Date: 18 Feb 2002 10:10:15 +0200
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Re: Star Wars and Archetypes


>>> gshalif-AT-netvision.net.il 02/17/02 10:22PM >>>
Atheist were all along history... though mostly a tiny
minority.

In the Eastern cultures which were much more advanced
than the European ones, the various atheist world opinions
were much more prevalent.

Tahir: Let me give you an idea of why I find this type of thinking in a sense irrelevant. The main point is that an ideology or school of thought that plays a progressive role in history can play a reactionary one later on at some other point in history. Compare Islam and Christianity. According to Samir Amin's interesting account in his Eurocentrism, one of the reasons why Islam did not crumble into secularism and eventually became a instead a fetter on social progress was not its inferior qualities, but precisely the fact that it was more coherent, rational and satisfying to its adherents than Christianity was. But from a revolutionary point of view in the modern world, it is precisely these strengths that prevent a revolutionary understanding from emerging in the Muslim world, among the believers that is. But during the middle ages Islam played a revolutionary role.

Now a second point is made in somoe of Loren Goldner's writings on millennial traditions in Christianity. Borrowing from Kolakowsky and others he shows how revolutionary marxism grew partially out of these utopian forms of Christianity. 

Now when one takes a look at the very complex interplay and the shifting roles that different traditions play at different points in history, one realises (a) that it is really futile to single out some of them as the good ones (that remain good for ever after) and others as the bad ones (that remain bad for ever after), and (b) that supporting some of those that played a progressive role at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past and then "extrapolating" from that historical point to the present and then trying to claim a similar role in the present is an ahistorical way of thinking and a pointless exercise, perhaps even a reactionary one. OK I'm going to add a third point: (c) I find it objectionable and chauvinistic to claim that one part of the world and one set of people had the sound view of things and all the others were a bunch of duffers, steeped in superstition etc. To paraphrase Amin and Goldner again: it was Christianity, in both its stengths AND weaknesses, that led the more directly to modern notions of revolutionary communism.

I think that some of our learned mystics need to learn to think in a more historical fashion.



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---