I wrote out these premises or base points for my thinking in response to Jonathan on a previous thread, but I thought I'd lay them out here, and let whoever wants to take shots at them. They are all debatable, needless to say, but it's how they all work together that underlies most of my thinking about almost everything.
1. That the incarnation has meaning for the entire earth and earth history.
2. That, therefore, history has meaning and what we do with our lives 'participates' in that meaning to greater or lesser degrees to promote or undermine the advancement of that meaning.
3. That the first phase of history--1.0--humans were largely passive and directed by forces they thought they had no control over.
4. That the second phase, 2.0, taking hold around the time of the Renaissance/Reformation, was characterized by humans' developing a sense of their own agency in history and gradually developing beliefs that history was humans' responsibility to direct. This last part was particularly strong in the period between the French Revolution and the WWI.
5. That since 2.0 largely defined itself in opposition to the irrational assumptions that grounded 1.0 traditional/customary cultures, it adopted new assumptions that were grounded in optimism about the future and the power of rationality guided by positivistic/materialistic norms to create a utopia on earth.
6. That the two 20th century world wars destroyed any optimism associated with human rationality--except in the US where it took until the sixties and seventies.
7. That we're in a slack tide phase now in which the 'best lack all conviction', etc. and virtually no attempt is being made to shape the human future, and so instinctual (i.e., non-Logos grounded) impulses of the 'worst' are driving history now largely unconstrained.
7. That because of premise 1, human beings have the resources to push back and to shape the future in accord with a Logos-grounded imagination of a human future. The Best have a chance, but it requires awakening capacities that like seeds lie dormant in the human heart waiting to germinate. This is what I mean by emergent 3.0.
8. That the advancements in technology, which could be subordinated to objectives of the 'Worst', could also be subordinated to the objectives of the Best--i.e., emergent 3.0 Logos-grounded objectives.
9. That the difference between now and any other time iies precisely in these technological advancements. As the Roman Roads, built for military purposes, became the conduit for the emergence of Christianity in the first centuries A. D., so could the new information and bio technologies amplify the emergence of 3.0.
10. That the use of these technologies will lead to disaster for the earth and for humanity if anything but emergent 3.0 "moral thinking" guides the use and adoption of these technologies.