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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 20 Jul 2013

Taken: 18 Nov 2007

0 favorites     1 comment    78 visits

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Michigan •
Lansing •
excerpt •
Escape from Evil •
Author •
Earnest Becker •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . .Nature was seen in her imagined purity of endless cycles of sun rising and settings, moon waxing and waning, seasons changing, animals dying and being born, etc. This kind of cosmology is not favorable to the accumulation of either guilt or property, since everything is wiped away with the gifts and nature is renewed with the help of ritual ceremonies of regeneration. Man did not feel that he had to pile things up. Brown makes the excellent point that it is not quite true to say that primitive man lived in the “eternal now”: he experienced the flow of time because he experienced guilt. That is, in terms of our discussion of guilt, primitive man lived in certain un iversal binds that characterize human life, and so he had to experience time flow because these binds are composed with the passage of time. Guilt and time, then, are inseparable, which is why primitive man so elaborately tried to deny them both with regenerative rituals. It took the longest time for this denial to be given up; the Greeks and Romans were reluctant to admit that the old regenerative rituals no longer worked. Probably the repeated sackings of Rome graphically swung the balance. It could no longer be pretended that the ancient rituals of renewal could keep regenerating the city, and at this time growing members of people opted for Christianity, which promised the impending end of the world; after Augustine, time was firmly set in a linear way while waiting for that end. We are still today ticking on the years, but we no longer know what for, unless it is for compounding interest, as Brown argues. Compounding interest is one of the few meaningful things to do in the irreversible time stream that is wholly secular and visible. ~ Page 87 ~ Escape from Evil - Earnest Becker
3 years ago.

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