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02.14.10
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age at 1:43 pm by nemo
On the Axial Age
The previous post/reference to a new paper on religion as genetic adaptation calls for still another reminder of the question of the Axial Age.
It is interesting to observe scientists on this issue: confront them if you can and watch the reaction.
Usually they will remain silent, change the subject, terminate communication for ever, never reply, and give you a dirty look as if you were some kind of evil person.
Strange, but not surprising. And the reason this nonsense about genetics and religion keeps coming back. A reductionist account of religion would keep scientists from having eye-ticks and nightmares about the Axial Age, which shows that the macroevolutionary process of religion generation visible even in world history makes a mockery of Darwinian claims of the evolution of religion.
Permalink
01.19.10
Posted in religion, The Axial Age at 4:25 pm by nemo
Danger: Teleologist at work! Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God
Review of Wright at the Hellfire Club.
Wright’s book is caught between two stools: he doesn’t satisfy theists or atheists.
The main flaw in Wright’s book, for a student of the eonic effect, is the failure to see that his subject matter pertains to the Axial Age, a subject that is taboo to even mention. The eonic effect suggests directionality, if not teleology.
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12.12.09
Posted in Booknotes, The Axial Age at 4:01 pm by nemo
Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation made such a total mess out of the Axial Age that her views on religion deserve to be challenged. The attempt to create a false unity of all religions (and in the process debunk the Axial Age Greeks who don’t fit in) is completely false, and prejudicial in another way, since it is an attempt to cover over what makes each of the different contributors distinct and unique.
Permalink
12.07.09
Posted in The Axial Age at 9:28 pm by nemo
Stream and Sequence: The ‘Axial’ Transitions
One of the ironies of the discovery of the Axial Age is the realization that design arguments, as current, won’t work anymore for monotheism, and that the ‘design’ of history shows the equal emergentism of the Indian, Chinese, Israelite/Persian, and Greek phases of emergentism.
We need a new kind of secularist’s design argument, since the current ID gang has wrecked design arguments with theri ID junk theory.
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11.16.09
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:59 pm by nemo
The Evolution of the God Gene
Having criticized Wade on the evolution of religion, I don’t reject out of hand the correlation of genetics and some aspect of ‘human nature’ connected somehow with ‘religion’, a fairly vague statement.
Man, since the Great Explosion, so-called, has had a ‘spiritual’ component to his psyche that noone has been able to put a finger on. It by no means follows that this emerged via natural selection or as an adaptation.
Read the rest of this entry »
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11.12.09
Posted in The Axial Age at 5:52 pm by nemo
Canaan and ‘Israel/Judah’: The Old Testament Riddle
As with the previous post, we have lost the key to the riddle of the Old Testament history, or, at least, the history that is part of the Axial Age.
The irony is that we cannot use the idea of ‘god’ to come to an understanding of that history.
Permalink
10.21.09
Posted in The Axial Age at 11:55 am by nemo
One of the most popular posts on this blog:
Karen Armstrong on Axial Age
http://darwiniana.com/2005/11/20/karen-armstrong-on-axial-age/
Permalink
10.04.09
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 6:21 pm by nemo
Archaic Greece: The Clue
The Old Testament is completely confusing because it is operating on two levels. It can help to look at the parallel Axial Age phenomenon of Greece to see that the remarkable nature of the era has nothing as such to do with religion.
Permalink
09.15.09
Posted in atheism, New Age, religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 5:33 pm by nemo
Over at The Gurdjieff Con we have been looking at the writings of Danielou on Indian religion, and here’s another such book: Shiva and the Primordial Tradition
This perspective can throw external students for a loop, as they might feel less disoriented with the later, streamlined traditions of Buddhism (and the confused Hinduism) or Vedanta, and the various syncretist traditions of a mere twenty five hundred years since the Axial Age, when a secondary development transformed the ancient legacy.
But Danielou’s basic orientation contains, it seems to me now, somewhat wiser after a number of historical phantoms chased in Indian history, an important clue, hard to grapple with at first.
As a student of the Neolithic (and the eonic effect) the thesis makes sense and tells us in specific terms what is suspected from history: that the great religious streams of civilization originate in the Neolithic transition, the great Axial Age beyond the Axial Age.
