~~”I am not here to discredit the faith.” … “The bible is a work of ideology” … “Reading the bible with a critical eye teaches respect for the ingenuity of the authors of the work in teaching so many people despite their culture, ability, age, literacy, and education.” … ~~”Give the authors their due.”– Prof Israel Finkelstein

He’s correct of course. As such we can obtain the spiritual meaning from the text as we do from any other mythology or mythological history, without requiring that the historical claims are factual as much as ideological explanations and justifications that help us derive the proper spiritual meaning and resulting moral behavior, that the authors intended.

While Chinese philosophy like European philosophy, like the formalization of post-bronze-age-collapse semitic religions, all developed around the same time. With the abrahamic the ‘last’ in that series, because it was largely a counter-revolution against the Indo-European, and especially Greek and roman superiority in technology, military, politics, and philosophy.

The Chinese were less technical than the europeans for reasons we are not quite sure, but were partly to do with the lack of western law of peerage and lack of European low context high precision language, appear to have produced the resulting impossibility of forming a rule of law government, and finally, some rather odd challenges that emerge with the Chinese language which is high context and low precision.

The Europeans invented rational philosophy. But the europeans evolved formal civilization thousands of years after the middle east had developed civilization. The earlier fertile crescent civilization relied on an older technology that could not depend upon education and writing, and exclusively dependent upon illiteracy and storytellling to teach people the moral lessons necessary to ‘get along in peace and harmony’.

So the fertile crescent developed submissive mythicism as their source of authoritarian literature(Priests), the Chinese developed the philosophy of harmony as their source (States), and the europeans developed philosophical darwinian competition through argumentative reason (Courts).

Those of us that study comparative civilizations, perhaps more than those that study comparative religion, see the necessity of variations in civilizational (race) wisdom literature by these various Paradigms Vocabularies, Grammars, logics. We seek what is good in each, and to elimnate what is false, foolish, or harmful in each.

The result of course is the Natural Law of Cooperation (self determination, self determined means, sovereignty, reciprocity and tort). Which, of course, given that Europeans developed the paradigm, grammar, vocabulary, and logic necessary for its discovery and articulation, is merely another example of the tendency of europeans, precisely because of the construction of our wisdom literatures.

First mover is not always best Last mover has an advantage in that one can learn from the mistakes of those that came before you and thus not pay the high and oft impossible cost of overcoming the entrenched metaphysics, institutions, traditions, norms, values, and yes, language and wisdom literature that exists already.

The best example of this is the abrahamic religions’ revolt against the conquest by greece, rome, and persia, – the indo europeans – by their immitation of the persian religion, and the imitation of the european law in teh torah, and the imitation of the greco roman epic cycle, in the produciton of an anti-hero in jesus in the bible.

Everything comes from somewhere. Evolution in retrospect is rather obvious. 😉

Cheers

CD