A short, disjointed work of religious speculation that will appeal mainly to readers who already agree with the authors’...
A short collection of miscellaneous observations about spiritual matters in various religions.
The four authors look over the tenets of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism and use leaps of intuition and conceptual history to examine what they see as the “truths” of those faiths. The bulk of the book’s opening segment discusses Christianity and makes several assertions about Jesus Christ (stylized here as “Y’sa,” or as a new Messiah, “M’sa”) and his role in bringing about the downfall of the Roman Empire: “To defeat the Romans, he [Y’sa] sees that faith in the Roman system needs to be broken,” the authors write. “This faith is based on the fear of crucifixion.” They style Y’sa as a “top-notch physician of the time and place” and imply that his medical knowledge (along with a specially drugged vinegar) allowed him to survive the ordeal of crucifixion, thereby breaking the psychological power of that form of execution for the Romans. But because the authors admit from the outset that “no attempt has been made to provide citations or other scholarly trappings,” these and other observations amount to questionable historical fiction. The book asserts, for example, that the ancients didn’t understand what heartbeats were; that if Y’sa were alive today, he would be a vegan; and, most incredibly, that Muhammad promised gay sex in the afterlife to his martyred followers. The scholarly “trappings” that the authors avoid would flatly contradict these and many other claims in the book, which will leave readers confused about whether to take them as speculative or not. The authors’ calls for an Islam without violence and a Hinduism without excessive mythology are refreshing. However, they don’t compensate for the other ideological imbalances.
A short, disjointed work of religious speculation that will appeal mainly to readers who already agree with the authors’ hypotheses.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511937818
Page Count: 80
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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