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NOTE: The comments that follow, below, are from people I've asked to serve as my "co-creators" on this project, i.e. to help me make this series as good and effective as possible.
They are people who have known me and my work. And my request of them is that --when the spirit moves them to contribute -- they add what they believe will help this series fulfill its purpose and give the readers something of value. I've invited them to tell the readers what they think will serve the readers well, and to pose questions or challenges they believe might elicit from me what I should be saying to the readers next.
I am grateful for their attempting to help me find the right path.
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Philip Kanellopoulos:
If the insights offered by the Parable of the Tribes ultimately save us, I suspect it will be primarily because of the faith in ourselves that it restores. Finding motivation to work toward a better world presumably requires a belief in the inherent worth of those who would deserve to inhabit it. Absent that faith, and we're left with no hope to escape from endless human misery and iniquity, other than of course through extinction. Could this be related to Freud's death drive? People content to allow and perhaps even to facilitate human extinction are in desperate need of this Better Human Story.
It's fascinating to me how leaps in our understanding of the world can seem to be metaphorically rendered within ancient mythologies. I can't recall whether in your writings you mention how Genesis arguably anticipates in its poetry not only the discovery of the Big Bang, but also that of the Parable of the Tribes. Our ancestors, as the story goes, had eaten of the cultivated fruit of knowledge, of good and evil, and were by that transgression of the established order driven out of a paradise of spontaneous provision, thereafter to toil and suffer. And the story would be appended later by the Gospels to include future deliverance through a new and more wholesome political order or kingdom, one of love, empathy, and interdependence.
I do recall somewhere in your writings you mention how human survival into the indefinite future may actually require civilization and its advanced technology, to protect Earth from the catastrophic threats posed by rogue asteroids and comets -- a technology obviously unavailable to foraging bands confined to their biologically prescribed niche. This would mean that our tormented history explained by the Parable of the Tribes has not only been an inevitable consequence of settled life, but actually a necessary ordeal for those who imagine our current epoch to be analogous to humanity's adolescence.
I first encountered the Parable of the Tribes nearly a generation ago, and its explanatory depth and scope still take my breath away. Not a week goes by that I don't refer to it in my struggles to interpret our complex world.
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April Moore:
Well-presented. Every time you've laid out THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES, I take it in more deeply. Reading this leaves me feeling compassion even for the likes of Trump.
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