The Birth of the World Religions

On Labour Day I thought I'd rest a little so I went to the local bookstore and found an interesting title. Världsreligionernas Födelse by Karen Armstrong from 2006.

I had realized a few years ago when I studied the advent of various civilizations that the important events in the birth of religions took place at approximately the same time. At the time I drew the conclusion that God probably acted at the same time to inspire people in various civilizations to various images of God and eternity. An atheist would of course just say that it is evident that civilizations matured and developed these thoughts and customs at about the same time.

The book seemed highly relevant for me to read since Armstrong performs this study to elaborate on this question. She compares the development of Judaism, Daoism in China, the Old Greeks, and India between 900-200 BCE. However, she does not discuss the matter God at all. She just seems to be interested in the behavioral aspects. All civilizations developed the concepts of the importance of compassion and love, in this order. She puts weight on India and China and thus plays down the aspect of God.

Another aspect she brings to the discussion is that the spirituality that was born through, what she calls, the Axial Age came out of extreme violent environments. We just remembered the initiation of a slaughter of 60m people but we live in an age were we focus a lot on technology. In fact the technology perhaps created the World Wars. "There is profit in confusion". Great disturbances were seen after the iron ages also. Armstrong mean that we should perhaps take the opportunity to develop our spirituality and morals as well.

I'm not convinced that it is appropriate to play down the role of Christianity and Judaism as the World Religions that formed our present situation on Earth, which I am proud of having achieved, even if environmental pessimists tend to harass me for this. Russia and China developed Communism and as I pointed out earlier the translation of the Bible was late in arrival in Russia and never made it to China. India also flirted with Communism. Well, since Armstrong left Catholicism, I might add that my conviction is that Protestantism was important.

Armstrong makes what seems to be an interesting point and that it was the Abrahamitic Religions which developed a monotheistic transcendent God concept where as India and especially China stayed in the material world. Could the fact that we here developed a spiritual realm have been important for the development of our civilization? It promotes the unknown and might have led to the development of science and technology and a liberated mind. My question is if it is time now to fuse science and spirituality as I have suggested earlier. Bring God into our material world when we move into the third millennium of the common era.