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From: "Nagamanickam Ganesan"
To: tamil@...
Cc: agathiyar@egroups.com
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 14:38:30 PDT
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Subject: [agathiyar] [Book] God's funeral
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Both Asthikar and Naasthikar are discussing items like
on the existence of God, the birth of Buddhism, etc.,
I do not know much about these big issues. I feel like
much more is involved in 1) the origins of Buddha's thoughts
or 2) MeykaNDaar giving a definite answer to Nihilists.
For example, the all-important Scientific Revolution of
the last 200 years and Science's implications were lacking
for Vedic folks or Buddha or MeykaNDaar. We must take that
also into account to be comprehensive and relevent today, I think.

I am reading a book by A. N. Wilson, Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature. The title is God's funeral, W. W. Norton, 1999.
>From the book wrapper, I am reproducing the blurb that
introduces the book.

Regards,
N. Ganesan

------------------------------------------------------------
A. N. Wilson, God's Funeral, W.W.Norton, 1999

"By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers,
artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity: many had abandoned
belief in God altogether. This was in part the result of scientific
discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in
The Origin of Species and the controversy that followed.
But the doubt about religion had many sources. From the urbane and
civilized Hume, who quietly proved in the eighteenth century that
God couldn't possibly exist in the form handed down by organized
religion, to Gibbon whose Decline and Fall showed how uncouth,
unheroic, and downright distasteful many of the martyrs and popes of
legend really were, to John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Marx, Carlyle,
and many other seminal thinkers and cultural icons undone by the
general loss of faith. A. N. Wilson demonstrates in this brilliant
synthesis of biography and intellectual history that the real
destruction of religious belief had been achieved well before Darwin's
momentous publication. By 1900, the Church of England, so vastly rich,
so politically and socially powerful, could be pronounced spiritually
empty, however full its pews might be on a Sunday.

This magesterial, colorful narrative illuminates the central
tragedy of the nineteenth century: that God (or man's faith in Him)
died, but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who
thought they had buried Him. Echoes of the "Death of God" could
be found practically everywhere: in the revolutionary politics
of Garibaldi and Lenin: in the poetry of Tennyson and the novels
of Hardy: in the work of Freud, connecting this "death" to our
deepest wishes: and in the decline of hierarchical authority and the
first stirrings of feminism.

Yet despite the fact that the church had essentially become an
edifice empty of faith, it survived into our century because so few
of the fascinating, tortured people Wilson portrays could face the
brutal consequences of their own logic. Whether or not God was dead,
they still needed o believe, hence the great spiritual angst of their
culture which is now echoed in ours.

Wilson's exquisitely detailed argument, rich with insight,
anecdote, and discovery, reveals the growth of a new imaginative
order of unbelief that supplanted organized religion - leaving
in its wake a devastating sense of loss extending to our own times."












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