Re: AUT: Re: Re: Star Wars and Archetypes

["commie00" <commie00@xxxxxxxxx>]

interestingly, tahir, you've just made the basic argument i've been trying
to make all along. only you're talking about xianity, and i was talking
about buddhism (in-potential).

oh well...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 3:10 AM
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Re: Star Wars and Archetypes


> >>> gshalif@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 02/17/02 10:22PM >>>
> Atheist were all along history... though mostly a tiny
> minority.
>
> In the Eastern cultures which were much more advanced
> than the European ones, the various atheist world opinions
> were much more prevalent.
>
> Tahir: Let me give you an idea of why I find this type of thinking in a
sense irrelevant. The main point is that an ideology or school of thought
that plays a progressive role in history can play a reactionary one later on
at some other point in history. Compare Islam and Christianity. According to
Samir Amin's interesting account in his Eurocentrism, one of the reasons why
Islam did not crumble into secularism and eventually became a instead a
fetter on social progress was not its inferior qualities, but precisely the
fact that it was more coherent, rational and satisfying to its adherents
than Christianity was. But from a revolutionary point of view in the modern
world, it is precisely these strengths that prevent a revolutionary
understanding from emerging in the Muslim world, among the believers that
is. But during the middle ages Islam played a revolutionary role.
>
> Now a second point is made in somoe of Loren Goldner's writings on
millennial traditions in Christianity. Borrowing from Kolakowsky and others
he shows how revolutionary marxism grew partially out of these utopian forms
of Christianity.
>
> Now when one takes a look at the very complex interplay and the shifting
roles that different traditions play at different points in history, one
realises (a) that it is really futile to single out some of them as the good
ones (that remain good for ever after) and others as the bad ones (that
remain bad for ever after), and (b) that supporting some of those that
played a progressive role at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past and
then "extrapolating" from that historical point to the present and then
trying to claim a similar role in the present is an ahistorical way of
thinking and a pointless exercise, perhaps even a reactionary one. OK I'm
going to add a third point: (c) I find it objectionable and chauvinistic to
claim that one part of the world and one set of people had the sound view of
things and all the others were a bunch of duffers, steeped in superstition
etc. To paraphrase Amin and Goldner again: it was Christianity, in both its
stengths AND weaknesses, that led the more directly to modern notions of
revolutionary communism.
>
> I think that some of our learned mystics need to learn to think in a more
historical fashion.
>
>
>
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