GR translation: there is a new election, a new preterition abroad

[Paul Mackin]

On 12/9/2011 2:51 PM, Michael Bailey wrote:
> Election and Preterition are Calvinist terms describing who is saved and lost.
> In theology this refers to being destined for Heaven or Hell; the
> additional precept of Predestination indicates that God determines
> (has determined, will determine, does determine) all of this without
> reference to any human action...
>
> Although I was brought up Presbyterian, that has never made very much
> sense to me -
It doesn't make much sense to moderns but, in the days in which 
Christianity was being developed, it was a rather comforting idea. It 
was totally obvious to everyone that the behavior of people toward each 
other was pretty awful.  Good works were few and far between. This was 
attributed to the Fall of course. But the important thing, regardless of 
cause and effect,  was that on the scales of good and evil, evil far out 
balanced good. If rescue from the situation depended on being good, 
there wasn't much hope. Which explains why,  a power that could save you 
regardless what a scoundrel you were was an attractive thing to believe in.

We moderns might say, but where's the justice in that.  But these folks 
in the early centuries of the common era were not all that interested in 
justice. They just wanted to get saved, which meant getting something 
better that the dreadful human existence they were stuck with.

P







>   I think maybe he arrived at these precepts by a
> dialectic process because he was trying to counter other philosophic
> problems...
> why do bad things happen to good people, eg
>
> anyway, in theology they are misty and involved concepts much like
> epicycles in early astronomy.
>
> But just as Goedel's theorem (as Pynchon elsewhere writes) has a
> "brash, proletarian restatement" in Murphy's Law, so the Calvinist
> election and preterition terms, instead of referring to post-death
> destination, refer instead to predestining of worldly success.
>
> The common element, then, is a binary organizing principle of people's
> fates (or in even broader terms, an organizing principle of any kind
> of object, such as Maxwell's Demon)
>
> The behavior of the Londoners around the organizing principle of the
> Adenoid creates two classes - those he shuns and those he snuffles
> up...
>
> Election and Preterition crop up all over the place in GR.
>