Tag: religion

The Animal Cure

This change, occurring between roughly 2000 BCE and 700 CE, has long been celebrated as a huge step forward for humankind—the “axial transformation”—propelling us from the unseemly worship of savage beasts to the refined and dignified adoration of a god who is both perfect and perfectly good.

But it was a tragic demotion for animals. The axial religions determined that some of them were ritually “unclean” and reclassified all of them as the inferiors of humans.

Source: The Animal Cure

The Missionary Position

The unforgiveable crime of the post-axial religions is to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of hierarchy and justice. When the pious bow down before the powerful or, in our own time, the megachurches celebrate wealth and its owners, the “good” God is just doing his job of what Habermas called “legitimation.”

Source: The Missionary Position

Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker

Secularism and Its Discontents : The New Yorker

Lots of nice moments… ‘Once a tendency has been put in place by nature, he writes, it is not essential that each and every expression of it serve survival and reproduction.”… As he says, The evolutionary reasons for altruistic behavior are not necessarily the animals reasons.’