THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WORDISM: FORM, SUBSTANCE, AND REALITY | nationalsalvation.net

We all know that there was a Greek philosopher who came up with the concept of atoms.

Here is the way I understand it. The Nicene Creed says that the Son is of one Substance with the Father. Centuries before that philosopher and Aristotle had a run-in over this fundamental concept.

The heretic said that is you slice a bit of cheese in two and the one of those two pieces in two, and then one of THOSE pieces in two and on and on and on, you would get to piece that was no longer cheese. You would get down to a piece so small it was part of the building blocks of all matter.

Aristotle said this was nonsense. He pointed out that all the Authorities agreed that all matter had its own Form and Substance. The different things were each a matter of substance, not a redistribution of a common set of atoms.

The Atomic Philosopher was very lucky he lost the debate then and not after the Nicene Creed was established. The killing point at Nicaea was whether there was a Trinity, in which God was in three FORMS, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but one Substance.

In other words, the Arian Heresy said that Jesus was not God. They simply stated this in their own terms.

A Protestant chemist I knew went into a Catholic Church Mass and got some bread and chemically analyzed it. He said he had disproven Transubstantiation because the bread had no protein in it.

I didn't try to explain to him that, just as those at Nicaea had used their own physics, so had he. He would have been insulted to hear that he was on the same level as the Christians he despised who said that if there was Evolution, there was no God.

Christians would be insulted to know that the Creed they so deeply say they believe in they don't understand.

Our whole history is screwed up this way. We try desperately to show a continuum between what we call Classical Thought and our present sciences. History is totally unaware of the Levantine Civilization which had a totally different way of thought and a different chemistry and physics that would have made no sense to us or to Aristotle.

One recent discovery about dinosaurs was that some of the different species we had named were actually species we already know, but at their pre-adult phases. A little THINKING might have told us that not all animals are of the same construction when they are young as when they are adult, but it didn't come up.

Ironically, nothing is changing more rapidly today than history.

Just as all of our present ideologies developed when we firmly believed that no animal held territory, that no animal had a class system, that no animals would ever give his life to defend his group, we now insist that all men always thought basically alike.

Why? Men who are fundamentally different are heresy. Everything the white man has comes from All Mankind.

We are right back with "substance" and the Nicene Creed.