Danielou is a cogent critic of monotheism, and the destruction it wrought in India and elsewhere, so the ‘New Atheists’ might consider this ‘atheist’ competition, whose sense of the ‘divine’ is very deep, but not anything to do with the watered down monotheisms of the occident.
Permalink
09.14.09
Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion, The Axial Age at 11:48 am by nemo
U.S. author traces “evolution” of God
Mon Sep 14, 2009 6:03am By Ed Stoddard
Wright’s book is observing the sudden accelerated appearance of a new updated monotheism, as a result of the effect of the Axial Age. His refusal to look at this phenomenon to produce instead a bogus theory based on the theory of games is a last ditch effort to rescue scientism, and the result is rubbish.
DALLAS (Reuters Life!) – U.S. author Robert Wright traces the history of God and suggests that it might point to the unfolding of something divine, though perhaps not in the sense that most people of faith would envision.
In his new book “The Evolution of God,” he takes his readers on a journey through the spiritual beliefs of our ancestors to the development of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The book has two convergent paths. One traces the material history of faith looking among other things at how “scriptural interpretation is obedient to facts on the ground.”
The other path is a more speculative one that Wright compares to Darwinian evolution and leads to the notion that our history has been one of moral progress, which suggests that something divine may be afoot.
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09.13.09
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect, World History and The Eonic Effect at 3:55 pm by nemo
The Nature of Myth – And More Good Stuff by Robert Bringhurst
This blogger at Beliefnet picks up the ‘logos/mythos’ nonsense that is peddled by Karen Armstrong, originally in The Battle For God.
The question of logos, and mythos, as handled by Armstrong is a cliche argument against the backdrop of the gross distortion of the Greeks that we see in her works, along with her denigation of modernist rationality as she trumpets some kind of postmodern ‘second Axial Age’, etc, etc…
The question of logos and mythos in Greek culture, in the context of the Axial Age is something that is beyond Karen Armstrong’s capacity to analyze, given here assumptions.
Let me note that in my treatment of the Axial Age in World History And The Eonic Effect the Greek Axial Age is shown to be the real key to the ‘age of revelation’, and that it is at once the source of secularism, and of its own take on religion. It is also the first (or else, the most dramtically first) democracy, an Axial innovation.
Armstrong could never handle Axial Age Greece in her work, and the reason might become clear from the study of the eonic effect.
Armstrong’s attempt to make patty cakes out of logos and mythos creates something not present among the Greeks.
In any case, the perception of mythos generally spells the end of that mythos. You might check out Plato on Homer, what to say of Euripides on Greek tragedy.
You can’t start serminizing to secularists about ‘belief’ as a form of embrace of mythos. It is a sophisticated con, and a disservice to tradition.
Pagan cultures have always made use of two sources of knowledge about the world, which Karen Armstrong defined in her book The Battle for God as mythos and logos. Modern societies, including most modern religion, limits itself to one, logos. We need both.
Logos is knowledge arrived at through evidence and reason as we usually think of it. It gives us knowledge about things, but not whether they have interior dimensions of meaning and awareness. You cannot measure consciousness.
Mythos addresses the meaning in the world, the value that exists there intrinsically. When it is abandoned, the world slides towards meaninglessness. Being myself schooled in logos, that is, modern ways of knowing, it took me many years even after I became Pagan, to realize its limitations as well as its strengths
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08.29.09
Posted in liberalism, The Axial Age at 5:05 pm by nemo
Liberalism has let itself become a kind of false ideology associated with Darwinism and scientism, and it has become in part for that reason the object of hatred by religious conservatives who now associate it with atheism, but the real history of liberalism is something far deeper, with a connection to a ‘transcendent’ realm greater than that of the ideologically debased religions inherited from antiquity. The real history of liberalism is a long study, and its xray in the context of the eonic effect is illuminating: Freedom Evolves? The Discrete Freedom Sequence
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08.24.09
Posted in Booknotes, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:38 pm by nemo
The end was nigh
Richard Overy’s comprehensive account of the fear of ‘civilisational decline’ that gripped Britain between the world wars, writes Matthew Price, poses more than a few challenges for the doomsayers of today.
