In The Story of B, I got the impression that the Antichrist is going to be responsible for “The Great Remembering.” Wouldn’t that make Christ responsible for “The Great Forgetting”?

The Great Remembering is not the responsibility of any individual, any more than the Great Forgetting was the responsibility of any individual.

The Great Forgetting (of the fact that humans were not born agriculturalists and civilization-builders) began to occur about 10,000 years ago and was probably complete among us after a couple thousand years. In other words, the Great Forgetting had been in place for five or six thousand years by the time Christ appeared (so he could hardly be responsible for it).

The Great Remembering began in the eighteenth century with the gradual realization that the earth (and therefore humanity) is not in fact just a few thousand years ago—and as yet is far from complete. Even people who know that humanity is three or more million years old still generally tend to think that there were no “real” humans here until our culture was born, about 10,000 years ago.

Paleontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and biologists have furthered the Great Remembering in certain directions; philosophers and theologians have ignored it completely, and I’ve tried to compensate for this in my own writings.

D: 574
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updated: 22 Jun 2002