An excerpt:
The question, then, is whether the West can possibly regain its spiritual and intellectual integrity by recovering its Hellenic roots. while clearly this can occur only through reason and logos being rightly understood, it remains to be seen whether this synthesis can persuade our jaded desires and lazy bodies. In other words, because reason rightly understood can act only by the genuine persuasion of the soul, it could be the case that our disordered psychic regimes are unmoved by reason's authority. But since Pope Benedict has affirmed that God acts on the human soul through the logos, "a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication" (#17), such a state of affairs would effectively mean that God is dead to technological man. Indeed, the reflexive vilification and simple incomprehension that greeted the Regensburg address may provide chilling confirmation of this dire condition. Or we could return to our Hellenic roots and argue, using the Myth of the Cave as our proof-text, that it is always possible to use philosophical dialectic to persuade a soul mired in artificial reality to get rightly acquainted with reality and rule its desires through self-knowledge and rational persuasion. (57)
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Philosophically, Ranasinghe seems not to have considered the possibility that while god is "dead to technological man" ---the fruit of an insight Nietzsche had already seized upon --the absence of a dead god need not be a mere negation ---and this precisely for technological man. As Heidegger had already realized, the god's absence lies, and this exclusively for technological man, as the possible experience of his pending arrival. In short (and in the Platonic terms Ranasinghe opts to use, the lack of movement of our psychic regimes is no mere stasis (understood as a privation of motion) but a peculiar ans non-negative new announcement of the essence of logos in historical human existence --one that invites a hitherto unexperienced dynamism, consisting in a radical possibility that can never be made actual by man alone. It is only in terms of this possibility that we may legitimately say that it is "always possible to use philosophical dialectic to persuade a soul mired in artificial reality." But of course Ransinghe remains completely correct about the actual political reaction to the Regensberg address and his diagnosis is astute.
On the other hand, equally unconsidered from a theological vantage point is the possibility, which Benedikt does not exclude (and which quite arguably he includes though perhaps not in the Regensberg address) that the possible arrival of god following after the age of the death of god, an arrival available for techonological man still to experience as a possibility, is not ultimately necessary for the man faithfully exposed to Christian revelation, since the Logos of the latter encompasses, transforms, and surpasses the logos of the former, thereby reaching beyond --even while entering into its historical confinements. The arrival of God after his death has already happened for the Christian as the defing event of his Christian identity --and the theo-locial consummation of this previous event consists in that illuminative fullfilment, understood as apo-kalypsis, of what is concealed in the 'logic' of historical dasein.
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