The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars
Richard Overy
Allen Lane
Dh152
The West, it seems, is living through a golden age of civilisational anxiety, marked by endless agonising about the uncertain future: its loss of power, the climate crisis, terrorism, rogue nuclear weapons, economic collapse, the unchecked flow of immigrants across borders. Whether the calamities envisioned by today’s Cassandras will come to pass cannot be determined, but our vivid imagination for disaster has long and deep roots. Indeed, the story of the West might be seen as tale of progress married to peril. Advances in technology, governance, and standards of living have been accompanied by new anxieties and an uneasy self-consciousness about the fragility of such gains. Technology appears as wonder and horror alike, both panacea and mortal threat. We twitter blissfully away on our laptops, worrying all the while about the collapse of the electronic infrastructure on which we now depend – or the malignant ends to which it could so easily be turned. One law of civilisation might be cast as follows: Every strength needs to be opposed by a perceived existential threat.
The Spengler/Toynbee axis has done immense harm, even as their views have proven in part correct (the reason for their misleading success).
The antidote is swift and simple: a look at the eonic effect which shows how their misplaced emphasis on ‘civilizations’ (hence their decline) has distracted hitorians from seeing that the measure of progress (or progression) emerges in a way that is independent of the civilization.
The classic example is the Axial Age wheere we can see that the emphasis is not on the civilization but the time-slice of such civilizations.
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08.20.09
Posted in New Age, secularism, The Axial Age at 9:06 pm by nemo
The issue of Buddhism is a confusing one. But one thing to consider is that it came into existence in the wake of the Axial Age, and then straddled an entire age until the modern, at which point its impetus began to fail. We see the desperation in the attempts to cast its ‘seeds’ in the West, as the whole structure collapses.
The Axial Transitions
The ‘new age’ is going to do something different, but it is a good question at this point what that might be. The impulse to imitate the past is compulsive. But the deviation of modernity into a culture of scientism is almost worse.
This short essay might help, if you forget the term ‘sufi’, and ‘fouth way’ and try to understand the invariant of all religion, man’s self-consciousness.
If religions can’t help here, and so far they haven’t, then they will pass away.
A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra
A clue, is to see the way in the elements spawned by modernity: the path of self-consciousness disguised in secular terms.
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08.18.09
Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:27 pm by nemo
Evolution and War: Basic and Advanced
I have criticized Wilson already here, and Huffpost for giving him an exclusive forum.
Now Wilson wishes to pontificate on warfare and evolution, accusing John Horgan of flunking Evolution 101.
Beware of Darwininists who claim to understand such a complex question, and please note that they pacific impulses are, stricly speaking, pure hypocrisy, since they have enshrined conflict as the key to evolution.
I fear Wilson flunks Evolution 101. Wilson rightly rejects two oversimplifications, but his long bit of phony analysis makes all the same basic Darwinian assumptions, so we must adjourn to the day we can begin with a critique of Darwin, on the way to a new perspective on evolution.
Wilson then proceeds to the ‘macrohistorian’ Turchin’s bizarre theories of history.
I might recomment a study of the eonic effect to gain an insight into historical dynamics, and the way in which there is a larger process to world history (the truly evolutionary) than its warfare. That said, the constancy of warfare remains to be understood, and the microevolutionary aspect of war, not to say its anti-evolutionary drag on our evolution, is something altogether separate fromwhat is truly evolutionary.
I will investigate Turchin’s thinking, but the key issue here is that there is no science of history (and for that reason no science of evolution into history) unless it is a ‘science of freedom’ in some sense. Trying to rig the mechanical ideas of science/physics to history won’t work.
http://history-and-evolution.com has a lot of material on history.
Sometime later in another post we can approach the issue of warfare in history, and perhaps also in evolution.
Darwinists might confound themselves with the super hard question: was the Battle of Marathon a chance event, or an event in the larger pattern of the Axial Age?
A good look at my ‘Kant’s Challenge’ (at history-and-evolution.com) and the Kantian perspective on universal peace and then the correlation of that with the eonic effect might suggest something quite different about warfare.
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08.17.09
Posted in religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 1:34 pm by nemo
The Old Testament as eonic data
In all the debates over science vs religion (and/or atheism vs theism/deism), the enigma of the Old Testament fails to gain any traction. Either the account is of a set of superstitions or it is an account of supernaturalism.
The real key to the OT lies in the eonic effect, and more directly the Axial Age subset of the eonic sequence. All the pieces of the puzzle fall into place once we look at the data on different levels.
Permalink
08.09.09
Posted in Evolution, religion, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 2:15 pm by nemo
Beware of gurus and New Age hypesters pontificating on the subject of evolution. I strongly recommend a look at the sense of ‘evolution’ following the data on the eonic effect, from World History and the Eonic Effect, starting here: Mysterious drumbeat to begin to get a sense of the tremendous scale and complexity of ‘evolution’ in the descent of man.
It is not a simple subject, and gurus have no edge on the task of understanding it.
A long and meticulous study of world history armed with the ‘eonic model’ can help (up to a point, but I make no claim to understand ‘evolution’ either)
Note that none of the enlightened sages of antiquity even realized there was an Axial Age, and that their efforts were bound up in that process indirectly.
In retrospect we can see that they were unable to assess the scale of religous evolution. Ironically, Buddhism became one of the prime exemplars of an Axial Age emergentism. That period included much more than Buddhism, however. And the overall global pattern is vaster still.
But it is important to see that the modern New Age movement can’t replicate that period of renewal. It is a difficult dilemma, and the typical confusion created by Andrew Cohen and/or Ken Wilbur isn’t going to help.
Such a macro process is not going to be repeated in the modern New Age movement, so don’t let New Age hypesters pretend otherwise.
Note as you study the eonic effect the distinction between macro-action and micro-action, and its implications for the study of religion.
That might help to see just how confused Cohen’s use of the term ‘evolution’ is.
People claiming some higher spiritual knowledge or consciousness are getting in the bad habit of pontificating on evolution, and they are almost as bad as Darwinists.
Permalink
08.03.09
Posted in The Axial Age at 7:08 pm by nemo
One of the considerable mysteries of world religion, and the Axial Age is the emergence of Samkhya: An Evolutionary Psychology: Classical Samkhya
Permalink
08.02.09
Posted in The Axial Age at 1:27 pm by nemo
With respect to previous post, we have commented many times on Karen Armstrong’s confusions over a A Second Axial Age?
There is a second Axial Age: the rise of modernity. The postmodern attack on this is simply retrograde, and a dangerous cultural tactic.
Permalink
Posted in religion, The Axial Age at 1:25 pm by nemo
Steve Fuller on Karen Armstrong
Armstrong’s thesis is worth taking seriously not only because she is knowledgeable, thoughtful and influential — though less so in academia than in interfaith politics. In addition, her indictment is meant to extend beyond ID and its forebears in natural theology to what Armstrong regards as the hubris behind science’s own ‘quest for certainty’, to recall the title of John Dewey’s Gifford Lectures. Armstrong turns out to be very much a fellow-traveller of the Frankfurt School and those who believe that humanity’s logos-mania has led to untold cruelty, misery and harm to other humans and nature at large. ID supporters may be disoriented to find themselves the targets of such an Anti-Enlightenment harangue but I think Armstrong has got the historical drift right. She even sees the scientism in many of the founders of the Anglo-American Protestant fundamentalism a hundred years ago. However, Armstrong portrays it all as part of one unmitigated disaster. And here I beg to differ.
It is at least clear why Armstrong is of interest to Fuller, the postmodernist.
We have commented many times on Armstrong’s strategy of confusion on modernity, starting with her outrageous misportrait of Axial Age Greece, as it hardly deserved to be part of the Axial Age at all, too rationalistic.
Denigrating the Enlightenment to produce a pack of historical lies on religious traditionalist lacks the briliance Fuller ascribes to Armstrong.
The result of Armstrong’s tactics will not be religion, but a hodgepodge of postmodern mental confusions, and a kind of PR mendacity that will vitiate the religious understanding of her readers.
Permalink
Posted in Science & Religion, The Axial Age at 12:48 pm by nemo
Comment on Axial Age and evolution of religion
James said,
August 2, 2009 at 12:20 pm
“No matter how much science can explain, it seems the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural.”
Maybe they should also learn to ditch the term “supernatural.” These incoherent, schizophrenic attempts to define “naturalism” by creating a sausage out of incompatible theories/worldviews such as Newtonian mechanics (the real parent of Darwinian thinking), relativity, and QM seem preposterous to anybody who has some knowledge of the history of science. These “scholars” of religion simply discredit themselves from the start.
