False Gods

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"You no longer have reason in its original form, but have decapitated God, and what is left is the human pole of reason. When only the human pole of reason is left, the content of reason, which is precisely the tension toward the ground, the consciousness of the ground, is destroyed. Since man cannot live, or does not live, without accounting for himself in terms of a ground, God, the transcendent ground, must be replaced by substitute grounds of being. Let me enumerate some of the instances.

"It begins in the eighteenth century with the replacement of a divinely conceived order of man and society by the idea of order in society through the balance of economic forces, and the rationale of an optimum production of goods. The conception of the eighteenth-century economy is that when all men strive for the utmost satisfaction of their desires and work as best they can in competition with one another for an increase in the production of goods, the result will be an order of society balanced by economic competition... economic competition was one of the substitutes for the reason that has disappeared." -- Eric Voegelin, "The Drama of Humanity"

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