as a Buddhist who follows the early texts, i've done quite a study of northern ancient India at the time of the Buddha, it truly was a very interesting time in history.
@@WhatifAltHist There are a lot of interesting things, like the first female monastic organizations (first jain then buddhist), the whole time period of the brahmins and the samanas who were essentially a whole sub-culture of people who checked out of society to try to find a way to awakening in the wilderness. Jains and Buddhists came from that culture. There is a good book by a preeminent Buddhist scholar A.K Warder called "Indian Buddhism", you can find it free as a pdf, the first half or so of the book starts from very ancient times to the time of the Buddha and the time after.
Jeremiah and the Jewish prophets are also considered a part of the axial age. The Judeo Christian tradition is a development of the axial age age as well.
10 Interconnected Principles of the coming Axial Age 1. Be Authentic and honest about yourself (include your blessing as well as your warts and all) 2. Earth Life Is A School To Learn And Exercise Spiritual Principles in a very challenging environment (Earth School) and not for judgement 3. Love Everyone - Be Caring, Kind, Respectful and Forgiving towards Everyone Unconditionally including yourself and ALL Others 4. Find And Follow Your Divine Intuition or Inner Voice which blossoms from Joy and Love 5. Use Technological Advances Responsibly so that it is uplifting and fosters constructive development 6. Release Prejudice - Release all anger, fear, scorn and pain against any and all "other" entities you encounter in Earth School 7. The Power To Manifest is controlled by our thoughts and can create an environment and life full of gratitude, abundance and health (while we adhere to the 10 Principles) 8. Avoid Negative Influences and instead seek out Constructive influences 9. Everything (including divine or sub-optimal or selfish or "evil" choices) works together to provide free agency opportunities to grow in Earth School 10. We Are All One - How each of us chooses to act towards ourselves and the rest of us impacts (reflects back to) us - in heaven and earth there is only us or we and no "others" or them
Just the Ticket, young man. New sub to the new channel, big fan of Whatifalthist, too. Definitely don't always agree but always find them thought provoking. Many Thanks. 😀😀😀😀😀
"What I remember about the rise of the Empire is... is how quiet it was. During the waning hours of the Clone Wars, the 501st Legion was discreetly transferred back to Coruscant. It was a silent trip. We all knew what was about to happen, what we were about to do. Did we have any doubts? Any private, traitorous thoughts? Perhaps, but no one said a word. Not on the flight to Coruscant, not when Order 66 came down, and not when we marched into the Jedi Temple. Not a word." - Operation: Knightfall "Knightfall" - Star Wars Battlefront II (2005)
@@bubble-wu6fi I'd like Rudyard to live stream a play through of the game. It might take over 3 hours to play every mission but of course it need not be all in one go. You hear that Rudyard!? Would you kindly live stream your play through of Star Wars Battlefront II (2005)?
EPILOGUE: This video was uploaded on July 4th, 2024, but it seems to have been recorded prior to June 27th (or at least in the daytime that Thursday) based on the initial conversation on the debate between Professor Lynch and Mr. Torenberg. President Biden's extremely poor performance in the aforementioned became the defining excuse for why the Democrats shoved him aside for another sick joke, his vice president, "Heels Up" Harris, last Sunday, July 21st.
It's interesting that you mentioned it, I eventually became religious (I practice a polytheist religion) after being born into a non-religious household, flipped-flopped between agnostic/atheism, and studied in hardcore STEM for over 10 years. Like I'm doing a PhD in a STEM field right now. And I think science can co-exist with religion, as long as you don't believe in mythic literalism and make some other compromises which is something I think Abrahamic religions struggle with. Also people misunderstand what science is, it's not a belief system, it's just a list of simple steps to systematically study things. That's it. So you can use it to study the physical side of the universe, while religion is for the spiritual side of the universe.
I think the reason people compare science to a religion are midwits. They don't have the brain power to understand it so they treat it like a belief system instead.
I often recall Carl Sagan's warning in 'The Demon-Haunted World' about the impending danger of a time when people's lives are dominated by science & technology yet those people know next to nothing about either.
@@Mr._Anderpson Yeah, I think we're living in a time where people are unironically dominated by science and technology. And from what I've observed, these people don't understand neither. It's like magic for them and as if it will somehow solve all their problems
I wish Rudyard had clarified what he meant when he referred to the Bible as a historical document. Many listeners, particularly if they come from religious areas of the US, will interpret that as "the Bible is a history book", which is the mistake which gives way to fundamentalism.