Permalink
07.31.09
Posted in Science & Religion, secularism, The Axial Age at 4:17 pm by nemo
Take Me to the River (or Somewhere Nearby)
By Robert Wright
You know the powers that be are trying to propagandize anti-religion when figures such as Robert Wright get so much free air time. Beware of such people. They make fundamentalists look brilliant.
Beware of Wright’s formulation. He says he spent a decade researching religion.
Is this fellow kidding?
Wright is either without talent on the issue of religion, or else his Darwinian assumptions have made him artificially brain dead on religious questions.
Wright gets hunter-gatherers completely wrong, we suspect (but we weren’t there, so who can say).
The Eyptian Book of the Dead is an enigma beyond the powers of those raised in Darwinian scientism. It might help to apprentice yourself to the Tibetan Book of the Dead first, to get your bearings on Books of the Dead.
The question of sin and redemption is so obvious, so completely transparent, that only the genius of Christian stupidity could have muddled the issue.
Here’s the shortest take I can manage on ‘redemptive religion’: man (contra the idiotic beliefs of scientists mired in scientism) has a will, and the exercise of this will is perilous and can result in dangerously bad choices. How dangerous? Is there some sort of karma (to transpose a Buddhist term on ‘Christian’ redemption logic). The point is that the burdern of free choice can become problematical. Perhaps the possibility of redemption is real. Is it?
Or is the promise of figures such as ‘Jesus’ purely formal?
We don’t actually know, but the warning has been sounded repeatedly by many in the ancient discourse of redemption. It depends also on the question of reincarnation which has been factored out of the redemptive logic of Xtianity.
There is a lot to say here!!! And I make no claim to be able to elucidate redemptive religion. But a little cribbing from Buddhism can suggest what was originally intended, in its own context (maybe).
The amnesia and mythologization of the basic idea has turned Xtianity into an exercise in futility.
My point here is that while the key to traditional discourses has usually been lost, the attempts of complete idiots like Robert Wright or Karen Armstrong to clarify any of this is dangerous medicine.
Xtianity is a mystery. We see the calamity of decline in the Roman Empire in the wake of the Axial Age. From the theatre of Greek tragedy to the theatre of the Colliseum. Somehow in a gesture of ‘redemption’ Xtianity assisted in the rebirthing of civilization into a new form. Secularists would do well to be less arrogant about this, and be wary of the long term calamity likely to happen to populations indoctrinated in Darwinism
Permalink
07.30.09
Posted in The Axial Age at 6:57 pm by nemo
Stream and Sequence: The ‘Axial’ Transitions
The question of religion and the Axial Age is entirely complex and the reason this blog is so hostile to Karen Armstrong is that she clearly, with dishonest intent, attempted to smear over that complexity, erase or ignore the evidence of planetary action in some kind of ‘higher power’ and throw everything into a sausage machine called the ‘Axial ethos’ when in fact the Axial Age shows an immense diversity, almost the whole point of the Axial period.
Just at the point that an insight into the Axial phenomenon was becoming public knowledge Armstrong consciously or unconsciously kicked up dust on the question to reconfuse everything.
Permalink
07.25.09
Posted in Evolution, religion, The Axial Age at 7:09 pm by nemo
The Old Testament: an eonic riddle
The great irony of the current social confusion over religion is that the Old Testament can be understood just as well in a secular context, and yet none of these secular thinkers can manage it!
Our understanding of the Old Testament is in crisis. The tide of Biblical Criticism and archaeology has eroded our sense of divine action, or of divinity acting in history. Traditionalists are frozen in biblical literalism, and heading over a cliff oblivious to their situation, while arrogant Darwinian reductionism only compounds the confusion by offering no insight into religion beyond the Social Darwinist vulgarity of the cadres of scientism.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the study of the eonic effect is the perspective given on the riddle of the Old Testament. Suddenly the pieces of a puzzle fall into place and we see the context, moment, and significance of that mysterious document that tradition takes for granted, but whose historical basis is increasingly challenged by the rise of Biblical archaeology. In fact in our account those challenges actually come into their own as the interaction of historical fact and mythology begin to clarify themselves. And then we see something remarkable, from a secular perspective, an incident in the ‘eonic evolution of religion’.
