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February 24 - March 20, 2018
Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions.
Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil.
Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. One well-known explanation is that this is God’s way of allowing for human free will.
If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished
Dualism has its own drawbacks. While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order.
So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil.
Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed numerous dualist beliefs and practices, and some of the most basic ideas of what we call ‘monotheism’ are, in fact, dualist in origin and spirit.
distinction between body and soul, between matter and spirit.
monotheists could not help but be captivated by dualist dichotomies, precisely because they helped them address the problem of evil.
Belief in heaven (the realm of the good god) and hell (the realm of the evil god) was also dualist in origin. There is no trace of this belief in the Old Testament, which also never claims that the souls of people continue to live after the death of the body.
creeds. In fact, however, the religious history of the world does not boil down to the history of gods.
suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
Gautama developed a set of meditation techniques that train the mind to experience reality as it is, without craving. These practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question, ‘What am I experiencing now?’ rather than on ‘What would I rather be experiencing?’
Those who have attained nirvana are fully liberated from all suffering.
if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was
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Religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order. The theory of relativity is not a religion, because (at least so far) there are no human norms and values that are founded on it. Football is not a religion because nobody argues that its rules reflect superhuman edicts. Islam, Buddhism and Communism are all religions, because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in a superhuman order.
Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which
Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct.
In today’s Europe, murder is seen as a violation of the sacred nature of humanity.
The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls.
Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than individualistic.
According to socialists, inequality is the worst blasphemy
The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution.
These positions did not change simply because new scientific research was published. Sociological and political developments were far more powerful engines
The White Australia policy which restricted immigration of non-white people to Australia remained in force until 1973. Aboriginal Australians did not receive equal political rights until the 1960s,
By succouring the weak, liberalism and Communism not only allowed unfit individuals to survive, they actually gave them the opportunity to reproduce, thereby undermining natural selection.
It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.
When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect. If you were to suggest then that it was about to become the Roman state religion, you’d have been laughed out
Determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are a natural and inevitable product of history.
History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic. So many forces are at work
history is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system.
Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted accurately.
There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benefit.
yardstick
more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host.
Postmodernist thinkers speak about discourses rather than memes as the building blocks of culture.
Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day.4 (Take a second look at those figures – human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold.)
American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
until about AD 1500, humans the world over doubted their ability to obtain new medical, military and economic powers. While government and wealthy patrons allocated funds to education and scholarship, the aim was, in general, to preserve existing capabilities rather than acquire new ones. The typical premodern ruler gave money to priests, philosophers and poets in the hope that they would legitimise his rule and maintain the social order.
modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways: a. The willingness to admit ignorance.
c. The acquisition of new powers.
Ancient traditions of knowledge admitted only two kinds of ignorance. First, an individual might be ignorant of something important.
Second, an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things.
Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.
willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.
tentative,
the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together?
One of the things that has made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the spread of an almost religious belief in technology and in the methods of scientific research, which have replaced to some extent the belief in absolute truths.
it might be difficult to predict with certainty a single event, such as the death of a particular person, it was possible to predict with great accuracy the average outcome of many similar events.
the relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon.
