Status Updates From The One, the Three and the ...

Very thought provoking. When God is displaced, fragmentation necessarily develops in culture, social thought, and in the relationship of the one to the many.

Heraclitus- everything is in flux; war is the universal creative and ruling force; basic fact of the world is strife. The many are prior to the One; there no stability to be found in nature.
Parminedes- the real is the totally unchanging; reality is timelessly and uniformly what it is. The many do not really exist, except as functions of the One.

So, time for Gunton again.

"When individual self-contemplation becomes the basis of the self, rather than the relation to the divine and human others on which our reality actually depends, the self begins to disappear" (118).

Time! Our incapacity to live in the present....wow!

A bit of a stiff read, but very insightful, especially on how the "many" are absorbed into the "one" and how that has lead to the tyranny of the consumer culture etc.

I read this back in 2006, and am picking it up for a second read (2014).