For when and if we’ve connected with “God,” we shouldn’t privilege that personal realization steeped in human prejudice or personal interpretation of that revelation which was probably meant for me and my Divine connection. Yet we have sought to universalize a brand of Divine intervention as if to proselytize or to create franchises instead of providing a perspective that may help to inspire and advance a human soul and preserve life. For if life is to be preserved then at times an intervention that is Divine may suffice to appease that Divine goal of life and the enjoyment it brings the Gods. If truth be told, we have universalized a brand of divine intervention so as to continue to assert our hegemony. But this is not new the beginnings of Christianity and the bifurcation of Judaism into Jews for Jesus and Jews not for Jesus created a situation where these positions jostle for positions that’s privilege themselves and beliefs over others.
When you study the foundations and evolution of knowledge up to the patristic traditions and beyond you see how these branches utilized interpretive methods so as to assert their positions and Romanized Christianity which provided a victory for “Jews not for Jesus” who at that point reposition themselves and started their hegemony and growth over the world. We will delve into these fully as I develop my final paper that looks at development of privilege and position.
Furthermore, as we think about these matters and examine the foundations of religion, we see the polishing or incorporation of Socratic platonic philosophy regarding piety and philosophical preparation to achieve eternal life within the development of western foundations of religion.
While the Jews look for a Hero that is Like that of the Greeks Achilles, those of the messianic persuasion saw their hero as Jesus who is the Christ and who dies to save the day. You can see the traditions of Greek philosophy mixed elaborately within Christianity traditions as the early fathers attempts to promote a religion that was better than the others. And the fathers were selective ensuring that the traditions and literature that would all but ensure the hegemony of Christianity was included in the canon of scripture, which we now refer to as The Holy Bible, that was nonexistent in the patristic and the early part of the medieval period.
Similarly, Mohamed who was given the revelation of Allah contained in the Quran in about 622 CE as a way to fix the errors of faith contained in other traditions such as Christianity and Judaism. Mohamed was supposed to be the conduit of all truth and all should come under the house of Allah. Privilege and power and hegemony continues here and no faith when you examine their foundations seem to be untouched by this prejudice and hegemonic based of their positions which provided a basis for war and countless human conflicts and discrimination justified in the foundation of knowledge riddled with privilege and bias that promotes their exceptionalism.
But the preservation and hegemony of the faith required a canon given the competitive traditions of faith that was developing and the rise of the Roman Empire that posed threats to several peoples and where infightings among military leaders created a necessity for the Christian faith to solidify power blocs within the Roman Empire. Moreover the Philosophical preparation that enables one to attain true knowledge which Plato speaks of and later developed in his republic whereby the philosopher leads all into this truth, is taken up by the fathers of the patristic and medieval traditions and morphed into the glorification of the pope the papacy and their religious piety. We will explore this in our final paper on this subject matter for my DLS Foundation 1 class.