And yet the account recorded in the Bible resists the standard secularist treatment. The resolution to the enigma lies in seeing the chronicle given in light of the eonic effect. Our approach is neither theistic, atheistic or agnostic. We simply stand back and perform periodization analysis, based on the eonic model (itself a periodization framework), on the incidents that constitute the core history. The result is an elegant wonder of systems analysis, and clarifies at once the puzzle left to us by its redactors.
Permalink
07.20.09
Posted in globalization, History, Islam, secularism, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 4:48 pm by nemo
History, and histories, of Islam
The problem with many of these critics of Islam, such as Spencer, mentioned in one of the comments, is that they drift into a right-wing perspective and then become proponents of ‘Western Civilization’ (whatever that is) and defenders of Christian traditionalism and religion against Islam, the status of secularism remaining confused.
The issue in criticizing Islam is not the Western tradition or some debate between Christianity and Islam.
The issue is the emergence of a new secular modernity, potentially global, in a ‘European context or matrix’, proceeding swiftly toward a transcultural context or matrix’. The emergence of modern freedoms is the great moment of this modern transition.
Muslims give themselves away as lacking in historical comprehension in their rejection of this aspect of modernity.
For Europeans bemused by a spurious latecomer consisting of postmodern multiculturalism and the rest of it to throw away their emergent heritage for an Islamic restoration of reactionary premodern culture is almost beyond belief, incomprehensible.
It is the emergence of modern secular culture in a Western source area, not Western Civilization, that is important. The reflexive focus on the West confuses the whole critique of the retrograde Islam, now most tragically threatening to overtake Europe.
Conservatives making a fetish out of the ‘West’ and Christianity are part of the problem and are inhibiting secular liberals from taking up the critique of Islam. Here the radical left with its idiotic alliance with Islamic culture has missed the point and is threatening to precipitate still another cultural tragedy, sharia in Holland. That is simply beyond belief. And no part of the legacy of Karl Marx, for crying out loud.
I recommend a careful look and study of the eonic effect to see the way in which emergent civilization transcends its source areas, and the dilemma that Muslims must face, with respect to the relatively weak basis for a world culture in Islam.
I don’t wish to be unfair to Islam, whose study I find of great interest, and in fact it is not unfair. Islam has exactly the potential that emerged with Protestantism from Catholicism to be a secular religious matrix in the context of modernization. In fact, it might be too fair to hope for such an outcome in what seems a religious culture stuck in the past. The same was said of Catholicism (now a variant of Protestantism).
Westerners, so-called, need to grasp the reality of their situation, which cannot be Christian culture vs Islamic culture. It can only be globalizing secular culture, born in the ‘west’, but rapidly globalizing on the way to a new oikoumene of secular entities.
For Europe to succumb to a retrograde phase of Islamic restoration is a recipe for total catastrophe, and it is irresponsible for any secularist to contemplate such an outcome. The radical left now abetting such an eventuality is in the midst of still another screw up, in the long list of many since the nineteenth century.
The eonic effect is a good guide to the larger dynamics of religions in world history.
Islam and Christianity/Judaism, for all their claims to spiritual foundations are in fact medieval distortions in all cases. The true moment in the Axial Age of the Greek, Israelite, Indic, Sinic (et al) intervals of transformation are lost to us now, and none of the world religions that find their sources in that era have any real connection to those periods, least wise any claim of ‘revelation’.
We should note that Axial Age Greece gave birth to secularism, and much else, and the modern transformation echoes much of that.
Thus the rise of modern secularism has a far better claim for a spiritual foundation than the medieval distortions of Christianity and Islam. Strange to say, but the facts of history in the large show the reality.
We tend to think of ‘Western Civilization’ in terms of Judaic, and Greek, sources, but that isn’t European! So why the exclusive focus on Europe. It is confusing the issue.
Look at the facts of the case with Islam: it is a most remarkable cultural matrix, but its basis is not adequate for a future global culture. This reality has to be faced, as the sentimental distortions of culture and history are set aside for a more realistic appraisal of Islamic history in light of the facts.
Christians and Moslems are full of themselves as they flaunt some special relationship to the sacred or to god. Such claims are without merit and are blinding millions to their real needs.
