05.30.06
Armstrong’s existential crisis
Armstrong’s interview at Salon is a short compendium of the fallacies and wishy-washy religious sausage in her book on the Axial Age. There are two issues Armstrong can’t keep separate: making a serious effort to understand the Axial Age, and Armstrong’s existential crisis, which seems to have drifted into a combination of Dalai Lama style PR and vote-getting ‘atheism’ and various alarmingly shallow delusions, i.e. that the Judaic Jehovah and nirvana somehow come out as the same doctrine: it goes on and on. It might help to stop trying to be a convert to Axial Age superdoctrine and simply try to understand the historical dynamics of this period, which is spectacular. Having filtered out the synchronous aspect of this period, the great clue however is lost and we are left with a version of the Axial mystery that doesn’t make any sense. Meanwhile we don’t have to falsify the record to make a different age of religion compatible with our prejudices/delusions. To discuss religion and then claim the issue of the afterlife is a red herring isn’t exactly a fair portrait of Axial religions. Tibetan Buddhism didn’t exactly make the afterlife a side issue. They were obsessed with the question.
The inability of modern science to deal with such issues dooms it as a substitute for religion.
I am sorry to say it but her book is total junk, and its success is due to Armstrong’s chameleon tactics that play to well to contradictory publics. My own analysis of the Axial Age, because it doesn’t compromise, is virtually banned from the public media. The powers that be must be glad Armstrong made the Axial Age question so trivial that it threatens noone, and will amount to nothing.
So what is the future of religion? We thought we were done with them, but Darwinism, by a strange miracle, has gone a long way to forcing their revival.