About

The Chosen Demos hopes to present a balanced Christian view of the world. As audacious as that may sound, nonetheless, it is our goal.

The Koine Greek word demos means the people; the Latin synonym for demos is the more pejorative and derogatory word mob. That distinction gives us some insight into how the Greeks viewed the common man, as opposed to how the Romans viewed the same people.

O.K.? Then why chosen? The ancient Israelites understood themselves as God’s chosen people. Subsequent to the arrival of God’s promised Messiah, in the person of Jesus (the Son of Man), the Christ (the Son of God) combined together in one person and being of one substance, and as a result of His well documented sinless life, and His unjust, but willingly submitted to, execution, death, resurrection, and eventual ascension, those who chose to follow and obey Him have become God’s new chosen people (be they ethnic Jews or gentiles).

The Chosen Demos website hopes to help all of us (Christians and all others alike) to understand the world that came before us, and how that prior world became the world we see and live in today.

The world we live in is one of the most beautiful and inspiring of places I can imagine, and its enigmas are worth pondering and deciphering. Those who penetrate the many pages of the Chosen Demos will unfold some of those mysteries and perhaps see some of that beauty for themselves.

The Bible tells us we are all made in the image of God. Fine! But what in the world does that mean?

The classically Greek trained Cappadocian Fathers (of the mid 300s), Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, distilled the apostolic concept of being made in the image of God down to three essential elements in which men were made similar to their creator God.

1. Men have immortal souls, and God has always existed and is eternal.

2. Men have free agency, and of course, God’s nature is that He does as He wills to do.

3. Lastly, men have the power of their reason (they don’t always use it well, but they have the power of reason, nonetheless), and God is, again of course, the essence of reason.

Many of the pages of this site will be filled with the threads of human history and the ideas which have influenced and caused those events or caused counter-reactions to those ideas and events.

In 1905, the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously, but negatively, said:

I would say, rather, that those who truly wish to learn from history and are willing to invest the time required to do so will be blessed both by being able to understand the people in our lives, and by seeing our world as a much more understandable place.

The fundamental truth of human nature does not really change over time. Good ideas lead to good choices, which in turn generally leads to good outcomes, and I think we all want those.

Human history is complicated, and I am, to say the least, a flawed person, so I will no doubt be mistaken at times. For those errors, I apologize to you, the reader, in advance.

I do not apologize for the biases I will present. To the best of my ability they will never be hidden or camouflaged; I am not that subtle of a person. At times I will even point to those biases confidently. To quote Thomas Sowell:

“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”

As a Christian, I am also aware of the admonition of Christ during the Sermon on the Mount:

“Judge not, that you be not judged (Matthew 7:1 NKJV).”

Though that quotation is often misunderstood (or even intentionally misused to try to silence the Christian voices out of the larger discussion in the virtual town square), that statement is not an injunction against sound judgment. It is a warning to us that we will be divinely judged by the same standards we chose to hold others up to. We are commanded to judge; however we are forbidden from being judgmental.

Importantly viewers will notice that this website will have far more apparently secular pages than overtly Christian ones.

The ancient gnostic religious heresy of the first and second centuries postulated a divided reality which split human existence between the base and corrupted physical world and a noble and virtuous “spiritual” world. For those Gnostics the highest form of existence in this world was to be so spiritually minded that one effectively transcended into the metaphysical world while one was still living in this physical one.

In numerous weird ways that falsely dichotomous gnostic thinking reappeared in many more modern circles during and since the more recent western enlightenment when people began to replace superstitious religious ideas which purported to explain the causality of numerous curious observations of the physical world with actual scientific ones based in observable and reproducible facts.

As scientific understanding of the physical world grew, the intelligent and virtuous people in those modern western societies reached an intolerance of religious thinking, which became such that they would only tolerate those silly religious ideas of others if they kept those thoughts to themselves. It was nominally acceptable to have your own transcendent or metaphysical ideas about things that are beyond the physically known reality as long as you kept that stuff in your “private” life. Hence the rebirth of ancient Gnosticism in the modern age.

Christianity, on the other hand, actually has no room for such knavish thought. The God who created the cosmos did not just create the physical world, but the metaphysical one also. Importantly there is no clear or defining distinction between the two. To quote the Nicene Creed of the 4th century:

One should note that the word visible used here means physical, and the word invisible means metaphysical.

In his Confessions, Augustine agreed with Origen of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage that there is a convergence between Christianity and classical culture that provides ground for a synthesis, though not without tension and struggle. Tertullian summarized this with his famously pithy rhetorical question:

So the Christian presuppositions of the Chosen Demos will not allow us to ignore the modern world in which we now live.  Christianity is not just a philosophy of metaphysics; it is an understanding of all of creation, the integrated physical and metaphysical worlds.

Finally, in actual practice, I will focus on “the real world” all the more. To quote the wise and sometimes whimsical Fyodor Dostoevsky:

Tolerance is a virtue in its broadest since, but it is not the overriding goal of this life, or of the Chosen Demos website.

The Chosen Demos Remains, as Always, at Your Service.