7 ecumenical councils?

closer to reality: the 7 unecuminical councils

sinners out of the hands of an absent God

traditional Christian "sins" seem almost quaint considering the demonic brutality revealed in the 20th century's "man's inhumanity to man"

moments of the descent?

the "psychologies" of eg Locke or Hobbes as stages of human anthropography?

the senses of Locke and Plotinus

Locke: there is nothing in the mind that was not previously in the senses
Plotinus: there is nothing in the senses that was not previously in the Mind

ones' intellectual ancestry

for those for whom the ideas and lives of "Zarathustra", Plato, Plotinus, Origen, Aquinas, Ockham, Ficino, Luther, Hume, Goethe, Strauss,...are a complicated family personal(ized by study) history...

science stole history

a grandchild of natural philosophy, science, stole history from humanity while it was dozing in church

sentenced to hard labor scholarship

many "scholars" work and write as if they had been sentenced to a life of hard labor
some quarrying common stones
others digging holes only to refill them

senseless suffering and death? theodicy...or pathodicy or thanodicy?

theodicy, at heart, or in mind...
is it not rather a pathodicy that is sought...
an attempt to justify, to give sense to suffering, so that for recent popular necessary example: "they did not die in vain"
or thanodicy, as an attempt to make sense, to justify a death, especially if and when it seems premature, unnatural, senseless?

America's missing cacosophy

it is certainly clear that when one must look to a book like Moby Dick or even Biblical or Church Father demonology for an understanding of "evil" in man, that one can say America has long had an inadequate cacosophy

WTC and "moral evil"

the second, more "successful" attack on the World Trade Center in NYC in 2001, is an historical example of "moral (as Lisbon was in 1755 of "natural) evil"
but one which cannot be realistically understood without clear knowledge of the prior decades of American imperial (overt and covert) history which lead up to it.
(though a preponderantly emotional position was, is and will be popular, naturally.)