Westernism

One of the biggest problems in the West is our tradition of Platonism. You know the attitude, because it predominates everywhere - if the facts don't fit your theory, so much for the facts! Um schlimmer fur die Tatsachen! remarked Herr George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel, when questioned a little too closely. Our theologies are not uninfected, nor our politics, nor our ideology. In general, it's assumed that absolute rules or Ideas or God govern reality, when in point of fact, Life remains a lot more like poker or horse racing than chess (hence, Reagan won the Cold War against the Russians). Statistics and trends govern reality. In one sense, there are no absolutes. Who would make anything absolute except God, and who can absolutely know Him absolutely? There is room in the human condition for Divine doubt, paradox, ambiguity, shadow, questioning, and seeking. Only in the religion of Islam and the universe of Allah is there any such thing as absolute certitude, perfect assurance, or invincible arguments. In this sense, every Westerner is a born humanist. That is, he believes in the principle of Incarnation, which states that Grace perfects Nature rather than altering or obliterating it, as Allah is wont to do when sufficiently enraged or capricious. Allah's will is His only limit. A Westerner believes there is room in even heaven for curiousity and the honest doubt. God condescends to our condition, and ennobles it. Resurrection is a change of condition, and not an annihilation of our kind, as in Platonism, in which the soul lives on, outside the body, gone forever. We just keep forgetting this and fall back into trying to be philosophers. As Blaise Pascal wrote so long ago, his life was illumined when he realized that the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In this sense, we have to continually go back to our Bibles in humility, back to our inmost hearts, back to our roots, back to our Church Fathers, back to our childhood, in short, and re-evaluate our priorities in the light of wisdom gained. What assumptions are disproven by the existence of the modern Jew or the caterpillar transformed to butterfly or the shining stars of deep heaven? Is what we believe a philosophy we have contrived, or a theology we have proved with suffering? Is Reality fundamentally misleading or is it merely veiled and subtly different than it appears at first glance?
The answers to these questions will determine whether we remain, not only recognizably Western, but (I would argue), meaningfully Christian.
We cannot remain in our comfortable fortresses, with our stock reactions, and our old proverbs.
http://www.isteve.com/philosophy.htm
http://groups.google.com/group/Until-the-Day-Dawns/about