aqvarivs,
Of course, I have to agree with the bulk of your second paragraph. I do not know what was your "personal and cultural experience"; mine was only with a totalitarian (stalinist) system imposed on a traditionally "Western" country in the middle of Europe. Not only the memory of better pre-communist times survived in the older generation, but also the awareness of being heirs of the cultural (and religious) West, as we saw us. Such an awareness of being heirs of a cultural and political system - that is being seen by the majority of the population as "better" (in various meanings of the word) than the one in existence - might exist in China, perhaps also in Islamic countries, but I do not think it exists to such an extent as was the case in Central European countries under communism. This, of course, is an important difference. Nevertheless, what we in the fifties regarded as an evil system that will have to spread all over the world before the powerful West stops being naive about it, collapsed in less than fourty years. Who knows whether, in spite of the difference mentioned above, the totalitarian systems built on Islamic ideology will not collapse, or rather dissolve, sooner than we might expect today; catchword "internet". If only the West did not hamper this process by overreacting, using the method “bull in the china shop”.

As to the first paragraph, I think one should not confuse Enlightenment with enlightenment that you define as "experience over time" which, of course, is not restricted to European history. When you want to speak of parallel alternatives in mathematics, you have to go far back into history: e.g. there is a Chinese version of the Pythagoras theorem, but it is not easy to see the equivalence with "western eyes”. I presume, the same could be said about medicine (perhaps with the exception of acupuncture): today there is only one medicine, like there is only one mathematics.

(ctd) Namely, the one practiced by all doctors and mathematician of the world, taught at all universities, based on what the West has arrived at in the recent centuries, with no better alternatives, whatever was the case in far away history. In the not so remote past we thought that the same was true about our Christianity. And in fact, when teaching mathematics to students of Asian background, I sometimes felt like a missionary of Western thought.

Sorry, I did not express myself clearly enough about the “software” (cultural) - in distinction to the "hardware" (territorial) - version of the East-West complementarity or polarity. One cannot separate East from West (the “software”) using territorial criteria, like one cannot mechanically separate the poles of a piece of magnet. Something like the yin-yang principle where the "hardware" version is the female-male distinction. There is, of course, some relation between the “software” and “hardware”, but I think in both cases a lot of misunderstandings arise from confusing the two. For instance, for us, living under communism, everything to the east of the Iron curtain was West (good and bad, we did not distinguish, we idealised the forbidden world), and even today countries in Central Europe, that used to be communist, are often referred to as Eastern Europe. I can better discern the poles East and West within, say, the Russian or German cultural make-ups, than in the Chinese or Islamic cases. So maybe I am seeing a distorted picture of the Islam-Christianity dilemma through my pinkish coloured East-West glasses. Paul Tillich describes the validity of this kind of “semi-subjective” approach rather succinctly: “The test of a phenomenological description is that the picture given by it is convincing, that it can be seen by anyone who is willing to look in the same direction, that the description illuminates other related ideas, and that it makes the reality which these ideas are supposed to reflect understandable. (Systematic Theology I, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 106).

George, I'm reminded of the story of the two gentlemen waiting in line for a bowl of ice cream. The shop only had a limited supply of ice cream come in once each week and it was always vanilla, and the queue was always very long and many waited in vain. This week the two gentlemen were well ahead in the queue to be assured of receiving their portion and were talking about what flavour they were going to enjoy. One said how he would have chocolate this week and the other said he would enjoy strawberry. Having gotten their bowl of vanilla ice cream each they spied a place in the shade to enjoy it. Approaching they asked a fellow already there if they could join him and struck up a conversation asking the stranger what flavour of ice cream he was enjoying this day. The man said, I had only made the end of the queue these past two weeks and missed my opportunity. This week I got up extra early and was one of the first. So gentlemen to make up for my missed opportunities, today I am having Neapolitan. One fellow turn to the other and says, The capitalist's would never understand such extravagance and probably have the vanilla. :-)

Thanks for your trouble Sam. The "mindset" you describe is so unfamiliar to me that I'll have to ponder and fret for a while. Will get back.

Pax,

This thread is still going?

Don't you people ever get sick of saying the same thing over and over again.

Don't you people ever get sick of saying the same thing over and over again.

Don't you people ever get sick of saying the same thing over and over again.

Don't you people ever get sick of saying the same thing over and over again.

Part One

To Boaz - Your statement that Christian groups have really been concerned about the lack of news regarding the plight of around a million and a half Iraqi Christians. Well, why has it not been mentioned on this OLO programme? Is it because there is concern that the Iraqi Christians are Nestorian, and said to be mostly non-Trinitarian?

With us Ecumenical Christians, Boaz, it is all about being fair to most everybody. As the 17th century English philosopher John Locke points out in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he warns that in using faith, we must still rely on reason to grasp the real truth as regards both spiritual and material welfare.

Just by changing Reason to Reasonable, I guess it gives out the true ecumenical message.

I guess you do know, Boaz, that the Holy Trinity was not made part of Christian Holy Scripture till nearly three years after the Crucifixion, when the Roman Emperor Constantine gave the order to cease persecuting the Christians and later prevailed over the Council of Nicea, in which as Chairman he gave the grant to a group who already believed in the Trinity - so hence began the life of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

The problem was, and it still is today, that many of the Nestorian groups refuse to sanction the Trinity, believing also more in a radical young Jewish preacher named Jesus rather than the Christ, which is a Greek word or synonom.

Further, about the Iraqi Christians, there was an article in the Guardian stating how forlorn the Iraqi Christians have become, many having crossed over into Syria and Jordan. The article author also expressed utter disgust towards the Bush regime just pushing the plight of the Nestorians aside, even more so because there is a large group practising in the US itself.

Our so-called church-minded John Howard should suffer over the above also, as well as Tony Blair, both apparently having lined up the Nestorians with the terrorists.