Tom Holland: Did Religion Exist in the Ancient World?
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- Опубликовано: 30 дек 2018
- Did Religion Exist in the Ancient World?
Tom Holland
A Friends of Classics Memorial Lecture
Books that take for granted the existence of Greek or Roman religion are everywhere. But did ‘religion’ as we understand the word today actually exist in the ancient world, or is it a word so freighted with Christian - and specifically Protestant - assumptions that to apply it to antiquity is to risk anachronism?
Tom Holland needs a youtube channel where he just talks about different historical periods that fascinate him
Just discovered him. He is a treasure! Amazing insights.
Check out his podcast, The Rest Is History
Yes indeed! His "Islam the Untold Story" documentary has to be one of the best I've ever seen!
@@ripamontir Sandbrook is annoying though.
His takes on history seem to all boil down to “Maggie was right!”
@@TesterAnimal1 Who's Maggie?
I like how Tom's work has 'exposed' sevularism's deeply Christian roots and much like Christianity, is devoted to converting every single unbeliever.
Unless you’re a secularist from a non Christian country. In which case it’s what?
@@TesterAnimal1 did that secularism come from that country or did it start after Christianity came? My assumption is that it is a mix between the Secularism which came from Christianity and the local way of thinking.
@@TesterAnimal1 Plenty SICKULARlists in India preaching
Lovely lecture. I sincerely admire Tom, not just because his books are incredibly fun to read, or because he is quite resourceful and insightful. I admire him because he is always unwrapping key historical issues that are extremely important for us in order to understand the way things are in the present, such as the conformation of Islam in its modern shape and form, how we can understand the Roman psyche and motivations, the role of Athelstan in conforming the English original identity, and so much more. I look forward to reading Dominion.
I never heard of him before stumbling across one of his You Tube videos a week ago. Now I'm halfway through "Dominion" and am looking forward to reading his other books. He is indeed both fun and erudite. I keep saying "Wow! I never thought of that!" or "Whoa, so that's where that comes from!" while reading him.
@@dm-gq5uj May be interested in this video: ruclips.net/video/-AbYIj5TCuw/видео.html
This video deserves a lot more views
Great lecture but the audio had moments where it was difficult to hear. Loved the topic though! Glad I subscribed to the channel - 👍
🇺🇲🇬🇧♥️
I wish the audio was better on this vid
Outstanding.
I've never seen so much plugged in so weirdly
What book is this from? I'm trying to track, and a lot makes sense because this is an accurate description of the scene of religio in Japan, but how do we look at personally pious and devout people like Abraham, Moses, David, Paul, etc.? It seems to be the exception that Tom recognizes in the Q&A. The early Jews and Christians were not practicing their religio for State/group purposes. To me there is a large gap between personal-covenantal religion of Judeo-Christian monotheism and group-commerical religion of polytheism. The content of the Old Testament presupposes this personal-covenantal monotheistic God over and against mere ritualism.
But King David was - a king. The Jewish religion was a national religion and in ancient Israel it governed just about every aspect of their lives. What made the Jewish God different, as Holland points out, is that the God of Israel was both the god of a specific people, the Israelites and their land, and a personal god who cared about his people. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD and the Jews were forced to scatter, they began developing the Talmud and a faith that was not dependent on, say making annual pilgrimages to Jerusalem. It's true that the Jews also had the concept of a personal God, and that's what enabled Judaism to survive after they were unmoored from their ancient homeland.
I haven't read it myself but I think it's from his 2019 book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind or How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
Its a shame you couldn't have provided Tom with a microphone. It's too difficult to listen to unfortunately.
A brilliant outline of the how contemporary notion of 'religion' with its evolutionary history by way of Christianity cannot be automatically apply to other historical contects that have not had the same historical/cultural development. The word anachronism is such used when inappropriately applying a notion of a later period to an earlier one. Is there an English word that signals the inappropriate application to another culture of a description/evaluation of notions alien to it?
Animal and grain sacrifices were not actually really sacrifices at all, most of the time, with the exception of the rare "whole burnt offering". Rather they were a way of honoring the god(s) prior to consumption of the meat. Meat was rare, and precious, and it was an acknowledgment of the guilt involved in the act of killing an animal. It's similar to the Native American practice of honoring the animal and the Great Spirit prior to eating a bison.
Now he must talk about the spider God
Tom Holland literally repogramming the minds everyone he speaks to...
😊
No . Yet Vedic teachings to impart character building, social habits to live in harmony etc did exist as far as I know. Our Vedas and Upanishads don't have the word RELIGION IN THEM. YET SPIRITUALITY did exist in various forms and discipline disciplines. Hinduism was given to INDIANS after the foreign investors pushed themselves into our GREAT LAND . WHICH IS VERY SAD
@annamnedungadi1581
Why do you use the euphemism "foreign invaders"? Just say Muslim and Mohammeden. Indian civilisation in the North and North-West was destroyed, burned to the ground by the Muslims. Śaivism and Buddhism and Sanskrit and Vedic culture were wiped out. And, yet, you Indians still allow Islam to exist in your lands??
This isn’t the Peter Parker Tom Holland I was looking for . . .
