Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part XII
Throughout history, what we often refer to as religious conflict has never been merely about religion. Economics and matters of power always played a role as well. For example, it would be hopelessly naïve to assume that the Irish ‘troubles’ between Catholics and Protestants are motivated by...
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Friday, November 2, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part XI
As we now begin to inspect a few of the relevant strands of the rich tapestry that is Christianity, again we need to pause briefly and remind ourselves of a few historical facts. The most important of those is that the New Testament did not come into being in its present form until a few hundred...
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part X
Before we now dive headlong into what has surely been one of the most important myths of the last fifteen-hundred years or so, a few more general remarks are in order, partly prompted by reader’s comments. I do not use the term ‘myth’ here in the way in which it is colloquially employed, where it...
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Thursday, October 25, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part IX
When attempting to understand aspects of human history from a sociological or social-psychological perspective, as we are doing in this little series, we must take care not to litter the landscape with too many unexamined concepts. One of these is the notion of ‘progress’, which I mention here...
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Monday, October 22, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part VIII
I must apologize to my readers for the slow pace of this series, but circumstances beyond my control have made it difficult for me to do much thinking, let alone writing. I shall endeavour to speed up things. The most important effect of the adoption of the idea of One God is that it furnishes what...
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Thursday, October 11, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part VII
" L'enfer, c'est les autres ", “Hell is other people”, says Jean Paul Sartre in his play “No Exit”. But so is Heaven! For we are essentially ‘social animals’, forever suspended between the need for ‘others’ and the desire to be ‘ourselves.’ We construct our cultures and our myths collectively, and...
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Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part VI
From the mists of the paleolithic, form the period of a collective human ‘dream time’ of which we hear an echo among the Aborigines of Australia, we have emerged into the turbulent days of Greece. Turbulent and fractured! For the concept of ‘Greek mythology’ glosses over the fact that there is no...
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part V
I cannot bring myself to leave Greece without a reference to Plato’s Dialogues *, with their affirmation of the life of Reason, as exemplified in the person of Socrates. Of course, the commentaries on this work, and indeed that whole period of Athenian thought, including that of Plato’s disciple...
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Sunday, September 23, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part IV
As promised, we are moving into the Greek world, but a few preliminary remarks are in order. Virtually anything I am saying about ‘the Greeks’ applies in varying degrees to other societies as well. The Greeks themselves were influenced in many ways by other cultures, many that came before them and...
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
Naut on Religion...Part III
When we speak of pre-historic humans, we need to remember two basic facts: their exceedingly small numbers, and their intimate proximity to and connectedness with nature, in ways that we can hardly imagine. Through most of the roughly 50,000-year history of h. sapiens we were hunters and gatherers....
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