Modernism and the ‘lure of heresy’
Peter Gay’s authoritative and lively history of the modernists captures their personalities and heretical approach. But it fails to place them in their profound historical context.
by Tim Black Read the rest of this entry »
Tibet is caught in an acute difficulty, a theatre of rightist and leftist collision. The previous post cites a leftist expose routine, but its point is nonetheless essential to consider: Behind the anti-anti-China Olympics campaign. The left, witness the action of the Marxist cadres, a truly braindead faction of, yes, the bourgeoisie at its most sadistic, is clearly at a dead end, culturally if not politically.
But the real threat from the right springs from lamaism itself whose history is ambiguous, and almost unknown, and never properly told (almost impossible to do). Read the rest of this entry »
The link on Parenti on Tibet, cf. earlier post today.
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A Convergence Of Civilizations
Books | Review of: Worlds at War
Conservatives seem to find 9/11 some vindications of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, to the point of reviving the false duality of ‘east and west’. And it is a false duality. The illusion of separation can be seen from looking at the Axial Age where a global synchronous emergentism is at work across Eurasia. In general the perspective of the eonic effect, a superset pattern of the Axial phenomenon shows that One Civilization is developing across the planet, whatever its temporary differentiations on the short, and illusory, time-frame of less than two millennia. The sudden rise of the West requires understanding in that context, and can only be understood as a globalization phenomenon, not as the action of some ‘Western Civilization’, that provincial illusion. Read the rest of this entry »
Chasing Axial Age confusions, via links…
Spirituality that determined history’s course
Armstrong on the Axial Age is the subject of extensive commentary on this blog, and one should be wary of her highly flawed analysis.
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Hitchens and Boteach’s Great Debate
It’s one thing to oppose religion, but that doesn’t guarantee understanding it.
What about the Old Testament in the context of the Axial Age?
Secularists have missed something (as have religionists).
Rabbinic Response to Intelligent Design Debate in New Volume of Science/Torah Periodical
ISRAEL — (January 24, 2008)
The Old Testament is beyond rescue as an historical text, or as evidence of ‘design in history’. It doesn’t follow that standard scientific views can make sense of it either. In fact, the model of the eonic effect illuminates its significance, and its Axial Age context.
The Eonic Effect
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Recent human evolution
This new spate of articles on recent human evolution are deflecting attention from some basic problems: can such rapid changes be ascribed to natural selection?
Also, the examples given, while of great interest, do not address anything particularly major: man as man is essentially in a state of realization (anatomically) of the ‘basic man’ who has remained relatively static since–the Great Explosion?
But most of all the discussion is blind to what is the real ‘evolution’ in the past ten thousand years, visible in the eonic effect in the emergence of the Neolithic/civilization, then the Axial Age. Because the definition is calibrated to genetics scientists are looking at the fine detail and missing the overall picture.
The eonic effect shows us how evolution is indeed visible in recent times, but this is a spectacular macrohistorical driver process, and not connected, as far as we know, with genetics.
Colonizing a Metaphor
The Bible and Middle East History
By ERIC WALBERG
Behind the secular critique of archaeology lies another perspective seen in the facts of the Axial Age (and the eonic effect).
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I have been observing Google’s (then Yahoo’s and MSN’s) attempts to downlist history-and-evolution.com for some time. A recent check shows that the site, if you type ‘eonic effect’ into google, appears on page five (it’s the source of the term and should be listed first, as it once was), with a link to a minor page in the archives. Nothing else is referenced (although everything is indexed in memory, as far as I know. It once was. ) Yahoo and MSN have recently imitated this behavior.
It is not possible for a search engine to be that brain-dead without human intervention.
Remember, censoring the site you dislike will result finally in the censor of the site you do like, the loss of your free speech.
Meanwhile, visitors still come, six hundred page views today for World History & The Eonic Effect, not bad for such a hard book.
The Darwin and other establishments et al. must be afraid indeed of the data of the eonic effect (and the Axial Age).
