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  • The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah See large image

    The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah (Paperback) By (author) Karen Armstrong

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    Short Description for The Great Transformation The centuries between 800 and 300 BC saw an explosion of new religious concepts. Their emergence is second only to man's harnessing of fire in fundamentally transforming our understanding of what it is to be human. This work examines this phenomenal period and the connections between a disparate group of philosophers, mystics and theologians.
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    The Great Transformation3

    Mark Thwaite It seems fashionable to think of religion as an aberration: a style of thinking only credible to fools and fanatics. But fashionable thinking is itself often wrong-headed. Religious thought has helped mankind as often as it has hampered it; has been the cause of great good as well as unspeakable evil. When thinking about religion it is worth remembering both its continuing ubiquity as well as its antiquity. Religion has been with us for a very long time and looks able to renew itself in very many different contexts (and, as John Gray points out in Black Mass, to insert itself squarely inside secular thought too).
    Whilst the new atheists (Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, Sam Harris, Michel Onfray et al) are right to be robust in their attacks on religion, they could do with both a little more humility and a lot more history. Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation could help them out here. Explaining the beginnings of religious faith as we still know it, Armstrong's sensitive book shows us when, how and why certain ideas about human beings -- what we need to prosper, why we are here, how to improve ourselves -- first developed. It was between 800 and 300 BC, "in the time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah" that new ways of thinking -- ways of thinking that transformed humanity for ever -- first came about. Those ideas are still with us. The new atheists are right to challenge these notions, but understanding them better should be their first motivation, rather than simply deriding them. Armstrong should be congratulated on on excellent, and very readable, journey back to the beginning of thinking. by Mark Thwaite

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