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The Forum > Article Comments > 2000 years of shaping the west > Comments

2000 years of shaping the west : Comments

By Simon Smart, published 2/7/2012

Geoffrey Blainey is used to compressing the uncompressible, and has done it again in A short History of Christianity.

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I read and enjoyed this book as I've enjoyed most of Geoffrey Blainey's work since "The Tyranny of Distance" all those years ago.

I am not a Christian but I do wonder at those who do not see how important the work of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and others was in separating the divine from the secular and arguing for freedom of conscience within the framework of Christian faith. Freedom of conscience was the essential forerunner to political freedom, democracy and notions of individual liberty, notions which sadly appear to me to be under threat in corporatist, nanny Australia.

Current programmes which politicise body shape, diets and worse, what one might legitimately think and say are now chipping away at freedoms for which our forebears fought, suffered and died.
Posted by Senior Victorian, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:13:51 AM
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Of course Jesus was never ever in any sense a Christian - he was always and only a Jew.
Nor did he create any of the religion about him, namely the ideology of Christian-ism. All of which was created by others long after his brutal murder. Mostly very long after by people who never ever met him in an up close and personal living-breathing-feeling human form.
And of course Jesus could not have created any of absurd "death-and-resurrection" dogma(nonsense) that became the center pole of the Christian belief system. Corpses are incapable of creating anything.

While he was alive Jesus taught and demonstrated a universal, non-Christian, non-sectarian Spirit-Breathing Spiritual Way of Life. Such a Spirit-Breathing has always been THE core practice in all esoteric Spiritual tradtions since the ancient days, and in 2012.

Meanwhile I much prefer this website http://www.jesusneverexisted.com
A site which among other things thoroughly debunks in a well reasoned manner all of the bogus ideas re the supposed uniqueness of Jesus.

Blainey is of course a superb historian. I have read parts of the book in my local library. It is quite good as far as it goes, in a one-dimensional sort of way. Blainey is of course very popular with the one-dimensional hollow men and women associated with the IPA, and thus with their various projects to promote the uniqueness, and even the "victory" of the Christian West.

Yes there is something unique about the West, and it does have many very useful things to contribute to an integrated world culture in this era of instantaneous globalized everyone and everything. But in its current form both so called conservative Christian-ism and the West altogether are in a state of deep almost terminal psychois.
Posted by Daffy Duck, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:19:26 AM
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The world is just beginning to make some progress in its endeavor to rid the world of silly superstition and wishful thinking and another book comes along that is having an each-way bet.

Human destiny is for a hole in the ground or the flames of a crematorium, nothing more, nothing less so make the most of life while you have it.

Cause if some humans want to believe in fairy tales well...
Posted by David G, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:24:57 AM
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The kind of religion that Geoffrey and the IPA nexus promote is only the most superficial and factional and most often dim-minded expressions of ancient power and control seeking ancient national and tribal cultism. It is entirely exoteric with a complete absence of any esoteric mystical, yogic or Spiritual content.

It is a product of Christian-ism as a "great religion", or more correctly Christian-ism as the historically world-dominant cult. The dominance of which was achieved via worldly power, first by Constantine's famous Sword, then via the barrel of guns, cannons and overwhelming air power.

Who would jesus have sliced up, shot, or ripped open with a metal-explosion?
Posted by Daffy Duck, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:34:30 AM
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At last, and inevitably, the ancient exoteric "religious" rulerships have failed. And "official" exoteric Christianity is now reduced to all the impenetrable illusions and decadent exercises that everywhere characterized previously privileged aristocracies in their decline from wordly power. Exoteric Christianity is now a chaos of corporate power seeking cults and Barnumesque propgandists that "rule" nothing more than frightened chaotic herds of grossly bound and self-deluded consumers in the whats-in-it-for-me market place of consumerist religion.

Therefore, the myth of the "cultural superiority" of "official Christianity has now come full circle. The "religious" mythologies of the "great-world-religions" are not only now waging global wars with one another, like so many psychotic inmates of asylums for the mad, but the public masses of religion-bound people, who, all over the world, for even thousands of years, have been controlled in body and mind by ancient institutions of religiously propagandized power, are now in a globalized state of grossly-bound "religious" delusion and social psychosis.

As an example this essay sums up the situation in the USA
http://tpjmagazineus/adams29 As does the antics of right-wing religionists in the USA altogether.
Posted by Daffy Duck, Monday, 2 July 2012 11:50:52 AM
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Senior Victorian complains about the suppposed erosion of our freedoms by the powers that be regarding body shape/image and the kinds of food that we eat.

But who produces and controls the standardized, air-brushed body images that we see on TV and in magazines, especially magazines that cater for the teen market and young women altogether, including new mothers. And the kinds of foods that the normal TV propagandized consumer now eats?