Why shouldn’t they be: a falsification of Darwinian theory is sitting there, mocking them behind their propaganda game.
They are betting the public is too stupid or confused to figure out their lie.
Meanwhile the geeks at Google have transmogrified into a corporate dead zone.
What’s next after Google?
Note the point: these experts are lying to you.
The Bible wasn’t meant to be a historical record
The long-ago authors of scripture never imagined their work would be taken literally, explains Karen Armstrong – spiritual truth was their goal
It is hard to figure Armstrong’s game. Apparently an atheist, with a solid market if only she will dissemble, she apparently wants other people to believe what she herself doesn’t believe. Just how the Israelites took the Bible texts does indeed deserve to be examined anthropologically but to say that its original readers were indulging in symbolist interpretation is wretchedly off the mark.
For millennia the Bible was virtually the Farmer’s Almanac of ’state of the art’ facts about God, civilization and the universe. Its readers were not indulging in post-literalist readings. If you don’t believe that go down to the Bible Belt and research it a little bit. Ask the fundamentalist natives how they take it.
The readers of antiquity were surely taking the tales as historical. If we now know that its facts are wrong we should move on to something else. It is a disservice to readers vulnerable to mythological manipulation to arrest their education with deceptions in this fashion. It is the degenerated tactic of social propaganda politics designed to cripple the intelligence of the masses, and the manner used is that of lying Machiavellian politicians who will desecrate any semblance of truth as they spittoon through microphones.
We can easily rescue the Old Testament for modern secular culture is we stand back and see it as a most remarkable account of a people passing through the Axial era. Taken in that fashion, with the proper interpretative foundation (check out my eonic model at history-and-evolution.com), we see a primitive record, but one that has a meaning we didn’t suspect.
But we have no evidence of theistic iintervention in history by Jehovah. What the Israelites were sensing was the reality of universal history in motion, a view that is actually quite shrewdly insightful, but this is no excuse to pass off its mythical context in the name of secularized Biblical lies about not taking the texts literally.
Biologist Richard Dawkins confesses that religion poses a “major puzzle to anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way.”
In fact, religion poses an even bigger puzzle for the Christian. How explain the correlation of Buddhism and proto-monotheism as these appeared in the Axial Age, an atheist and theist religion appearing in parallel.
The thesis of ‘revelation’ is falsified.
Email sent to H-World listserve in a thread called, Why study world history?
John Landon
history-and-evolution.com
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Here’s a job for the New Atheists: stop being cowards and address the Jewish Question, or rather the Jewish-Christian question. This is no time to be preening one’s feathers, as ’smart Jews’ or ‘atheist brites’. Here’s a kickoff idea (once suggested to me by a Jewish friend, who must have been self-hating since he used to fart on mention of the chosenness of Jews): Read the rest of this entry »
D’Souza declares (premature) victory
The point raised by the man from Tonga flushes out a significant issue in the New Atheist critique of Christianity. They have failed to place these religions in their historic context, to see the cultural achievements they initiated against the past. Read the rest of this entry »
Rodney Stark, the author of the much ridiculed ‘Victory of Reason’ (note many of the similar arguments in D’Souza re: Christianity and science, etc), returns with a new book, which I am perusing: Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief (Hardcover)
by Rodney Stark
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I just noticed that there is a P.I.G. (politically incorrect guide) to the Bible in the right-wing book series. Below is the blurb from Amazon.
Clearly the book does a disservice to its subject with a series of distortions that won’t stand. I don’t share the view of many (e.g. the New Atheists) who wish to trash the Bible in the name of secularism, but its status at this point is problematical. More problematical are the inaccurate talking points conservatives are now using to promote traditionalism.
It is misleading to say that the Bible established the foundations for science and democracy. We need to look at the overall context of world history, with the Axial Age (and the eonic effect) in mind, and we see a very different picture. How will these Bible defenders simply omit the Classical Greeks, or the Indian/Chinese traditions from their account? And what exactly is the meaning of the term ‘Western Civilization’. It is simply nonsense to say that Christianity, or the Bible, are the source of this civilization.
