See Mircea Eliade's book THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: THE NATURE OF RELIGION (1959), Troels Engberg-Pedersen's book COSMOLOGY AND SELF IN TE APOSTLE PAUL: THE MATERIAL SPIRIT (2010), Hans Belting's book LIKENESS AND PRESENCE: A HISTORY OF THE IMAGE BEFORE THE ERA OF ART (1994), and Marcus J. Borg's book CONVICTIONS: HOW I LEARNED WHAT MATTERS MOST (2014).
(5) According to Ong, the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Western culture in the 1450s fostered the unprecedented expansion of the world-as-view sense of life beyond Western philosophic thought and Christian theology. Formal education in Western culture today continues to provide strong cultural conditioning in the world-as-view sense of life. More recently, we in Western culture have seen the unprecedented expansion of the Gutenberg printing press in photocopying machines and printers attached to computers.
See Ong's book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE: FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON (1958).
(6) One of Ong's claims to fame is that he held out hope about the positive potential of the communication media that accentuate sound. Because the telegraph used sound in a way that somewhat resembles African drum-talk, perhaps we should see the telegraph as one example of communication media that accentuate sound, along with sound amplification systems, movies with sound tracks, audio recordings of all kinds, the telephone, the television, and the like. Under the influence of the various communication media that accentuate sound, our contemporary Western cultural conditioning is changing us deep in our psyches. According to Ong, the influence of our cultural conditioning by the communication media that accentuate sound will not result in our returning to the world-as-event sense of life that characterized primary oral cultures.
However, according to Ong, our deeply instilled world-as-view sense of life will probably undergo a certain modification as a result of our cultural conditioning by communication media that accentuate sound. But Ong does not venture to suggest how this modification may proceed, except to suggest that it will proceed.
See Ong's book INTERFACES OF THE WORD: STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE (1977).
CERTAIN ANALOGIES WITH THE CHRIST MYTH
Taking a hint from Ong's play on the analogy between the capitalized Word in the Christian tradition of thought and the lower-case word of spoken and written human language in his book THE PRESENCE OF THE WORD (1967), mentioned above, I want to play with the analogy between Ong's sweeping account of Western cultural history in terms of communication media, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain key points in the Christian tradition of thought about the Christ myth: (A) the Incarnation, (B) the Crucifixion, (C) the Resurrection, (D) the Ascension, and (E) the envisioned Second Coming.
As mention, the Gospel According to John claims that "In the beginning was the Word" (capitalized).
According to Ong, in the beginning, all of our human ancestors lived in primary oral cultures (i.e., pre-literate cultures).
(A) According to the Christian tradition of thought, the Incarnation of the Word occurred when the historical Jesus was conceived by a Jewish woman named Mary and was born in the ancient Jewish homeland.
But before Jesus was born, the human word was incarnated by his Jewish ancestors in their phonetic alphabetic writing system in their scriptures.
(B) After the historical Jesus was crucified by the local authorities of the Roman Empire in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover, his followers embarked on exploring their Jewish scriptures and also certain other sources such as Philo of Alexandria as they wrote a new set of scriptures for the emerging Christian movement (as it eventually came to be called).
Nevertheless, the analogous Crucifixion of the ordinary human word emerged with the development of the Gutenberg printing press in the 1450s.
(C) The analogous Resurrection of communication media involves all of the contemporary communication media that accentuate sound.
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