God, Religion and Society in Ancient Thought PDF Download
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Author: Giovanni Giorgini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783896659767
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The relationship between religion, social structures and political institutions has always played a fundamental role in human societies. This collection of essays aims to explore possible ways in which philosophical conceptualizations of god, the gods, and the divine in the ancient world interact with traditional religious practices and institutions, as well as with non-philosophical images of the divine. It spans from the 'rationalization' of the divine operated by early Greek philosophers to the notion of toleration one may find in Augustine. It features such authors as Plato (who uses for the first time in history the words 'theology' and 'atheism'), and Aristotle, with his intellectualist view of God. It will be valuable to readers interested in intellectual history, political theory, history of religion and classics.
Author: Giovanni Giorgini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783896659767
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The relationship between religion, social structures and political institutions has always played a fundamental role in human societies. This collection of essays aims to explore possible ways in which philosophical conceptualizations of god, the gods, and the divine in the ancient world interact with traditional religious practices and institutions, as well as with non-philosophical images of the divine. It spans from the 'rationalization' of the divine operated by early Greek philosophers to the notion of toleration one may find in Augustine. It features such authors as Plato (who uses for the first time in history the words 'theology' and 'atheism'), and Aristotle, with his intellectualist view of God. It will be valuable to readers interested in intellectual history, political theory, history of religion and classics.
Author: Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Author: Ezra Hall Gillett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature and morals
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
Author: Phil Zuckerman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814797237
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Are lawyers, by their very nature, agents of the state, of capital, of institutions of power? Or are there ways in which they can work constructively or transformatively for the disempowered, the working class, the underprivileged? Lawyers in a Postmodern World explores how lawyers actively create the forms of power which they and others deploy. Through engaging case studies, the book examines how lawyers work within and for powerful institutions and provides suggestions--both general and practical--for ways in which the practice of law can be made to work with and for the powerless. Individuals chapters address such subjects as the contradictions of radical law practice; legal work in South Africa; the economics and politics of negotiating justice; feminist legal scholarship and women's gendered lives; the overlapping worlds of law, business, and politics; theories of legal practice; and how lawyers are constitutive of gender relations. Contributing to the book are Maureen Cain (University of West Indies), Yves Dezalay (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), Martha Fineman (Columbia University), Sue Lees (University of North London), Doreen McBarnet (Wolfson College, Oxford), Frank Munger (SUNY, Buffalo), Wilfried Scharf (University of Cape Town), Stuart Scheingold (University of Washington), David Sugarman (Lancaster University), and Sally Wheeler (University of Nottingham).
Author: J. P. F. Wynne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107070481
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Do the gods love you? Cicero gives deep and surprising answers in two philosophical dialogues on traditional Roman religion.
Author: F. B. Jevons
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
This fascinating book revolves around the idea of God outside of Judeo-Christian framework. It was written by Frank Byron Jevons, a polymath, academic and administrator of Durham University. Each chapter in the book is dedicated to analyzing the concept of God through the lens of mythology, worship, and prayer.
Author: William Charlton
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
ISBN: 0227906977
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Where should God be in thinking about society, or society in thinking about God? This book shows how philosophy can help non-philosophers with these questions. It shows that intelligence is the product, not the source, of society and language, and the rationality of individuals is inevitably conditioned by the distinctive customs and beliefs of their societies. Addressing the idea that religion can impede the smooth running of society, it argues that the Western concept of religion is taken from Christianity and cannot usefully be extended to non-European cultures. But any society will be threatened by a sub-society with customs conflicting with those of the whole in which it exists, and Jews, Christians and Muslims have sometimes formed such sub-societies. Charlton proceeds to consider how our dependence upon society fits with traditional beliefs about creation, salvation and life after death, and offers a synthesis that is new without being unorthodox. He indicates where Christian customs concerning birth, death, sex and education conflict with those of secular liberalism and considers which culture, Christian or secular liberal, has the better chance of prevailing in a globalised world.
Author: Eliza Burt Gamble
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The God-Idea of the Ancients; Or, Sex in Religion" by Eliza Burt Gamble. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Author: Henri Frankfort
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226260119
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
This classic study clearly establishes a fundamental difference in viewpoint between the peoples of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. By examining the forms of kingship which evolved in the two countries, Frankfort discovered that beneath resemblances fostered by similar cultural growth and geographical location lay differences based partly upon the natural conditions under which each society developed. The river flood which annually renewed life in the Nile Valley gave Egyptians a cheerful confidence in the permanence of established things and faith in life after death. Their Mesopotamian contemporaries, however, viewed anxiously the harsh, hostile workings of nature. Frank's superb work, first published in 1948 and now supplemented with a preface by Samuel Noah Kramer, demonstrates how the Egyptian and Mesopotamian attitudes toward nature related to their concept of kingship. In both countries the people regarded the king as their mediator with the gods, but in Mesopotamia the king was only the foremost citizen, while in Egypt the ruler was a divine descendant of the gods and the earthly representative of the God Horus.
Author: Mikhail Bakunin
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 77
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Book Description
This is one of history's most eloquent assertions of anarchist philosophy: religion is fundamentally the impoverishment, servitude, and annihilation of humanity. It is a weapon of the state. According to Bakunin, it had to be abolished before the right to self-determination could be achieved. God and the State remains a mind-opening experience, even for those who are not fundamentally sympathetic to its premise, whether as an introduction to anarchist ideas, an atheist manifesto, or a summation of Bakunin's thought.
