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Skeptics attempt to put Nothingness/Nihilism/Chance into the heart of a society's literature. Soon they discover that the absence of truth invites the rulers of the day to exercise unbridled and exclusive authority to govern according to their own folly. The abolition of truth creates a vacuum that is filled with force.This Book Changed Everything, 11
Freud's opposition to sexual repression is an important factor behind the West's sexual revolution.
From around the twelfth century, British courts required witnesses to place their hand on the Bible to take the oath, "I swear by Almighty God [to tell] the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." This is because God himself commanded, "You shall not bear false witness." Traditionally, after swearing to tell the truth, witnesses bowed to kiss the Bible.
The covenant of the Ten Commandments founded the modern principle of constitutionalism, or rule of law, by a perpetual written and binding law. Britain's submission to the rule of law was institutionalized with the Magna Carta (1215), founded on common law, tracing to the code of Alfred the Great. The Mosaic code was the foundation for such legal codes in the West. One-third of Alfred's "Dooms" (AD 893) quoted biblical law while collating the laws of three Christian kingdoms. Ultimately the Word of God was the basis for law and government
Buddhism blamed Avidhya (primeval ignorance) as the source of human bondage. Our salvation, nirvana, depends on deliverance from this delusion of personal existence. To be "saved" in Buddhism is the opposite of eternal life. Nirvana or Buddhist salvation is to be delivered from the delusion that you exist. Salvation is cessation of existence -eternal death.This Book Changed Everything, 57
Hindu sages went in an opposite direction. They concluded that our individuality is an illusion as is a wave in an ocean. The wave is part of the ocean. It has no independent existence. Illusion is to think that it exists as an independent reality. No! It is one with the ocean and must merge into the ocean. Salvation is to lose one's own existence. The post-Christian west is just catching up with the ancient Indian wisdom. This Book Changed Everything, 53-54
Sophism's challenge helped other Greek philosophers realize that logic and language can make sense only if they come from Logos -the Ground of Reason above the cosmos. Something of Logos must live also in man. This became the foundation of Greek rationalism that fascinated modern Europe. The Greeks were not sure if Logos actually existed. They deemed it to be a necessary assumption if logic is to make any sense.
Hindus and Buddhist sages were brilliant. They could have produced science. They didn't because a scientific interest in nature has to begin with the assumption that the world is real. That it is rational and valuable.This Book Changed Everything, 46
Prominent Hindu sages teach that the world, including individuality is Maya -illusion. Buddhism teaches Anatman -"No-self." Your belief that you exist as an individual person is your bondage. Rene Descartes, the father of European Enlightenment, tried to prove that he existed, but failed. Therefore, much of contemporary Western philosophy has lost the confidence that you exist as a real person; a permanent soul, self, or spirit. It is following the Buddha in giving up the confidence that your logic can know the truth and that your language can communicate it. This tectonic philosophical shift is moving the modern West to postmodern, neo-Buddhist nihilism.This Book Changed Everything, 45
Ramanujan raised serious doubt if atheism could make sense of numbers in the cosmos and their correlation with mathematics in the human mind.This Book Changed Everything, 40
Carl Jung began to feel that reducing human beings to soulless biochemical machines did not do justice to what we know about ourselves. Therefore he began to explore the "occult": spiritism, astrology, fortune telling, parapsychology, etc. This made him the most important influence on the "New Age Movement" of the 1980s.This Book Changed Everything, 36
Freud thought that since spirits can't exist, mental sickness called "demon possession" was often a case of repressed sexual desires.This Book Changed Everything, 35
Morally debased cultures tend to be controlled by a few wealthy people. Their riches come from power, extortion, and war, not honest and diligent work. "The ease of doing business" is always at a low ebb in a culture of corruption.This Book Changed Everything, 25
during the (so-called) Dark Ages, the Bible had begun to prepare the ground for Europe's economic transformation. Monasteries began to develop the medieval mind, work ethic, technology, agriculture, double-entry bookkeeping, etc., that went on to create an unprecedented miracle in the later centuries.This Book Changed Everything, 23
Jesus was humiliated, brutalized, and killed not because of the nobility of the human heart, but because of its cruelty and wickedness.This Book Changed Everything, 21
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