A challenge to Novelity in thought.:

 Dear Diana:

Ah yea IQ the intelligence "quotient"(I would guess about 150ish. Close?)  Hmm, I don't think many have made it this far in an argument for a while.  It’s relevance pretty much breaks down in people's 20s. You are bright, and can go far if you can get past reading but one book on Religion and Philosophy.

You do know that this thought has grown out of the 1890s right?
Perhaps you think you can prove that no one has made a significant contribution to this form of Existentialism since the 1890s. Camus and Sartre are the poster children of the last century, but they were hardly powerhouses of thought...pathetic really.  What I have been trying to explain to you is that your thought was printed in 1973. It has been prominent to this day, because they are extension and application of thought that was birthed in 1849:   Perhaps earlier.  **However, it is clearly obvious these thoughts are hardly original.   Rudolf Bultmann’s  work  to de-mythologize the Bible dominated mainline theology thru to the 1930s.  Bultmann’s work was error prone, and  rather shoddy,  but aside from that, the impetus behind his idea really arose under the shadow of Voltaire--with Immanuel Kant and David Hume,( a century earlier)—both philosophies were understood by so few.
Kierkegaard knew Hegel; he actually attended some of his lectures in fact. Nietzsche secularized Existential thought, which was straight from Kierkegaard. (Without his admitting he had stolen his ideas from an obscure Danish philosopher).  Some serious philosophers say there hasn’t been a new thought since Heidegger. Having not read your textbook, I really don’t know what it says—obviously.  But the “fear thing” has been around since at least David Hume. “People are religious out of fear” just doesn’t cut it as a novel concept.  I just hope your author sourced and credited the appropriate contributors. I can’t make a comment about that because I haven’t looked at the book. Well look, I have almost written another soliloquy or meandering megillah… We ought to meet. Perhaps when OJ or Dustin come over, or I actually get away to Vic. The advantage if you came here, is that I could take you into my library and give you some new reading.

·       **1974, grade 9 English class on mythologies.  Fear of death, concurrent and similar myths and story lines.  But only myth, the sort of which is patently not the truth, nor intended to be believed as real historical truth.