In the celebrated closing of the Origin of Species, Darwin hits his lyrical stride with a paradox:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of [...]
Tags:Arthur Schopenhauer·creation·cruelty·Darwin·destruction·dialectic·Friedrich Nietzsche·grandeur·life·nature·nihilism·omnibenevolence·Origin of Species·paradox·pessimism·red in tooth and claw·Richard Dawkins·Richard Schacht·suffering·theodicy·transcendence
Between 800 and 200 BCE, a remarkable series of sages, mystics, and thinkers gave rise to the transcendental traditions that are known today as “world religions.” In 1949, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers identified several themes common to these traditions and described this six hundred year period as the Axial Age: “These movements were ‘axial’ [...]
Tags:Akkadia·Alan Strathern·Assyria·axial age·Buddha·Confucius·Daoism·death·ethics·Hinduism·immanence·Jainism·Jaspers·Judaism·Karen Armstrong·Karl·Mesopotamia·monotheism·morals·Plato·Platonism·Socrates·suffering·Sumerian·Thorkild Jacobsen·transcendence·world rejection
There are many ways in which China remains a cipher for Westerners, most of whom labor under the misapprehension that “modern civilization” originated in ancient Greece and spread slowly outward, eventually reaching “backwards” China and even then only in attenuated fashion. This of course ignores parallel and in some ways more spectacular developments in Neolithic [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·ancient China·Anne Underhill·burials·China·Chinese archaeology·Chinese Neolithic·Confucius·cult of ancestors·Donald Holzman·filial piety·KC Chang·lineages·macrocosm·microcosm·parents·stratification·transcendence
Nearly 5,500 years ago or about 3,500 BCE, the Sumerians began writing about supernatural matters; in a sense, this marks the origin of what most people today understand as “religion.” This relatively modern and provincially Western understanding of religion is on full display in Paul Raushenbush’s article introducing HuffPo Religion’s new series on religious texts [...]
Tags:Bhagavad Gita·books·Buddhist·category of religion·Christian presuppositions·doctrinal·Edward Said·essentializing·Harvey Whitehouse·Hindu·imagistic·Jonathan Z. Smith·non-written traditions·orientalism·Paul Raushenbush·religion as academic creation·religion as text·religion as writing·religions of the book·religious writings·scriptures·shamanisms·shamanist·shamans·Sumeria·Sumerians·texts·The Word·theologians·theology·transcendence·transcendent·Vedic·word·writing
There is a long history of assessing — and attempting to explain — religion in a functional manner. Marx and Engels figured that the function of religion was to disguise the realities of the underlying economic system and palliate the suffering of the laboring masses. Durkheim thought that the function of religion was to enable [...]
Tags:Civil Religion·Durkheim·Engels·ethics·Freud·function of religion·Marx·morals·Philip Goldberg·proximate cause·Robert Bellah·Thomas Hobbes·transcendence·ultimate cause
