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    Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization
    Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization
    Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization
    Ebook61 pages55 minutes

    Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization

    By Ed Hurst

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    As with all previous civilizations and cultures in human history, the West is collapsing. As you might expect, just about anything Western in character will also be left behind. That includes Western Christian religion. Even as organized religion wanes, spirituality has grown. If we understand that religion is merely our human response to the call of the Spirit in our souls, then it stands to reason we should distinguish between religion and faith. This book explores some possibilities in stripping away what is merely human invention in mainstream Christian religion, and attempts to put back some things we might have lost since those first churches were formed in the first century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEd Hurst
    Release dateJul 11, 2016
    ISBN9781310538612
    Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization
    Author

    Ed Hurst

    Born 18 September 1956 in Seminole, OK. Traveled a great deal in Europe with the US Army, worked a series of odd jobs, and finally in public education. Ordained to the ministry as a Baptist, then with a non-denominational endorsement. Currently semi-retired.

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      Book preview

      Radix Fidem - Ed Hurst

      Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization

      By Ed Hurst

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2016 by Ed Hurst

      Copyright notice: People of honor need no copyright laws; they are only too happy to give credit where credit is due. Others will ignore copyright laws whenever they please. If you are of the latter, please note what Moses said about dishonorable behavior – be sure your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:23)

      Permission is granted to copy, reproduce and distribute for non-commercial reasons, provided the book remains in its original form.

      Cover Art: Abandoned Presbyterian church in Taiban, New Mexico by Wordbuilder (Wikipedia); source. Used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, this work has been modified and the modified version is available under the same license upon request.

      Other books in this series include Heart of Faith and A Course in Biblical Mysticism by the same author.

      Radix Fidem: Faith Arising at the End of Western Civilization

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: Not a Cult

      Chapter 2: Radix Fidem

      Chapter 3: Two Realms

      Chapter 4: The Heart of the Matter

      Chapter 5: Flavoring Matters

      Chapter 6: Radicals

      Chapter 7: The Moral Sphere

      Chapter 8: Freedom

      Chapter 9: Paranoia

      Chapter 10: Forget the Results

      Chapter 11: An Application

      Conclusion: Otherworld

      Introduction

      Every human aspiration to make the world a better place carries the seeds of its own destruction.

      It becomes particularly obvious when we examine the rise and fall of empires and civilizations. Yet, even on the smaller scale of various political endeavors of our time, we see the same tendency to rot from within. What begins as a driving hunger against the existing system, once it succeeds and becomes mainstream, hardens into a bureaucracy that seeks to prevent change in the status quo. The creative genius of visionaries is replaced with the dehumanizing hive-mind – sometimes within the very same set of people who started the whole thing. This is the nature of human political activity.

      We should hardly be surprised to find ourselves today at the ragged end of Western Civilization. Like it or not, this thing has run its course. Those who would seek to preserve what they deem the purity and vitality of past glories complain of all the invasive new trends that are obviously shredding things, but they fail to see that the destructive tendencies were there all along. Today’s whiny college dweeb scrabbling for an emotional safe space from micro-aggressions is not some insidious new attack on mainstream culture; it’s a direct derivative of the fundamental weaknesses. Every human endeavor has its own strengths and weaknesses, and Western Civilization is no exception.

      The blindness to that truth comes from being too deeply absorbed into the ambient cultural myths. You cannot usefully evaluate Western Civilization using Western values. We can probably justify suggesting that the Enlightenment was the pinnacle of Western creative ferment, but if you can’t step outside of your admiration for it, you can’t see the inevitable breakage hidden within. For those pickled in the glory of it, the flaws don’t matter. Perhaps the early leading minds of the Enlightenment could turn a cynical eye to the mirror, but that died when it became the mainstream. You cannot mainstream a wise self-cynicism.

      At least, you cannot do that in Western Civilization. You can write it as the essential rhetoric of the culture, but there’s nothing you can do to write it on the human soul if your culture fundamentally rejects the notion of the soul. The signal flaw of Western Civilization is the essential materialism of all assumptions. It presumes a reality confined to this universe, confined to what our reason and senses can handle. Could you step outside the cultural biases of the West, you would realize that even the vast varieties of Christian religion are locked into this narrow outlook. For all the talk of Heaven and Hell, the entire belief structure still drags them down into this realm of existence.

      As you might expect, even as people begin to lose their sense of belonging to Western Civilization, church membership as a whole declines. At the same time, religious sensibilities are rising. Atheism is dying, too, because it arose from the same intellectual fabric as Western Christian religion. Even the most radical new wave of churches still share entirely too much with the dying culture. Can we remake religion as a human activity so that it better answers the evolving sense of spiritual pull for whatever follows Western Civilization?

      By no means do I pretend

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