The Bible is a history book of sorts you just have to understand that in context of how history was done in the past. The way we do history now came about in the 20th century from the western world. Regardless this isn't what makes people fundamentalist
@@jesse123185 It certainly is. People read the stories, start counting back generations, & arrive at the conclusion the Earth is 6000 years old , virgins actually pop out babies, & other metaphors like the ascension which shouldn't be taken literally. I'm a fan of most aspects of Christianity, but I can't nod along to narratives like the Egyptian captivity & exodus being taken as history.
This video was very all over the place. Like to many incomplete thought going from one topic to another without much of a bridge just all over the place.
I love your work Rudyard,. I always learn something. Can I request a video on the pre-coinage IOU system? That fascinates me, I can't think how that would work on a large scale
Its a great lie to say India 500 bc didn't have contact with other empires. The name Cambyses is a namesake of the Kambojas who the Buddhist converted during the reign of Cyrus. Cyrus is a namesake of the Indian Kurus who were aligned with the Kambojas. The archeologist Flinders Petrie unearthed an Indian Buddha at the Memphis Ptah temple dated to the time of Cambyses. The Indian Kurus married into the Gautamas as the name Codomannus ( Sans Gautaman, a variant of Gautama) is found in the family of Cyrus' (Kurus(
While standardized coins were first invented by the Lydians, the oldest form of metal currency (i.e. coins) may be traced to mesopotomia some millenia before the axial age. Beyond this, Lydia was not a greek speaking area. At the time, Lydia was populated by Lydians who spoke the Lydian language which initself is as close to Greek as it is to Hindi (being in the anatolian sub-branch of the indo european languages). While it is true that greek colonies on the western coast of anatolia did, as with many other peoples, pay tribue to Lydia, it was certainly not the case that the Lydians were themselves Greek. Further your claim of a lack of coinage during this era in the region of the middle east is odd considering that the bulk of the coinage of this era was produced by the Achamenid (Persian) empire.
13:30 "If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism" - Albert Einstein. Note that Buddha taught essentially the same social ethic as Jesus, without the metaphysics of Christianity.
I'm fairly certain that Buddhism had an indirect influence on the moral attitudes that eventually became Christianity, considering that it was a mature philosophy long before.
I am not sure about your coin theory. The medians/persian had coinage since the 5th bc, Egypt since the 4th. We have lots of records from the Persian empire, it’s all Persian though, and ignored by classic studies.
my favorite thing about Bertrand Russell was he just kept pounding in the Greek third of the book about the different focus on the number of things, whether it was 1 (Atomic), 2 (dualism), 3 or 4... it was just great how they bounced back and forth - and somehow it kept up somehow into the 1800s. I had a hard time with his view of all philosophers having to have slaves (he was an aristocrat) and him being so conservative (as in against democracy) but I kinda get it. The Christian book - the only thing I took from that was that his take on the Jewish contribution was minimal, whereas he takes Origen and Augustine as far more important. I think the third book reached its apex in its chapter on Locke and Hume, but I loved his take on Voltaire. I think Durant does a better job on those later philosophers. I also think Russell focused too much (pages and pages!!!) on logical symbolism - but at least he gives honest opinions that he is trying to say what he thinks other philosophers actually think and that he sometimes doesn't really get it all entirely.
How can you claim that these people from 500 BC were the foundation for the Abrahamic religions? Abraham himself lived in 2000 BC and Moses was like 1300 BC. I guess you can claim it influenced Christianity and Islam. But pretty much the entire Old Testament was before the axial age
35:00 Funny, I used to think Plato was a brilliant philosopher and came to the opposite conclusion with time. The more I learn about Plato's philosophy, the less I respect it and those who abide by it
Wasn't there already morality in ancient Greek mythology before the Axial Age? You sacrificed goats and cows to the gods, sure, but you also had to resist hubris, being a bad host or guest, and lead a good, heroic life to reach Elysium. Those that broke the laws of morality were punished like Tantalus, those that acted in accordance to the moral codes were rewarded. Sounds like a religious moral system to me.
12 minutes in, there are a lot of unsupportable generalities being thrown about and it's clear the speaker isn't very familiar with what he's talking about- no "market economy" in "the middle east"- does he just mean coin based economies? Because "market economy" typically refers to something else. The commentary on religion as well, the idea of societies "progressing faster than their religions" is silly. The idea that somehow "machinery" would be a problem for Christianity because the Bible happens to use a lot of agricultural metaphors? It's not like Christianity is a thriving world religion today or anything. The speaker doesn't seem to be very familiar with religious thought at all, except as charicature.
