Fair enough, but I think most people here live in/come from Britain (or elsewhere in Europe) or North America ...
But surely, and speaking as someone who is neither British nor American, that is an insular - and frankly, destructively nationalistic - weakness of this idiotically London-myopic forum in the context of frontierless cyberspace? And why most of its more insightful posters have long since left [not that I necessarily agree with their perfectly understandable but misguided, passivistic escapism in the face of the onslaught - everywhere on internet forums - of abusive, consumer-zombie irrationalism]? Why your unexamined appeal to Anglo-American anthropocentrism? Shouldn't a forum such as this, allowing for obvious language-translation limitations, be appealing to cultural affects and influences beyond that tired and bankrupt paradigm? [On the contrary, just like during the early years of USENET, when everyone posting to its newsgroups was generally
assumed to be American with all its hegemonic, hubristic assumptions, this - unreflective - forum is similarly and conservatively continuing that narcissistic tradition. Just look at all the parochial posts here about some pathetically juvenile and irrelevant London-based trivia - best place to eat restaurant, best dub club, best ugly building, best fucking this-best fucking that, best fucking litter-bin, etc - (which is why I totally avoid all the music threads here) ... I intimately know another side of London that you lot would rather not even begin to acknowledge, but indulging in that would be insular, all too insular!! ...
where Christianity has obviously been the most important religious influence in historical times. It'd be pretty stupid to suggest that Islam no longer has much shaping influence on the cultures of the Middle East, or that Hinduism is no longer a major force in Indian culture.
Yeah, but Christianity has actually much more in common with Islam and other post-pagan religions than either could ever have with Hinduism, which is a pagan religion ...
Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517
Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12
Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah
Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18
Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a
Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23
Taoism: Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss.: T'ai Shag Kan Ying P'ien
Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5
So the very core of the pagan wisdom resides in the insight into this cosmic balance of hierarchically ordered principles, more precisely, the insight into the eternal circuit of the cosmic catastrophe, derailment, and the restoration of order through just punishment. Perhaps the most elaborated case of such a cosmic order is the ancient Hindu cosmology first copied onto the social order in the guise of the system of castes, and then onto the individual organism itself in the guise of the harmonious hierarchy of its organs: head, hands, abdomen, and so on. Today such an attitude is artificially resuscitated in the multitude of New Age approaches to nature, society, and so on and so on. So that's the standard, traditional, pagan order. Again, being good means that you fully assume your proper place within some global order. But Christianity, and in its own way already — maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it — Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit, or today, of human rights and freedoms. The idea is that I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my specific particular place within the global order. For that reason, Buddha's followers form a community of people who in one way or another have broken with the hierarchy of the social order, who started to treat this order as something fundamentally irrelevant. In his choice of disciples, Buddha pointedly ignored castes and, after some hesitation, true, even sexual difference. And do Christ's scandalous words from Luke [14:26] look, not point, in the same direction? "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Here, of course, I claim we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous god. Family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire social network, for any particular ethnic substance that determines my place in the global order of things. The hatred enjoined by Christ is therefore not any kind of dialectical opposite of love, but the direct expression of love. It is love itself that enjoins me to unplug, as it were, from my organic community into which I was born, or, as St. Paul put it, "There are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks."