Despite many interesting points here it suffers from what it accuses: creating new legends about old ones, here including the myth of Darwinian which cannot explain religion in terms of that theory of evolution as it applies/doesn’t apply to religion… Darwinism, and Robert Wright’s useless books, cannot resolve the issues of religion. Secular humanists have created a new set of fictions about religion and are alarmingly often completely off the mark. Darwinism shows all the signs of ‘religious’ fiction redux.
To see the overall picture one can recommend a look at the eonic effect and the way that Buddha, and early Israel fit into the eonic sequence that generates two religions in parallel in a classic eonic transition. The discussion of monolatry, etc, might however fit in quite well with respect to Israel which emerged as a challenge to paganism, largely succeeding in that in concert with the later Christianity, about whose origins we remain ignorant.
Tag: israelitism
A warning to take the eonic effect into account…
Scholars simply won’t listen to an outsider, and if Darwinism is challenged they will take ‘not listening’ to a whole new level. But for me it is sad, and almost unnerving to see the life work of so many scholars base itself on false premises. The evolution of man as indicated in the eonic model forces the realization that ‘evolution’ in the emergence of man coordinates a huge spectrum, including art, and with the rise of civilization we see in a snapshot the way that ‘evolution’ in a new but related sense drives the emergence of civilization. To discuss the evolution of ‘virtue’ and morality unaware of the eonic models discussion of the emergence of religion in the Axial interval, viz. Israelitism, and Buddhism, is to get mostly everything wrong. But much of the research cited remains of great interest, and hopefully a new edition of DCDX can cite some of the new thinking.
The eonic model can clarify this debate but at the same one has to go through a large amount of new research on the issues of human evolution, even given the inability of established scholars to ge…
The confusing history of monotheism, using the eonic model to assess its overall pattern in world history.
This material contains the key to sorting out the confusions in the history of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastarianism and Buddhsim. It won’t make any sense at first and requires up to six months work on world history, religious histories, and the so-called eonic model. As the post notes, the idea of god in history fails: ‘god’ would not produce the kind of mess we see in Christianity and Judaism, which ended in collision. I recommend you walk away from these monotheistic religions and at the same time consider that secular humanism can’t either make sense of the case here. In a complex history, the monotheists never got ‘god’ straight and turned the whole thing into a mess of pottage…It makes sense taken as an artificial challenge to polytheism with the ‘one god’ to replace the pagan pantheons. Buddhism was far more successful and its relation to earlier ‘Hinduism’ (bad word!) is also clear. Let’s note that ‘enlightenment’ and ‘salvation’ are not the same, but the case with salvation is unclear. It seems related to a kind of ‘sufi soul’ factor soon lost we suspect in the later religion which turned into a useful crowd control ideology for the Roman emperors. That said, later Christianity is obscure to us now, and along Islam a very hard to evaluate. The eonic model is a powerful tool but has its own limits. The eonic effect is not theology: its looks intelligent, but its effect is more like ferlizer and amplifies its local region, and then diffuse beyond that region. That is still another limited analogy, but…
Study the eonic model for six months and start reading some of the hundreds of books connected to the material.
The post revers to an earlier one yesterday:
The secular era has moved out of religion, but then looks backward and asks, what was all that? The enigma has always remained unsolved and the mystery of early Christianity remains veiled in its own propaganda of a savior who conveniently disappeared almost as soon as he had appeared, and history is left with an unknown around which still others created a religion of myths, mostly, and created from Jesus an imaginary figure. The status of its claims of salvation remain obscure.
Here we interpolate the material below. The original ending is below at the end of the post: Continue reading “The confusing history of monotheism, using the eonic model to assess its overall pattern in world history.”
Archaic Greece to the rescue…//The eonic effect and generated religion…
Many readers will reject our brand of explanation here as speculative, and that’s completely OK. Our interpretations however are one thing and the basic eonic effect another. The latter is a rock-solid nonrandom pattern in world history and not speculation at all. Explaining it is quite another matter. It is probable that the category of ‘evolution’ is the right one, but not Darwinian evolution, which is so crackpot and speculative that we must rescue the idea of evolution to a new set of facts. The eonic effect, taken in the large foots the bill, minus our interpretations, perhaps. The eonic effect shows a global process, able to focalize on regions, effect or remorph species change according to unseen form factors and in time remorph repeatedly a set of basic blueprints. In the case of civilizations, we see how men create civilization but do so in the context of a related set of form factors.
Our previous post may seem speculative but the Old Testament is a dangerous ‘frenemy’ to a scientific project. Until we adopt a set of potentially scientific concepts in the process of explanation. Here is the challenge is simple to state: explain Israelite ancient history between Solomon and the Exile with naturalistic concepts without reductionist nonsense or causal sociology which clearly won’t work.
