirming man's self-confidence, but it ends in debasing him through severing his celestial ties and in seeing him as but a part of nature. The Renaissance rediscovered natural man and antiquity, witnessed the clash of pagan and Christian principles, and saw their partial reconciliation in the great symbolic art of the age. The Reformation affirmed man's freedom from ecclesiastical compulsion, but it debased man by denying his primal freedom before God. The Enlightenment affirmed man's self-sufficient reason, but in denying any mystery it debased man's ability to know. The French Revolution affirmed man's ability to change history but ended in denying all human rights. Romanticism affirmed man's spiritual resources but denied his ultimate destiny. Industrialism affirmed man's liberation from nature but denied his integrity and dignity. Modern history by a fatal dialectic sees humanism paradoxically be coming inhumanism; the denial of God tending to the denial of man. Berdyaev sees the present as the beginning of a new barbarism the inhumanity of which is manifest in the total war system where human lives are regarded as mere means; in capitalism under which man is enslaved and oppressed by property; in collectivism where the organization becomes the end and man, the instrument; in a morality of bestialism which permits the use of man in any way to attain inhuman or anti-human ends; in cultural manifestations in literature, science, philosophy, and theology which interpret integral man in terms of a part; in politics with sham democracy's concern with only abstract, formal political freedom and the totalitarian's rejection of all freedom; in the dictator led masses in which all individuality is ruthlessly obliterated; in the intensification of racialism and nationalism which find the existential center in entities other than human personality; in the tyranny of Caesars who rule by appeal to instinct and emotion; and in a Christianity that largely conforms to the world.
This barbarism may lead on to the new Middle Ages which Berdyaev sees marked by the end of humanism, individualism, and formal liberalism; a simplified material culture; political universalism.; religious collectivism; and a social order of the syndicalist type. Berdyaev rejects the progressive and cyclical notions of history. Though Western civilization is at a crisis, he postulates the possibility of salvation through religious transfiguration. This will take place only as Christianity and creation are combined, i.e. as a dynamic, creative conception of the Church becomes actualized and incarnated in all areas of life. Man's ethical task is one of creativity as in contemplation he acquires the intuitive insight of genius and in self-sacrificing love he actualizes his inspiration. Death signifies that there is no eternity in time and that an endless temporal series is meaningless. Man's role in this situation is to forsake the creation of temporary, transitory, and corruptible goods and to devote himself to the creation of eternal, permanent, and immortal values.
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Please find a different understanding of Jesus and what he was doing while he was alive.
The people whom Jesus was addressing - who were, in their disposition, the same kind of person he was - presumed that suffering was the natural, and not merely political, state of human beings. Human beings, in that view, are all humble, mortal, suffering, often ill, and deprived - regardless of their worldly status whether high or low in the social pecking order. As such Jesus was simply, by nature, sympathetic and compassionate ordinary, natural, human condition - not just as subordinates of the Roman State, or as members of an "official" religious institution that was, itself, essentially a kind of political entity. Jesus stepped out of the spheres of both the power of the State, and the power of "official" religion, and basically, he taught everyone else to do the same.
Jesus freely extended his Blessing-Regard to all which was demonstrated through the reported incidents of his healing work. By this means Jesus taught people to understand that the essence of true religion is not merely a set of communications for right behavior. Rather, true religion is free Communion with the Living Divine Presence by means of moral or right-life disciplines, and by means of devotional, or right-heart disciplines, and, above all, by means of Spiritual or Truth-Worshipping disciplines. According to Jesus, true religion is the comprehensive life-practice of turning to the Spiritual Divine "with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength"
Su
At last, and inevitably, the ancient institutional rulerships have failed, and official institutional Christian-ism (along with all the other "great" world religions of institutional religion-power) is now reduced to impenetrable illusions and decadent exercise that everywhere characterize previously privileged aristocracies in their decline from worldly power.
Now, except a revolution renews the forever Esoteric Spirit of Truth, institutional Christian-ism is reduced to a chaos of corporate cults and Barnumesque propagandists that rule nothing more than chaotic herds of self-deluded consumers of whats-in-in-it-for-me consumerist religiosity.
Barnum was of course wrong as there are thousands of suckers born every minute. And of course the necessary Esoteric Spirit of Truth will not emerge from within the fortress like walls of institutional Christian-ism.
Therefore, the myth/lie of the cultural superiority of official institutional Christian-ism has come full circle. The religious mythologies of the "great" world religions are now not only waging global wars with one another (like so many psychotic inmates of asylums for the mad, each confronting the other with exclusive claims of personal absoluteness) but the public masses of religion-bound people - who, all over the world, for even thousands of years, been controlled in body and mind by ancient institutions of religiously-propagandized worldly power - are now in a globalized state of grossly bound religious delusion and social psychosis.