Good Evening Friends,

Well, we seem to have rambled far and wide away from our ORIGINAL conceptual project of reconciling religion and humanism.

Recall that I suggested and tried to argue that the ancient masters, the original founders of the world's great religious and spiritual systems, were keen naturalistic observers of human nature and the world around them; and their observations and analyses were religionized, if you will, by the only interpretative framework available at the time.

By drawing on the ideas of Slavoj Zizek, I hope I have adequately shown, in a limited space, that we "believe" more than we think we do, more than we appear to do.

Taken together, I think we can conclude that: religion is not as religious as religion thinks it is (and this is not a criticism of religion) and secularism is not as secular as secularism thinks it is.

I hope that the line between religion and reason, faith and atheism (agnosticism, atheism), belief and non-belief (though I tend to think there is no non-belief) is not as clear to you as it may have been before we started these reflections.

Next time we shall try to apply what we've discovered in saying a word about capitalism. This may take some time. We must keep in mind the fundamental ontological and phenomenological ideas about Existentialism, namely: consciousness is not what it is but what it is not; and man is the desire to become God.

Hopefully, we will be able to make some relatively novel observations about capitalism and the causes of crisis in the system, historically, as well as recently.

Good Night.

wingedcentaur