At the last minute we are saved from collapse of this project by the study of Archaic to Classical Greece. Archaic Greece (or in our model, Greece ca. 900 to 600/400 BCE) is a very unnerving but beautiful and ultimately very clear parallel variant to the case of the Israelites in the transition period. And the synchronous timing is uncanny. But the details which come in parallel are convincing. We see the collation of the Iliad and Odyssey in exact concert with the early manuscripts of the biblical corpus, we see the same fixation around a divide ca. 600 BCE, and we see an immense corpus of innovations, literary, philosophic, scientific and political. This is a huge study, but our basic point is made: we see a common dynamic behind the Israelite and Greek case and both in a short interval up to 600 BCE, with a 200-year extension as the early results try to manifest in stable form. We cannot say ‘god’ generated the Israelite case without the same for Archaic Greece and other cases, etc…
The Greek case doesn’t generate a religion but all the resources for a new kind of civilization, many of which barely survive only to reappear in the modern case (e.g.science). Greece remains polytheistic in a strange brand of aesthetic polytheism, but generates the seeds for future secular culture.
The eonic effect shows the way religions (and secularism, and philosophies, and science…) emerge in the context of ‘eonic transitions’, three times, at least: emergent ‘Isra…
Source: The eonic effect and generated religion… – 1848+: The End(s) of History
The eonic effect and generated religion…
The eonic effect shows the way religions (and secularism, and philosophies, and science…) emerge in the context of ‘eonic transitions’, three times, at least: emergent ‘Israelitism’, emergent early Buddhism, and the modern ‘protestant’ reformation. (the case in Sumer and Dynastic Egypt are also probable cases). This is remarkable but it is a caution against monotheistic ideas of revelation. The idea that ‘god’ intervenes in history is a classic monotheistic meme but it is almost certainly to us now a delusive concept. But wait: what on earth were the Israelites up to? Their perception was that only a ‘god’ could move them around like a chess piece and they were right in a sense. But to a closer look, we see that it is an illusion. The eonic model distinguishes ‘system action’ and free action, and early Israelitism by definition shows ‘system action’ mediating ‘free action, followed by ‘free action’ only after the ‘divide’, i.e. ca 600. The facts strangely match this model and Israelite history changes course or consolidates around just that period of the Exile, after which the tradition solidifies and stabilizes. So what the ‘blazes’ is system action, and what was it up to? In one case it generates an atheist religion, and in another a theism. And then in the modern case both a reformation and a following ‘secular’ enlightenment. We can stand back and ‘sort of’ see the obvious logic of all this, except for the case of the Israelites. The answer lies perhaps in an unknown ‘gnostic or semi-Buddhist abstraction or element that operates as an attractor in the teleological dynamics of the eonic effect. As system action passes into free action confusion arises and the outcome is filtered through polytheistic mindsets into a variant ‘god’ concept from just that polytheism. Whatever the case there is some abstraction deeper than vulgar ‘god’ concepts in the case of the attractor, if I may purloin the idea from systems dynamics theories. Teleology is elusive and stands behind two opposite outcomes. Small wonder monotheism navigated into a rock. But even if we end in secular humanism the case of the Israelites before 600 BCE looks miraculous: case in point: just at the right time, independent conquering ‘states’ like the Assyrians/Persians conquered and then displaced the ‘remnant’ into exile where (!) Zoroastrian and Israelite monotheism could be blended after which the Israelites returned home with a new monotheism blending Semitic and Indo-European elements on the way to a universal ideology that could in principle (in practice it didn’t quite) lead to a universal culture of the future. It is almost impossible not to conceive of a divinity at work before the rise of modern science. The experience of the ancient Israelites was totally nonrandom, small wonder it seemed miraculous. But we can begin to move on and see a strange dynamical system at work, one operating on a stupendous scale.
It is in fact a small world, and none other than the ‘evolutionary’ dynamic behind the emergence of homo sapiens (or homo idioticus) full of many such rabbits out of the hat.
The Bible Unearthed by Silberman and Finkelstein is the book to read here: we still barely know what actually did happen in the period between the mythical Solomon (?) and the Exile period. Note again, some mysterious process of the eonic evolutionary dynamic independently of human awareness blended two monotheism by moving a chess piece of Israelites to a blender zone, and then ….the tale turns into the history of human agents now armed with a strange new eonic production, and this in turn in a late set of effects (not system action) produced the first universal religion clearly foreseen in the Old Testament (sort of) and in the outcome produced two religions instead of one, a botched but still viable result. Not that early Israelitism shows system action but later early Christianity does not. All that means is that people can botch the whole outcome. Whatever the case, this is not god in history. So what is it? The eonic effect and model merely points to a dynamic, not its full explanation, but it can help to think of an abstraction, ‘creative energy’ as a common denominator to multiple parallel outcomes. Man makes himself, but not in any arbitrary way, in the vein of an evolutionary potential that creates new futures.
A bit fuzzy, but at least some indication, maybe.
Samkya_ancient_modern2ax(1) One of the ironies of the history of religious monotheism is that it ‘could have been’ an atheist religion, or, rather, ‘atheist’, in quotation m…
Source: An ‘atheist’ christianity…? – 1848+: The End(s) of History
1848+: The End(s) of History 