Meanwhile the historical accuracy of the Bible has plummeted in light of the findings of archaeology. The result puts figures such as Abrahma, Moses, and other figures in question.
A work such a Finkelstein and Silberman’s The Bible Unearthed gives us an indication of how confusing the historical of the Bible really is.
Actually, the place of the Bible in world history deserves a better understanding, one that secularists and traditionalists are unable to provide.
If we start by looking at its Axial Age context, we can begin to reinterpret its significance. A study of the eonic effect is indispensable here. I don’t think there is any other avenue to grasping this book than that of the study of the eonic effect. Read the rest of this entry »
James comments on Armstrong post
A good point from James: Armstrong seems to confuse the (admittedly) difficult question of the Axial Age with the idea of the same thing happening in different places at the same time, surely a distortion. We can grasp the Axial Age without carefully seeing its context, and then we have to zoom in on each of its branches individually, to study the complex literatures/histories in each area, a very difficult task. We can see that an exploration of diversity or opposites is an equally good interpretation. Her treatment of Buddhism becomes hopeless on these grounds as it all goes into the sausage machine. Read the rest of this entry »
Previously cited tonight is the article from talk.reason, The chosen among us, By Alexander Eterman
This article usefully wrestles with some difficult questions, and it is important for some critical thinking here. The notion of (Ashkenazi) stetl Jews proceeding via natural selection to higher IQ’s smacked of crackpot Darwinism, and some of the contradictions in this thesis are pointed out by the author. I can’t resolve the complexities of this question, but… Read the rest of this entry »
Biblical archeology is too important to leave to crackpots and ideologues. It’s time to fight back.
The confusion over the Old Testament, religious and secular, is disguising its ultimately unique significance as a record of the Axial Age, and the existence of macro-historical phenomena. Rescuing this interpretation (e.g. via the study of the eonic effect) is getting lost in the exploitations and secularist reductions. Read the rest of this entry »
James on the question of the ’sacred’:
You are quite right, how can we talk about the ’sacred’ at all, in a secular context. We can’t, and don’t need to.
As to what we mean by religion, the question if very complex, and it is probably counterproductive to insist on a single definition. It won’t work, and leads people like the New Atheists to denounce ‘all religion’ in all its aspects, a tactic that is highly dangerous in the end.
Look at history, the question of religion is not simple. We have the signs of religion in the Neolithic, at the birth of civilization, in the Axial Age, etc…
We can’t easily generalize on the question.
Look at ancient Israel. It is hard to figure that one out. Note that the religion(s) came much later, the Old Testemant era itself, was the tale of a Canaanite kingdom and its emergent theocratic state.
Or Buddhism, a tiny ashram in the forest area of India.
Continuing from yesterday,
Spiritual psychologies and Christianity,
More on Spiritual Psychologies
If we examine the spiritual impoverishment of current scientism, or the New Atheists, we see wistfully at what might have been: an intelligent Samkhya, beyond religion, available to social man as his birthright.
The question of Samkhya is very complicated, and my references to it are provisional at best. But the point is clear enough. Dawkins et al. ought to take note, and consider how they play into the hands of religious traditionalists.
James comments on spiritual psychologies.
James certainly has a point with the limits of Christianity in terms of spiritual psychologies. The problems, however, are immense.
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Taking exception to Jake
by PZ Myers, Pharyngula
Reposted from:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/09/taking_exception_to_jake.php
The New Atheists are charged with saying that science and atheism are one, while Pharyngula, after a sommersault about doing science, appears to assert just that. I am a little alarmed: you mean all the New Atheists have a common belief system? It must be the t-shirt.
There is no implication in form, type, discovery, or method of science that can lead to atheism as a conclusion. The same might be said for theistic beliefs.
However the question of ‘god’ is too incoherent to conclude anything.
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Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?.
More ethical theory junk in the Times. The attempts to dispose of altruism proceed apace. It’s the economy, stupid…
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