History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
– “The Great Transformation and God: A Biography,” by Karen Armstrong. A noted religious scholar, Armstrong has written a number of books including these two that look at faith, especially in the three closely-related religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Actually, Armstrong’s book on the ‘great transformation’ is completely off the mark, and a piece of propaganda to keep the implications of the Axial Age under wraps.
When you consider your choices–heart disease, colon cancer, plus-size pants, melting ice caps, gale force storms, and animal suffering vs. good health, energy, a trim physique, a livable planet, compassion, and tasty, diverse foods — it’s clear that going vegetarian is an excellent choice as we move toward living a more conscious life.
Having mentioned the Axial Age I am confronted with last year’s disaster book, Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, whose principal effect seems to have been to have made the whole period incomprehensible–just the way the establishment likes it, a wishy-washy sausage treatment that suppresses all the relevant paradoxes of this hard-to-understand period in world history. The promoters of public ideology don’t want you to know that the Axial Age shows something stupendous in action, a something that doesn’t fit into current scientific perspectives, or, for that matter, current religious belief systems.
You can follow an extensive series of discussions of that book on this blog, with some of the links for those at the History and Evolution website. Or click on the Axial Age category, or use the search box.
The previous post on the question of religion and evolution might be complemented with a discussion of the issue of the Axial Age.
Read the rest of this entry »
Chalmers Johnson in Nemesis is very very worried about the American republic/democracy, and proceeds in the book to pose a series of analogies to the Roman Republic and its decline into empire.
Read the rest of this entry »
Reading:
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project) (Hardcover)
by Chalmers Johnson (Author) Read the rest of this entry »
Britain’s new cultural divide is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew. It is between those who have faith and those who do not. Stuart Jeffries reports on the vicious and uncompromising battle between believers and non-believers