Dear Banjo,

<<No. But it seems you are claiming that Jesus spent "a lifetime of suffering among the Jews". I am no expert but I thought his suffering occurred during the three hours he spent on the cross before he died. Would be so kind as to let me have some more details on that.>>

I have no first-hand knowledge of Jesus, but according to the gospel, he was constantly confronted by ill-wishing fundamentalist Jews who were looking to trap him and as a result he had to walk on eggs. While under different circumstances he could perhaps have imparted the same ultimate wisdom as Krishna, alas instead of Arjuna he had for disciples ignorant, brainwashed and superstitious Jewish peasants whom he had to teach the A-B-C in parables.

<<Or about how non-Christians should understand, if at all, Christ’s resurrection.>>

Again, I have no first-hand knowledge, so my guess could be good as yours. One possibility is that rather than dying, Jesus went into Samadhi, where the heart and breathing can stop for days and so he was mistakenly taken to be dead.

George wrote: I was not arguing a point (except by mentioning the rather obvious fact that modern science and technology originated in the cultural West rather than East).

Dear George,

Is it an obvious fact? Science, democracy and much else that make up our civilization are assumed by many to have originated in the West. However, one can maintain this is historiography rather than history, and the role of the East has been downgraded or denied. Western civilisation is a late comer to the civilised world. John Keane in "The Life and Death of Democracy" places the beginnings of democracy in Asia where there is an ancient tradition of settling matters by bringing them up in discussion in assemblies generally open to the adult male population of the area. Greek democracy came later.

John Hobson in "The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation" regards western civilisation as an offshoot of developments in Africa and Asia. For example the Chinese had the seed drill 2,200 years before it got to Sicily, printing with movable type in Korea 400 years before Gutenberg, blast furnaces in China 1,700 years before they were in Europe etc. Even Christianity, the dominant religion of Europe, was invented elsewhere.

Before the nineteenth century Europe acknowledged the debt to the East. However, in the nineteenth century Weber, a capitalist historian, and Marx, an anti-capitalist historian, denied that debt and saw the east as characterised by 'oriental despotism.’

Our language contains Arabisms in astronomy, mathematics and chemistry such as zenith, apogee, Deneb, algorithm, algebra and alembic. Hypatia, a fourth century Egyptian, discovered that the planets had an elliptical orbit a thousand years before Kepler. The Indian Aryabhata (b. 476) thought of zero, and proved that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis.

During the Cold War the Soviet claimed to have thought of rockets and disavowed genetics in favour of Lysenkoism. I think we are doing an analogous thing when we claim a western origin for science and technology. Science and technology did not arise full blown in the West from nothing several hundred years ago.

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Dear Yuyutsu,

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"One possibility is that rather than dying, Jesus went into Samadhi, where the heart and breathing can stop for days and so he was mistakenly taken to be dead."
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I see you have once again switched from scientific discourse to the enunciation of esoteric doctrine.

It is not difficult to imagine that the explanation you offer could well appeal to Hindu and Buddhist yogi and other mystics but, unfortunately, not so to the uninitiated, particularly the pragmatic realist I happen to be.
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My mind drifts back to other lands:

I thought I heard something ... must have been the breeze rustling through the leaves of the gum trees down on the river bank where the earth is cool and the grass is green ... and the clear water flows gently over the clean pebbled river bed of the Condamine at Rangers Bridge. The big white cockatoos swirl high in the bright blue sky and settle on the boughs of the tall gum trees, breaking the silence with their mournful cry. ... and time stands still at midday as it always does ... suspended in the pure fresh air of the rugged Queensland outback.

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Dear david f,

I never claimed that “science and technology” arose “full blown in the West from nothing several hundred years ago”.The same as I would not claim humans arose “full blown from nothing” several million years ago. Nevertheless, I maintain the we, humans, have brought it further than any other species on this Earth (without saying explicitly what I understand by “further”) . As for science and technology, I thought I made it explicit what I meant by the adjective “modern”.

As fas as I know - though I might be wrong - none of the examples that you provided contributed directly to the developments in the West that lead to contemporary science and technology. Did Gutenberg pinch his printing technology ideas from the Koreans? An so on. Those examples apparently did not lead the culture that gave rise to them to scientific and technological heights comparable to those reached by the equivalent achievements, even if at a later time, within the West.

Besides, I wrote of West and East on the background of religions, and here the West is represented by the three Abrahamic religions (c.f. EB’s reference to “jealous” God), which includes the Arabs. As Western culture would not be Western culture as we know it without its Judaic and Hellenic roots, science would not be science as we understand it without Arabic (or Hindu-Arabic if you like) numerals. And Aquinas would probably not know much about Aristotle and other Hellenic thinkers without Arabic mediation. Nobody denies these things today.

There are geographical, political, cultural, religious and other distinctions between East and West, that only partly overlap.

Dear George,

You asked if Gutenberg pinched his printing press from the Koreans. Of course he didn’t directly. He put together and improved on existing technology. The basic print technology may have made its way to Europe from China in the 1300s, although some scholars, claim that a European had the insight independently. Gutenberg’s printing would have meant little without the invention of paper, as parchment would not have supplied enough material for the books and other printing that began to pour forth. From http://www.ipst.gatech.edu/amp/collection/museum_invention_paper.htm papermaking was invented in China over 2,000 years ago The spread of knowledge of papermaking can be traced, and it did not originate in Europe. You wrote, “I was not arguing a point (except by mentioning the rather obvious fact that modern science and technology originated in the cultural West rather than East).”

Other instances of technological modernity originating in the East were the tools of warfare - steel making by the blast furnace and gunpowder. That made the mounted knight obsolete. The mounted knight disappeared in China about 1,700 years before he disappeared in Europe and for the same reason. Technology made him obsolete. It is generally accepted that the modernization of Japan has been largely a consequence of the importation of technology from the West and their application of that technology in their own country. When they defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War they had taken western technology and used it so well that they had outdone a European power. In the same way Europe had taken eastern technology and had outdone the East.

Newton acknowledged his debt to others when he wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Neither modern technology nor modern science might have arisen in the West without the contribution of the East.

What I am objecting to is the whole idea that our culture stems from the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews independently of the rest of the world. Perhaps you didn’t mean that at all.

Dear david f,

Thanks for the information.

>>What I am objecting to is the whole idea that our culture stems from the Greeks, Romans and Hebrews independently of the rest of the world. Perhaps you didn’t mean that at all. <<

No I did not, if the emphasis is on “independently”. I cannot imagine a Newton or Einstein if we still had to work with Roman numerals.

Just an illustration of what I was trying to say about MODERN science: Taking mathematics, or mathematical physics, there are many non-European sounding names among contemporary prominent specialists and pioneers, most of them previous students at Western universities. I don’t think this was the case in, say, nineteenth century, which I think is related to the fact that there were practically no “non-Western” students in Western universities in those centuries.