Axial age

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 641.

Value of religion

Organized religion emerged as a means of providing social and economic stability to large populations through the following ways:

Organized religion served to Justify the central authority, which in turn possessed the right to collect taxes in return for providing social and security services to the state. The empires of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were theocracies, with chiefs, kings and emperors playing dual roles of political and spiritual leaders.[9] Virtually all state societies and chiefdoms around the world have similar political structures where political authority is justified by divine sanction.

Organized religion emerged as means of maintaining peace between unrelated individuals. Bands and tribes consist of small number of related individuals. However states and nations are composed of thousands or millions of unrelated individuals. Jared Diamond argues that organized religion served to provide a bond between unrelated individuals who would otherwise be more prone to enmity. He argues that the leading cause of death among hunter gatherer societies is murder.[10]

The period from 900 to 200 BCE has been described by historians as the axial age, a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. According to Jaspers, this is the era of history when "the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently... And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today". Intellectual historian Peter Watson has summarized this period as the foundation of many of humanity's most influential philosophical traditions, including monotheism in Persia and Canaan, Platonism in Greece, Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism in India, and Confucianism and Taoism in China. These ideas would become institutionalized in time, for example Ashoka's role in the spread of Buddhism, or the role of platonic philosophy in Christianity at its foundation.