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Entry: Inventing Islam Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/inventing_islam#15516 Post contents: While it is of more than passing interest to compare the various achievements of assorted cultural groups against one another, in the end, it is whistling past the graveyard. Adriana is correct that the Middle Ages were a technological era. Far from "Dark" and despite the repeated plagues and factional warring, they were also the crucible of the Modern Western Nation State and with that, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. We could debate all day whether or not Christianity went beyond informing this technological progress to causing it. At this juncture, the technological juggernaut appears set to run us all down a blind alley of diminishing returns, overpopulation, crowding, war and biologic crash. While our technology leapt ahead out of the Middle Ages, one wonders if our intellectual capacity, our ability to martial our technology with wisdom and indeed our spirituality kept pace. I do no believe it did. We are intellectually and emotionally way behind our technological abilities and quite likely will enter the same depauperate stasis that Islamic culture fully entered after the Ottoman Period, compounded by a kind of mechanized auto-destruct urge. Messianic Religious Revivalism is everywhere, a loud commentary upon the abuses of our financial, statist and technological systems when aggravated by overcrowding and resource competition. Instead of comparing whose artistic and technological pudenda is biggest, we should be marshaling our reason, together with our spirituality in an effort to embrace historic human successes from whatever source they emerged from.....while pillorying the mistakes....and there are enough of those to go around on all sides..... so that we may finally achieve an intellectual mastery over our technological abilities. We trumpet ourselves as "modern" but are stuck in a primitive mind. Truth be told, this is the Information Dark Ages, an extension of the Middle Ages. We have yet, as a species to truly achieve the Modern we think we embody. Imagery depicting the four cardinal points are found throughout all religions from the directional cruciform of the Algonquin to the Four Rivers of Paradise of Islam....among others. This unites us all. Family.....Community....Spirituality....Labor/Craft....all converging and creating culture....the creative urge, our need to explore. In our rush to be triumphantly modern, we have forsaken this compass. If we fail to overcome our reductio ad absurdum tribalism we'll be reduced to eating the menu after the larder is emptied and no amount of spirituality will salve that sordid fate. Indeed, spiritualism will , by default, be proven a hoax at worst, an unmet potential at best. Religio....the ties that bind, they blind us too often. Sent at: 2008 12 02