Scienceblog posts tend to revolve around current events, almost to the point where history is irrelevant, and the Island of Doubt is no different. I try to put things in historical perspective, but concede that I tend too often overlook what has gone before. In an effort to undo a little of that cognitive damage, here's a humbling quote from a surprising place and time: Persia (or thereabouts) in the ninth century:
And we are the heirs, and transmitters to our heirs, of heathenism, which is honored gloriously in this world. Lucky is he who beareth the burden with a sure hope for the sake of heathenism. Who had made the world to be inhabited and flooded it with cities except the good men and kings of heathenism? Who had constructed harbors and conserved the rivers? Who had made manifest the hidden sciences? On whom hath dawned the divinity which giveth divinations and teacheth the knowledge of future events except the wise men of the heathen? It is they who have pointed out all these things, and have made to arise the healing of souls, and have made to shine forth their redemption, and it is they also who have made to arise the medicines for bodies. And they have filled the world with the correctness of modes of life and with the wisdom which is the head of excellence. Without these products of heathenism the world would be an empty and needy place, and it would have been enveloped in sheer want and misery.-- Abu al-Hasan Tabith (Islamic scholar, died 901 CE) discussing the contribution of Greek philosophy
I came across it in Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind, although Freeman lifted it from Ramsay MacMullen's Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries.
More like this
Carnival of the Godless #55 is up on Kingdom of Heathen
Don't forget to read the Carnival of the Godless before you go to bed…it's as effective as prayer!
They're getting hard to keep track of — but they do provide fodder for the thread full of fierce heathens.
I think that David Bowie and Bing Crosby say it best:
That is a really great quote. Like so many religions though, Islam seems to be going through a period of ignorance of it's own past and teachings at the hands of corrupt leadership who pick and choose what elements of the faith are beneficial and which are not. Sadly all those that benefit submissiveness and obedience are put forth as the truth and people like Abu al-Hasan Tabith are shunned - or worse.
Personally I take a lot of pleasure from spiritual things like hymns, chants and other religious music, novels about religious history and ancient drawings and paintings that people created to explain or impress their gods. But at the same time I feel civilization is about ready to move on from it's adolescence and become adults who take responsibility for the damages their excess and ignorance has wrought on the earth. Just like a frat boy waking from a drunken stupor to realize if he doesn't shape up he'll never graduate from college, our world is making it's judgement on our species and it will expel us not based on our gay love, abortions and who we pray to but on the simple fact that we don't care about harmonious existence.
I enjoy reading texts like the one you posted and am happy to find inspiration in it's message and hope others do as well, but I still don't feel Islam benefits society in any way at all. And for those who say without religion we'd all be barbarians with no moral compass - well, they must be blinded by faith.
You know, it's a pity - religion has given the human race some of its most beautiful art and architecture, and if you are that way inclined, some profound philosophical thinking. And yet on the other hand it is responsible for some of history's cruellest and most barbaric stupidities.
Would that we could have the former without the latter.