Moses and his One God: Jewish Roots Christianity and Islam are the most wide spread and influential monotheistic religions in the world today by any measure, and both sprung from and were heavily influenced by the monotheistic religions, and metaphysical and… Read More ›
Ancient Civilization
What is Vedanta?
Introduction The ancient Indo-Aryan civilization sprung forth in the Indus valley region in modern day India and Pakistan (to the ancients Eastern Persia), and was the source of the “Vedas”, some of the oldest extant literature of mankind. This ancient… Read More ›
Vedic Cosmological Narratives (Part II)
The Hymn of Purusha: God Takes Shape[1] While the preceding passage from the Rig Veda contains some of the root kernel philosophical elements of Vedic philosophy, there is another passage from the same collection of hymns dating back to the… Read More ›
Vedic Creation Narratives and Philosophy: Brothers in Arms (Part I)
When looking at the Indo-Aryan tradition, given its age and maturity and its fundamental belief and faith in the unity of man and the universe from which he emerged (unique to the Eastern religious traditions in general), a line can… Read More ›
Creation Stories of the Ancient Egyptians: Order (Maat) from Chaos
Cultural Context As Charlie began to delve into the mythology of the Ancient Egyptians, and in particular their cosmology, or mythological description of the origins of the known universe, he found that a narrative of mythology or a book of… Read More ›
Creation Mythology in Antiquity: Order out of Chaos
Introduction: Creation Myths in Antiquity Any cursory study of Egyptian and Sumer-Babylonian creation mythology yielded parallels and similarities, but was much less clear and open to debate was whether or not these similarities, these mythemes as it were, pointed to a… Read More ›
The Philosophy of the East: The Legacy of the Indo-Aryans
Introduction Throughout academic parlance in the Enlightenment Era intellectual and philosophical development throughout mankind’s history has been divided into Eastern and Western branches. The Eastern branch of thought and development for many centuries was looked upon as “Oriental”, a term… Read More ›
Sacred Geometry in Plato’s Timaeus
After Pythagoras, the next in line in the propagation of core mathematical constructs, not just numbers themselves but again geometry as well, as key elements of the universal world order, is Plato. It is said that outside of the Academy… Read More ›
Pythagorean theology: Truth in numbers
In their quest for the ultimate symbols to represent reality the Greeks developed a theological system that although was analogous to the pantheistic tradition within which it coexisted, was relatively independent from it and was perceived to be, at least… Read More ›
The Seeds of Christianity: The Hellenization of Judaism
With light and insight shed on the competing philosophical and theological systems from the 3rd century BCE to the first few centuries after the death of Christ and the advent of early Christianity, Middle Platonism and Stoicism in particular, we… Read More ›
Middle Platonism: Greek Philosophic Adolescence
Despite the emergence of metaphysics as we know it today in classical Greece, seen most clearly in the (interpretation of) the dialogues of Plato and then more clearly elucidated in the work of Aristotle, a product of Plato’s Academy, and… Read More ›
Egyptian Mythology: The Bedrock of Western Theology
Judaism and Zoroastrianism clearly represented some of the earliest forms of monotheism in the civilized world, and both faiths had their respective prophets which each set of followers believed had had their respective laws, or truths, handed down to them… Read More ›
The Soul of Plato: The Seat of Logos
The lasting contribution of the Greeks to the West is not only in their political philosophy, they are of course given credit for the creation of democracy, but with their philosophical tradition in itself, from which their politics emerge really…. Read More ›
Knowledge and the Intellect: Extracting Truth from Scripture
Outside of his thesis coming together, with some clear indicators of cultural borrowing among Ancient Western civilizations with respect to the development of theology and philosophy, Charlie now had a much better context within which to view Niels’s letter which… Read More ›
Muslim Philosophy: Muhammad, the Qur’an and Aristotle
Despite Charlie’s Jewish heritage, at least Jewish by blood, and his penchant for the less rigid and orthodox theological systems of the East, he knew little about Islam outside of his aversion for its fundamentalist interpretation which, along with its… Read More ›