The progression of philosophy

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Thoughts on the origin of worldview

"Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society; and, actually or ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them. The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works, -if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with fortune instead."
Uses of Great Men, Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is it about man that we find it so easy to obsess over ourselves? The biggest obstacle a man will ever face is the confines that he will impose on himself. The irony is that man's greatest self-imposed confine is himself. The depths of man inherently know that a higher power is omnipresent in his domain, and he tends to loathe it. On the one hand, we refuse to submit to anything attempting to claim lordship of our innermost thoughts and subtle actions, but on the other, we sell our souls for the permission to identify with certain thought processes and popular sociological trends. A particular rocket scientist could reject all thoughts of a creator or god in an attempt to “liberate” his mind, and simultaneously fall prey to the same social restrictions that ensnare high school girls when selecting an outfit and brand names to wear for a night out.
Every culture adopts and raises a distinct cornucopia of principles and ideas with which they choose to identify. These principles govern all who find themselves enveloped within its jurisdiction. For Europeans before the reformation, this social order was constructed around the dictations of God mainly through the Pope. Their lives were simple, and they relied on God for everything. A farmer would come to the dinner table with his sons after a long day at work in the fields, and he would bow his head to pray for rain for the crops they just planted, and continued health and protection for the members of his family. For the people of his era, life was completely out of human control or prediction. It rained only when God made it rain and for however long He saw fit. Disease was prevalent, but He bestowed protection on whom He wanted to when He wanted to. Life was extremely matter of fact. Imagine the implications to such a society when someone starts predicting the weather. Weather patterns become charted, germs get discovered, preventative measures are concocted, and God’s job description gets redefined. The situation snowballs, and mankind’s dependence on its progenitor is obliterated during a hectic rapid development of a society spawned by trust in man.
Corrupt Popes fused with advances in technology propelled thoughts away from God and into outer space or on massive ships surveying the globe. Mankind was unstoppable. Instead of demonstrating this vertically like their previous attempt to build a tower to touch heaven, they expressed this notion horizontally. Ideas and inventions spread like fire through mentally dry lands. Was man limitless?

It is ironic that the corruption of a few religious leaders served as a catalyst to corrupt human thought in general on the opposite side of the pendulum. It seems that when human nature and philosophy interact the consequent irrational actions produced are often followed by harsher reactions. We are a people that travel between scarlet letters and complete sexual perversion without any contemplation of the existence of a middle ground. In any case, religion dispersed as kings and popes faced off against each other. With mankind’s advancement, and subsequent self-reliance, the power of the church cracked. Man no longer needed a pope to bridge the gap between God and man and felt confident enough to interpret the Bible for himself. Denominations were born as a result of people feeling like they could say and think what they wanted. In Germany, Luther declared that the Eucharist was the actual body of Christ, and is later excommunicated from the church after writing a divisive paper called the “Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms.” In Switzerland, massive amounts of people started following John Calvin’s interpretation of the Bible. Erasmus declared himself a humanist Christian (today an explicit oxymoron) and started criticizing doctrines, even re-writing certain sacred texts. The Christian order was in disarray. Catholicism faced off against the Protestants, and the church of England at the time adopted a crossbreed of the two. True Humanism had its foothold and the notion of an absolute truth was dealt a fatal blow, although it would take a few more centuries to bleed out. Today, Europe is agnostic and atheistic in its values.

*to be continued*