Perhaps someone can improve my understanding. The author says that Lucretius got his underlying themes from Jewish teachers. The proof of that is that his themes map pretty well over onto genesis. The big thing that enabled him to see this was that all ancient religions viewed the heavenly bodies as gods except the Old Hebrews. For them as for us—God stands outside of nature. Somehow the author saw a bit of this OT/Torah theology in the writings of Lucretius.
Here’s the part I don’t get. The author then goes on to say that somehow this confusion caused by trying to replace genesis with an origin myth that contains many genesis themes created an urbane myth....
So the urbane myth is that there is another version of genesis in Lucretius that turns out to be surprisingly similar to genesis.
Well, ok.
But then how does the author go from there to this statement?
“The consequences of this urbane myth are so enormous in scope and are so far along in propelling this nation into a profound political and economic disaster, that to ignore it is equivalent to abetting collective suicide.”
I do agree with the principle that some profound mistakes were made in the early 17th century. But I tend to lay them at the feet of Descartes. He was the guy whose tree of knowledge placed theology along side witchcraft as a sub branch of philosophy and the roots of the tree are metaphysics. The problem with this is that theology doesn’t even belong on the tree of knowledge. Because the tree of knowledge presumes that man is the measure of all things. Whereas theology presumes that God is the measure of all things.
And then of course you can compare Descartes Tree of Knowledge to the Genesis tree of the Knowledge of good and evil.
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So yes I do agree that some profound mistakes were made in the 17th century. But I don’t get how the writer of the article above gets the apocalypse out the urbane myth that grew from Lucretius poem.
So the urbane myth is that there is another version of genesis in Lucretius that turns out to be surprisingly similar to genesis.
OK, full disclosure, I am the author.
The mistake at issue is laid out very clearly at the beginning: That to presume "Natural" as being equivalent to "no influence from people," believing "Nature" to be a self-optimizing system but only if people are not involved, is a very dangerous and destructive thing to the productivity of "wildland" habitat, PARTICULARLY when that landscape has been shaped by people for 10,000 years. It is a philosophy that defines wildland management to this day and it carries a presumptive primacy in law. The way that this belief has modified our ability to see what we are looking at is perhaps its most destructive attribute.
The way Lucretius presents it, nature was self-generating, but the way he describes it is very much coherent with the story as told in Genesis, but without benefit of a god. The Enlightenment philosophers took that idea and ran with it.
It is also true that the philosophers did mistakenly adopt the same foundations to their thinking as what they thought they were repudiating.
For them as for us—God stands outside of nature.
I see the form the world takes as a manifestation of how the Lord set things up to work based upon our choices. He holds us accountable for the results too and teaches how we are to recognize whether we are keeping the Law in the shape the landscape takes. Moreover, I can show how even weather is modified by whether or not we keep the Law, as given, not as interpreted. I know that's a tall order, but that's what it says. The archaeological and geophysical record bears that out too.
The word translated as "create" in Genesis (bara) actually means to shape a preexisting workpiece. Be sure to read the entire page including opening up the Genesius' lexicon entry.
I hope that answers your questions; thanks for asking.
I actually had similar questions to Carry_Okie, and now I see his answer at 16.
I think that sometime around AD 1500 a catastrophe has happened in the Western Culture, the outcomes of which were latent till the 20th century. I would not ascribe the root of the catastrophe to any single man. The environmental disaster resulting from the perverted view on man in relation to God is likewise not the only manifestation of the catastrophe.