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People who seek the TRVTH outside the rhelm of verifiable knowledge give me the heebie jeebies

" . . . progress in certainty is gained by renouncing the knowledge of anything as whole . . genuinely philosophic, since it reflects on human deficiency in the light of the highest ambitions." -- R. L. Velkley, "Richard Kennington on Modern Origins" in The Political Science Reviewer 2002 available at Barnes and Noble.
"As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation, at first by socialism and then by Communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "Communism is naturalized humanism." This statement turned out to be not entirely meaningless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism [renouncing knowledge of the whole] and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under Communist regimes reaches the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures, with a seemingly scientific approach (this is typical of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and of Marxism) . . . . Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart

********************************************************* Proof as such is the colossus of little man representing his rage against the universe, the conclusion of his doubt in the face of an overwhelming existence. Proof is the pill for discontent of mind, the intellectual embrace of simplicity, the willful erasure of elemental evidence in naive experience, the satisfaction in the humanized safety against terror, the sugared pretense that knowledge is uberalles, the political Mauer to guard against the world that spins us all.

Proof as such is the colossus of little man representing his rage against the universe, the conclusion of his doubt in the face of an overwhelming existence. Proof is the pill for discontent of mind, the intellectual embrace of simplicity, the willful erasure of elemental evidence in naive experience, the satisfaction in the humanized safety against terror, the sugared pretense that knowledge is uberalles, the political Mauer to guard against the world that spins us all.

This insight makes me weep, it strikes an evocative chord....

What you describe is the felt sense of human alienation -- an alienation that I strongly doubt you yourself feel in any complete way, cornelis. Oddly enough, I strongly doubt you could have mustered the detachment, the "objectivity," it must have taken to compose these lines, had you given yourself up to a pure abstraction like "alienation."

Governments, social systems, international bodies, etc., all lately have signalled that "the little guy" and his concerns are of little moment to the Great Things now going forward in the world, in the name of the supposed "welfare" of some kind of "abstract humanity."

Well, I don't know about you, but I've never personally met "abstract humanity." The people I meet are persons, not abstractions.

I'm pretty sure that's the way God sees it: He knows each and every unique soul individually, by name. And loves each soul, each as His own son. If I thought otherwise, I'd change my own thinking about the futility of trying to engage "abstract humanity" as/with a motivational principle.

Keep the faith, baby! At the end of the day, Truth will out.

Thank you so much for the heads up! Your paragraph is priceless and bears repeating:

Proof as such is the colossus of little man representing his rage against the universe, the conclusion of his doubt in the face of an overwhelming existence. Proof is the pill for discontent of mind, the intellectual embrace of simplicity, the willful erasure of elemental evidence in naive experience, the satisfaction in the humanized safety against terror, the sugared pretense that knowledge is uberalles, the political Mauer to guard against the world that spins us all.

This deserves better commentary that I can probably produce at the moment, but for now all I can say is that materialism deals with material reality. Whether or not other varieties of reality exist, and what the nature of such realities might be, is not amenable to materialistic exploration. Reason is a powerful tool, but it has its limits.

That, and that scientific truth is necessarily an approximation of Truth, even material Truth. Perhaps we forget that sometimes...