To me, the omnipresence of Christianity -- or any belief in the supernatural -- is akin to perfumed asbestos. On that level of abstraction (which is tangential to the talk), yes, one might wittily call Lucretius a Dawkins in toga. Yet in so far as Lucretian lucidity prefigures the enlightenment, and is at odds with prevailing practice, the poet seems more reminiscent of Diderot or perhaps Shelley than to any New Atheist.
The link between 18th century enlightenment and Lucretius is surely there: In fact there was even a remake of sorts of Lucretius' The Nature of Things in 1751 by german enlightenment poet Christoph Wieland. I don't know whether it was ever translated into english, though. Here's a link to the original german version:
www.projekt-gutenberg.org/wieland/natdinge/titlepage.html
I'm writing my masters thesis on a certain aspect of classical religion and I think I can corroborate/relate what he's saying. In my experience ancient thought was pervaded by sophisticated (pun intended) pagan theology we barely understand at all anymore. People just don't get taught in basic childhood history class how intense and intelligent pagan thought was. What makes it so alien to us is that it has been so thoroughly replaced by the Christian ethos. So when you have real pagan theology to compare it to, it's easier to see how even Enlightenment thought was essentially Christian flavored in it's worldview.
Nonsense conceptualizing of the term "religion".If you search in a an arab-english dictionary the translation of the word "deen" you'll obtain "religion", but that's not the exact equivalent in the islamic faith,cult, whatever.That does it mean that Muslims doesn't have a religion? Obviously not. So the same with ancient greeks.The map is not the territory.
Islam wasn’t around until 300+ years after Constantine so “religion” was already being redefined by then……sooo…..yea…..no
"Are YOU CLUELESS ??? " - Everybody Is Religious - Everybody Worships Something & It's Ussually Themselves - GENESIS 3 - ROMANS 1:18-32 - EPHESIANS 6:13 🔥🤗🔥
What do you mean by worship?
yep
Speak for yourself.
Hoĺland?Nein danke
Tom Holland appears to have read the wrong books . It would be better if he did some real research for himself and not base his thoughts on what others wrote. Sorry that you confuse more that you convince.
musfaza hosein - whatever books you read, you are always reading other people's thoughts. That is the point of books.....no?
@@kbeetles He means real research where you just make up stuff and tell every one it is true when most of the time it is a lie.
This isn't for you, go back to zakir naik
Remain Humble - have you read this book? Exactly which bit did Tom "make up"? When you are working with historical facts, it is not easy to make things up - names, dates, events and even people's thoughts are documented. Everything can be checked and easily refuted. This is a pretty formidable work. Before your friend musfaza hosein poo-poos a book like this, I want to see him put down a similarly impressive book on the table!
@@kbeetles sorry, I was being sarcastic towards a lot of research these days that is just about money and based on false assumptions and weird philosophies. This was not at all aimed at Tom whose research to me is quite good. Sarcasm can be missed but I was agreeing with you and disagreeing with the one who you had commented to.
Did I understand what you were saying correctly? That we can thank the Christians for giving us both: the modern sense of religion AND the modern sense of secular?????? Uh, I'm no historian, but I've had the impression that the secular had to fight for its existence AWAY FROM Christianity. The Roman empire, before the crisis of the 300's was not that far away from starting a scientific and industrial revolution. Christianity was not responsible for the decline of classical learning, but it was in position to have saved it if it wanted to, and it didn't want to. If I wanted I can find a number of very anti-intellectual and anti-science quotes from a number of early church fathers. When Bacon started pitching his primitive form of what would become empiricism, he did so by taking a ton of bible verses, twisting their meaning and trying to pretend that Christianity was for science all along. It wasn't. He probably knew that but he also knew he'd have a better chance of getting his ideas accepted if he pretended that god was for them. Both Bacon and Galileo had works on the Catholic church's list of prohibited books. People back then actually EXPECTED the Spanish Inquisition. The church did not give us the secular. The secular had to re-bootstrap to exist.
Well the secular is terrible anyway. So we should reject it.
@John wayne It was Christian abolitionism that got rid of slavery, and it is secularism that brought us communism and 100 million+ excess deaths.....
@John wayne People where letting their slaves free since early Chrsitianity. Read Isaiah 58 where God tells the people to break every joke.
Or John 8 where it said you are the slave. The slave to sin and Jesus wants to set you free, but you refuse.
So how are you against slavery when you willingly let yourself be enslaved?
Christianity did indeed give us secularity in an ironic twist of history (or dialectics as german idealists would put it): In pagan cults, the gods were very much part of this world and the idea that there was a transcendent world beyond our normal universe was alien to pagans. Surely the gods were distant from us but only in a finite way, like let's say the moon or the sun. Philosophically the gods were inside the universe. Only a small circle of platonist philosophers saw God or the gods in a realm beyond this world. Because of this worldlyness of the gods, nothing the pagans did was ever truly outside of religious considerations like modern science or liberal democracies for example are. Also, nothing was ever just religious without any reference to worldly flourishing. It was the Platonists and especially the church fathers that grew up in a platonistic worldview, that introduced "pure religion" a form of live that disregarded or even rejected worldly flourishing. This new religion necessarily created a new awareness that "this world" and its mortal affairs are not full of god or gods that conserve them eternally. This world is but transient, in a word secular.
@@duto009 there are many kinds of atheism. Modern Western liberalism is secular but it is thanks to it that different religions are not destroying each other by killing their members.