11.17.05

Second Axial Age??

Posted in Evolution at 1:06 am by nemo

What is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article on Karen Armstrong and the supposed ‘Second Axial Age’. Unfortunately it is not online. The use of the term ‘Axial Age’ has suffered confusion, and has degenerated in some accounts into a conception of an age that produced the great religions. But that is not what the Axial Age was.
Armstrong’s thinking here needs my eonic effect model! Her thinking has shifted slightly on this, first was the idea of some kind of postmodern resurgence of religion as the Second Axial Age, then suddenly there was a shift, she speaks of this Second Axial Age starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. She must have seen my website! The problem is that this becomes incoherent. The rise of the early modern could hardly be called the ground for religious renewal. Its thrust was secularization, the Enlightenment, and t he critique of all religions. This New Age version of a Second Axial Age is changing the roadsigns.