Certainly not the government. Almost everything that we eat, including the never ending next-big-thing excitingly "new" packets of toxic chemicals that are advertized on TV is produced and promoted by mega-corporations.

In fact the government is the only source/agency that has the potential power to counter this 24/7 corporate propaganda.

Last weekend I watched the documentary film FOOD Inc - I thoroughly recommend it. In the context of the USA the mega-corprations thus described control every aspect of the food industry in the USA, including the government regulatory agencies that are supposed to set and enforce standards. The film also contains some interesting information re the now ubiquitous use/presence of corn and corn based derivatives in the USA corporate "food" industry. And how that is potentially a disaster for both cows and human beings. A cows digestive was/is not "designed" to eat corn.

One of the talking heads in the film was Michael Pollan the author of the challenging book The Future of Food. He is by the way a soon to be featured speaker at the Wheeler Centre here in Melbourne.

The title of the book seems a bit strange. But is it? In the book Michael asks the question would what we now call "food" be recognized as such by our grand parents, or indeed by most people in human history.

One tragically amusing aside. Somehow in the scheme of things in the midst of the corporately controlled "food"-wars in the USA, PIZZA is now officially defined as a VEGETABLE. How absurd, especially as some meat based pizzas do not even contain any vegetables, not even olives.
Posted by Daffy Duck, Monday, 2 July 2012 12:24:59 PM
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Always nice to be called a one-dimensional hollow man, especially by someone promoting an integrated world culture, whatever that might be.

It is nevertheless the case that individual liberty is more highly valued in the Christian West than elsewhere and, in my view, the work of Locke, Hume and Mill would not have been possible without Thomas Aquinas, Luther and Francis Hutchesson.

The IPA's campaign to promote the values of Western Civilisation seems to me to be based on the legitimate view that Western Civilisation and particularly British political institutions form the basis of 21st century Australian society and provide the most satisfactory lens through which to begin to imagine our Australian future.

By the way, it has been predominantly government funded agencies that are promoting what we are supposed to see as a morally superior, 'healthy lifestyle'.
Posted by Senior Victorian, Monday, 2 July 2012 1:18:59 PM
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DavidG writes

'The world is just beginning to make some progress in its endeavor to rid the world of silly superstition and wishful thinking and another book comes along that is having an each-way bet. '

And no doubt he has enough blind faith to believe something comes from nothing. No doubt the arrogance of the new atheist increases while their faith based belief system wavers pathetically.
Posted by runner, Monday, 2 July 2012 3:51:26 PM
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"Yet Blainey sees not a dying out of Christianity, but a shift in its geographical centre. Latin America and Africa now hold the majority of Christian believers and the Church is thriving in these regions."

Just goes to show that western science, education and critical thinking, negate the need for a bible or the need to believe in a "Jesus".

Feel sorry for those poor Latinos and African's obviously now under the spell of more and more missionary derived mythological codswallop.
Posted by Geoff of Perth, Monday, 2 July 2012 6:29:55 PM
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A quick response to runner.

You assert the almost throwaway line 'believe something comes from nothing'. Presumably you are referring to the beginning of the universe (time, space, etc.). Why is this seen as an argument-ending line? Is it actually so inconceivable that something came from nothing? Obviously our minds are not easily able to comprehend the idea, and I am not arguing for it in any capacity. But perhaps you should not be using it with absolute certainty either.
Posted by AdamB, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 7:48:23 PM
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AdamB,

Just to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself, runner does assert such things with "certainty" - but don't ask him where God came from.
Posted by Poirot, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 8:06:39 PM
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Not all scientists have "…enough blind faith to believe something comes from nothing." But the recent successful experiments demonstrating the Dynamical Casimir Effect – which, as predicted, did actually create something from nothing – make it easier to believe conclusions based on the same quantum science.

Runner, I don't know why you're so unaccepting of faith-based belief systems.
Posted by WmTrevor, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 9:05:23 PM
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"Early in the 21st century it is clear that the church is struggling in the West. The former heartland of Europe is littered with empty churches. Even in Italy, a stronghold of the Catholic Church, only 25% of the population are regular attendees, and in Eastern Europe most people have no contact with the Church."

Catholicism is still a major force in Ireland and Poland, while the Russian Orthodox faith seems to be making a comeback since the demise of soul-destroying, atheistic communism.

It is true, however, that Christianity is on the wane in the vast majority of European countries, a trend that is also apparent in Australia.

One need not be a believer to recognise the positive role Christianity has played in shaping Western civilisation. Christianity was responsible for the West's moral framework, and the decline of moral standards in Western society over the last fifty years or so is directly correlated with the decline of the Christian faith in Western countries. This is a lamentable development.
Posted by drab, Saturday, 7 July 2012 6:38:22 AM
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