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by
Tamim Ansary
It was better to be adaptable than adapted.
Daring to strive while accepting the inevitability of fate: these were the keys to a life of meaning and purpose.
human life as a quest for goodness and truth through reason and experience.
When money emerged, it didn’t replace barter; it replaced calculations of credit and debt.
interesting propoaition
those M’s: management, messaging, money, math, military might, and master narrative.
Originally Buddhists had frowned on sculptural representations of the master because, the feeling was, you didn’t need to know what Buddha looked like, but in the Kushan world, Buddhists were inhaling the fumes of Hellenic culture left behind by Alexander the Great.
The central figure in the Mithraic mysteries was born from a virgin mother named Anahid, a human who had given birth to a god. The birth took place around the winter solstice, which is to say, on or about December 25. During his career on Earth, Mithra was attended by followers corresponding to the signs of the zodiac, of which there are twelve. Virgin birth, savior of humanity, born on December 25, twelve apostles—is
any of this starting to sound familiar?
It’s not with physical weapons that one narrative beats another—it’s with meaning-making prowess.
The Goths’ vocabulary had emerged out of experiences quite unlike those of the early Christians in the Holy Lands. When Ulfilas used Gothic words to express Christian ideas, he produced a Bible subtly different from the one used by the churches of Rome and Constantinople. Once a Gothic Bible of any sort existed, however, German tribes began converting—to their own brand of Christianity.
Muhammad, however, replaced the idea of tribe with that of community—but not just any community. The community. A tribe was something you pretty much had to be born into. The community of Islam was a metatribe that anyone could join by simply embracing its core doctrine: there was only one God, and Muhammad was truly his messenger.
beautiful and ugly have no objective existence separate from the humans doing the “knowing.”
as Istanbul,
Constantinople was only officially rename Istanbul in the 1930s.
Since the world never stops changing,
the sharia project could never be completed.
example, Arthur Middletown of Carolina had thirty-five hundred enslaved people working for him when he signed the declaration stating that all men were created equal.
Yann Martell once said, “We are all citizens of the languages we speak, and World is not a language.”
