Faith without God.

[french frank]

The first of a 2-part series was the Feature last Sunday. A good meaty subject, which made a reasonable start and is certainly a fascinating subject: in the 6th c BCE, there were similar thought systems evolving across the civilised world: the early Greek philosophers, the Buddha, Confucius. Were there contacts between the Chinese, Indian and Greek civilisations which fostered the development of the philosophy of Man, rather than God, being the 'measure of all things'?

[Gordon]

Excellent programme I thought which taught me a lot, eg the Wahhabi movement in Islam. Look forward to the second part.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Thank you. i'll listen to this in iPlayer.

[Frances_iom]

Excellent programme I thought which taught me a lot, eg the Wahhabi movement in Islam. Look forward to the second part.

Gordon are you not confusing the feature on R4 (Analysis) on Monday re What is Wahhabism - well done but left me even more worried about the inherent fascism within Islam - FF's recommedation was a R3 program agin very well done on earlier monotheism and the likely cross fertilization of ideas in 6th C bce (ie over 1millenium prior to 18th C Islam fundementalism)

[Honoured Guest]

Michael Goldfarb, the investigator of this Radio 3 Sunday Feature, popped up on 5Live ninety minutes later as the reporter on an hour-long documentary, From Kabul to Kent.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03trxjy

[french frank]

I didn't quite catch the Indian (?) word which was supposed to have derived from 'Ionian'. Liked the idea that Indian society has many 'classes', whereas [Ionians/Westerners] then had two: master and slave.

[Gordon]

Gordon are you not confusing the feature on R4 (Analysis) on Monday re What is Wahhabism - well done but left me even more worried about the inherent fascism within Islam - FF's recommedation was a R3 program agin very well done on earlier monotheism and the likely cross fertilization of ideas in 6th C bce (ie over 1millenium prior to 18th C Islam fundementalism)

Yes, thanks Frances, somewhere in my editing a couple of lines got lost: I had heard both the R3 programme and the R4 and wanted to point anyone who had heard FFs recommendation to the Analysis programme and its Wahhabi subject matter and to some interesting aspects of it as well as the divisions in Islam. And yes the certainty expressed by fundmentalists is worrying but then so is any fundamentalist tendency, regardless of its origin.

[DracoM]

Yes, that Wahabbism prog was truly scary. Reminded me of the same extreme writings and behaviours of Christian zealots in UK in the 16th and 17th centuries. And these days such sects/persuasions have a far more destructive power at their disposal to impose their wills.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

thanks for the pointer, Moore found that the Asian faiths did not give rise to violence to any extent comparable to the monotheisms of the occidental cultures ....

Moore's search begins with the Old Testament's restrictions on sexual behavior, idolatry, diet, and handling unclean objects. He argues that religious authorities seeking to distinguish the ancient Hebrews from competing groups invented, along with monotheism, the association of impure things with moral failure and the violation of God's will. This allowed people to view those holding competing ideas as contaminated and, more important, contaminating. Moore moves next to the French Wars of Religion, in which Protestants and Catholics massacred each other over the control of purity, and the French Revolution, which perfected terror and secularized purity. He then combs the major Asian religions and finds--to his surprise--that violent efforts to eradicate the "impure" were largely absent before substantial Western influence.

[Serial_Apologist]

thanks for the pointer, Moore found that the Asian faiths did not give rise to violence to any extent comparable to the monotheisms of the occidental cultures ....

I haven't yet heard these programmes - and thanks for the pointers - but Watts (The Way of Zen) pointed out that it was western missionaries who imported puritanism into Indian cultures - notably absent previously, as can vividly be seen from Hindu iconographies of course.

[french frank]

violent efforts to eradicate the "impure" were largely absent before substantial Western influence

Does he say when this 'substantial Western influence' began?

[Serial_Apologist]

Does he say when this 'substantial Western influence' began?

I'm looking...

[Serial_Apologist]

FF - the nearest I can find is the following, from "Psychotherapy East and West" (Jonathan Cape, London, 1971, PP 19-20):

"It is of course a common misapprehension that the change in personal consciousness effected in the Eastern ways of liberation is 'depersonalisation' in the sense of regression to a primitive or infantile type of awareness. Indeed, Freud designated the longing for a return to the oceanic consciousness of the womb as the nirvana-principle, and his followers have persistently confused all ideas of ttranscending the ego with mere loss of 'ego strength'. This attitude flows, perhaps, from the imperialism of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, when it became convenient to regard Indians and Chinese as backward and benighted heathens desperately in need of improvement by colonization".

Watts was more interested in showing the consequences of a western perspective on Eastern spiritual traditons than in what brought them about, but I might be able to find a better quote than this one.

[french frank]

Thanks, S_A. It seems to me that it would need to be a lot earlier than the 19th c. to have any connection with religious violence in Asia. Even a cursory look through Wikipedia provides very early examples in China, Japan and India which appear to be well referenced.