The Reawakening: Religion and the Future of Humanity

This work critiques the concept of an Axial Age around 500 BCE in which modern religions emerged and in which humans became ‘moral’. The Reawakening argues instead that these emergent religions, based on newly-founded empires, empires which exerted hitherto unknown levels of control and coercion over their populations, and which lead in the end of monotheistic religions, moved humans away from the life of the world to an obsession with the life of the world to come… paving the way in the modern times for the disruptive regime of capitalism and its destruction of nature. However, at the same time as these religions emerged a countercurrent also emerged, represented primarily by Daoism and Buddhism, and in the West, Cynicism and Stoicism. This reawakening can provide the inspiration for a modern reawakening of spiritual traditions which stress compassion for all living things, and a quiet, responsible existence within nature.