One of the problems is that secularism is misunderstood by its proponents, as scientism, darwinism, atheism, and a host of lesser episodes of modernity rise to claim the whole. The real significance of the secular has yet to manifest itself, and remains a project of the future.
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07.17.09
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 4:21 pm by nemo
Non-Evolution of God, Part 2 By Nicholas Wade
Wright’s ambivalence about ‘moral progress’ and his confusion on the ‘evolution’ of religion which springs from his Darwinian assumptions, arises from his inability to carefully observe what is happening, in the context of the Axial Age.
We can critique the primitive character of some aspects of the ‘god’ of the Old Testament, but as we stand back and look at the larger history, we see the sourcing of a new religious ‘evolution (in the sense of the eonic effect)’ as a function of time in an Axial Age phase that will show the complete transformation of religion in the next age-period. The crudities of theological belief, picked over by ‘secularists’ tring to cavil religion out of existence are important enough, but beside the point, as we watch this larger drama, one that is quite spectacular.
We could speak of the ‘eonic evolution’ of the ‘god’ idea, save that the Israelites were clearly reluctant to use mundane references to ‘god’, as indicated in the glyph pointing to the mystery, IHVH.
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07.15.09
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 5:27 pm by nemo
Armstrong’s distortion of the eonic effect
Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation is a disguised rip-off of World History And The Eonic Effect, transposed and reinterpreted to grease the wheeels. Note how Armstrong slips in the ‘great transformation of modernity’, but has changed the terms of discourse complexity.
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07.09.09
Posted in religion, The Axial Age at 5:19 pm by nemo
Comment on Kant, Freedom, ….
Stephen P. Smith said,
July 8, 2009 at 8:24 pm ·
What is viable has to do with sufficiency. Freedom is stuck on necessity. It is necessary that we are free, but freedom won`t help the person dying of cancer. The dying person must find something sufficient, but that does not involve freedom. It involves the hard work of dying, and complete surrender.
Freedom is the work of the secular.
Sufficiency is the work of religion.
Hucklebird, I think some kind of conservative boilerplate is stuck in your craw.
The dialectics of freedom leaves plenty of room for its negation. But is that the point here? Not at all.
In general freedom is a higher value than religion. In fact, religion, as modernity makes clear, threatens to become a superflous category, if not a superfluous activity. Religion is only a propaedeutic. And it might fail, at which point we can set it aside.
Whether freedom can help a person dying of cancer or not is not an argument relevant to the emergence of freedom in evolution/history. It is worth thinking about, but is it a relevant issue to our more general use of the term ‘freedom’?
The point is that the incomplete pseudo-religions of antiquity were unable to complete the metaphysics of ‘god’ and ‘soul’ with an idea of freedom (which also arose in parallel at the same time, but in Greece).
The three, ‘god’, ‘soul’, and ‘free will’ were the metaphysical grand triad in Kant’s critique of metaphysics, and should be the complete categories for religious discourse, instead of the pseudo-divinity of authoritarian religion, which made man, wrongly, subject to a kind of divine kingship, and other bullshit.
So the idea of god was stillborn in ancient religion. Perhaps man of the future in his secular bastion can remedy the lack.
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07.08.09
Posted in secularism, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 6:48 pm by nemo
The immense effort of traditionalists, postmodernists, and New Agers to discredit or denigrate modernity have missed the point completely.
The great irony is that the rise of the modern has a better claim on being a spiri tual phenomenon than the emergence of Judaism and Christianity. The Discrete Freedom Sequence
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07.07.09
Posted in The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 7:28 pm by nemo
Invisible Transitions? The Neolithic
If we examine the larger context of the evolution of religion we suddenly see that the immense significance of the Old Testament was not in its religious content, which was dross, but in its actual historical record of a transition period.
If we examine the earlier Neolithic, or the earlier descent of man, we fail to see the fact that the data for understanding is lost forever, as substitue illusions arise in the form of Darwinian-style theories of random evolution. If we didn’t have the Old Testament in writing we would have no understanding of the way several forms of monotheism were associated with a period of rapid emergentism.
The Old Testament is an historical first, in that regard, because, irregardless of its context, it registers a moment of historical rapid transformation.
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