Month: May 2011

 

Christ’s Death must have been hard to cope with for his followers

“Imagine no religion, it’s easy if you try.”

So sang John Lennon.  I miss you John.  It would be really nice to think you were up there somewhere and could know how much we all love you.  I imagine that the followers of Jesus felt much the same.  Their much loved charismatic leader was dead.  Who can blame them for wishing him back to life, in some form or another.  It is very human and very understandable.

So that is how I think Christianity got started.  Jesus was a man who inspired a lot of love, and deep down that is what it is all about.  It has been twisted into some pretty evil forms since then, but there is still something good and wholesome buried extremely deeply at its core.  But why was this originally harmless cult persecuted so ferociously from its very origin?

In the past Empires were built on the demand for spices. What was so special about spices?  Basically it was that they were valuable, imperishable and portable.  Before modern technology, in particular modern transport, they were just about the only commodity which it was technically feasible to trade on a global scale.  But as technology has developed what can be traded has changed.  And it is still changing.  This book looks at the implications.

Where Bilbo lives is a very comfortable and law abiding place.  As we get further away from home things get wilder.  The Hobbit is of course a children’s book and Tolkien makes things as simple for his youthful audience.  He designates this area as ‘the Wild’.  This is fairly easy on the brain and gets us to the right place mentally with minimal effort.

I am indebted to the highly followable  @TLockyer on Twitter for drawing my attention to a fascinating paper available via the marvelous Medievalist.net resource. http://www.medievalists.net/2011/05/01/franchise-conflict-the-tide-of-antipopes-in-the-aftermath-of-the-eastern-schism/ This looks at the idea…

I have given quite a lot of coverage to the individual episodes of Niall Ferguson’s series Civilization, Is the West History?, so I thought it made sense to round it all off with a review of all six programmes as a whole.   Each of them explores a particular aspect of how the West has come to dominate the world for the last 500 years.  But the title, the tone and even the advertising of this series project lay claim to a high ambition. The aim is surely not just to explain how things got to be this way, but to tell us where things are going.  And we do surely need an answer to the question in the title.  Has domination of the world by the West now run its course and possibly be going into reverse.

The rapid rise of Christianity has often been considered to be a remarkable event in itself, and the fact that it acquired so many adherents so quickly is often held to be a miracle in its own right that further confirms the truth of the message. Recent calculations are a bit more sober.  Prior to its official adoption growth was impressive but far from unbelievable.   In fact it is in line with and if anything  even a bit slower than the the much better documented recent growth of Mormonism.

I had watched the rest of the series when it was broadcast and blogged it instantly.  I couldn’t do that for the last episode because I was away at a conference to do with my work.  Not many people work on a Sunday evening, but I think Niall would approve.  In the West we used to work hard, and now most of us don’t any more.  And this may be our undoing.

Jesus turns water into wine

Edward Gibbon as an enlightened thinker has an issue with miracles.