Backporting Your Assumptions

In software development lingo, “backporting” is making adjustments in software code so that it works on some older OS. Software development typically takes place using the latest and greatest software environment. Backporting often means rewriting the code so that it compiles on something earlier, yet somehow tends to work pretty much the same. As you might expect, some developers get nasty when you suggest there might be a good reason for it, as their world makes no room for the existence of folks who aren’t in a hurry to upgrade and update something that works well.

Just so, we find ourselves living in a Western society that bears an unconscious spite for anything from yesterday. Society does recognize nostalgia as a sentiment, but nothing more than a mere wishful aura for something that cannot be, and should not be, and might never have actually been. “Get over it.” How easily we forget that Western Civilization has been remarkably short lived even as it appears in accelerating collapse.

Perhaps you are acquainted with the history and intellectual background of the West? You still might not know that Aristotle’s primary innovation was trashing the bulk of human wisdom and knowledge from previous civilizations. Given what we know of the historical context, we can reasonably assume he was exposed to a wide range of older philosophical backgrounds from elder civilizations, and apparently dismissed the vast majority of it all. His teaching shows virtually no acknowledgement of vast stretches of human thought still available in his time. It was truly a radical departure.

For example, if you read the text of Daniel’s Prophecy, you’ll notice the story in chapter 4 where Nebuchadnezzar suffers a mental breakdown. Contemporary support is weak, at best, but the event itself was not the point. Nor is it some kind of propaganda about how Nebs bought into Hebrew religion, if only momentarily. Daniel is fully aware of the meaning of all of this in a far wider context. In the Ancient Near East, Nebuchadnezzar had violated a fundamental moral assumption about reality itself, and in the process, sinned against his own gods.

The issue is not hubris. Neither in the modern meaning of the word, nor the more ancient Greek concept — a concept somewhat different from the modern. For the Greeks, it was excessive spite against your vanquished adversary. The Greek image included the idea of debauchery. In crude terms, it was beating your opponent and then forcing him to give you a blow job, or anally raping him. It’s turning victory into a zero sum game, an unwarranted level of spite that violates good sense. Only in a few Greek myths does the term “hubris” take on religious significance.

It should be obvious this had nothing to do with Nebuchadnezzar’s sin. In the first place, the Greeks made their gods out to be morally no different than any petty human. The myths endow them with the worst of human moral weaknesses. In the Ancient Near East, that would be a shocking lack of reverence. The gods of the East belonged to an entirely different plane of existence, incomprehensible to humans. It wasn’t a mere matter of scale, as it was in Aristotle’s unitary universe. Nebs failed to embrace the moral duty of humility. Nobody in his world failed to give honor to at least one deity for their good fortune. This was far different from merely being uppity and forgetting his place below some bunch of petty and easily angered gods. No one in the East took literally the idea of angering any god(s). Deities were above that sort of thing, but it might feel pretty much the same down here on the receiving end.

The Greeks had no concept at all for a fallen nature. For them, all that existed was of the same stuff and human frailty could be fixed if we just employed reason. In the East, humans were fallen and it could not be fixed without some merciful redemption from outside our realm of existence entirely. Greeks considered current reality more or less eternal, and that time and space were fundamental to existence itself. Easterns regarded time and space as anomalies we just endure until something outside time and space broke through to rescue us, and in the process remaking everything around us. There was a distinct sense that death meant departure from this realm, not simply some other state or place within it.

Within Western Christianity we can discern the Greek stain in their doctrine, as if the Greek approach is fundamentally true. Worse, it’s mixed with a bunch of Germanic mythological hogwash. We have reason to believe the very intelligent Church scholars decided to simply adjust their teachings to match the morals already held by Germans invading Europe at the end of Roman Civilization. In other words, the priests agreed with Aristotle and threw away the vast lore of how man should approach questions of fundamental reality that served as the context for all of Scripture. They ditched it all because embracing Germanic mythology made a good sales pitch and would smooth the path to “Christianizing” the invading hordes. Of course, Acquinas strove mightily to justify that shift after the fact.

Backporting can work well in software. The consequences are actually manageable. In terms of human thought processes and intellectual assumptions, attempts at backporting guarantee you’ll never be able to understand Jesus Christ, and you will not avoid accidentally blaspheming God. Welcome to Nebuchadnezzar’s madness.