From: FutureQ (futureq@attbi.com)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 13:28:49 MDT
Greg Burch wrote:
>
>
> There are a number of crucial differences between what one might call
> "religion" in traditional China and the phenomena that go by that name
> in the West. In traditional China three cultural complexes fit into the
> social and cultural space occupied by religion in the West and the
> Middle East: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. Each are far more
> humanistic than any of the "religions of the Book", all have a much more
> syncretistic orientation than the totalistic tendencies of the Western
> monotheist religions, there is no centralized authority in these
> cultural complexes and, most importantly, none are truly theistic in any
> meaningful sense. In their pervasive, widespread "low" or "folk" forms,
> each become polytheistic: Taoism expresses itself as a kind of local,
> naturist animism, Confucianism as "ancestor worship" (really "ancestor
> veneration") and Buddhism as mythic spritism. Sinitic polytheism (I use
> this term because one sees it throughout East Asia) is singularly "weak"
> as religions go -- the metaphysical claims made by folk practitioners
> are modest, and the social normative impact of the folk belief systems
> is very attenuated (because of the factors mentioned above) when
> compared with the totalism of Western monotheistic religions.
>
> Now, the subject you mention -- the fact of China's failure to have a
> scientific or industrial revolution, despite being the pinnacle of human
> civilization for most of the time since the Neolithic period -- is the
> question that attracted me to sinology lo these many eons ago when I
> first began studying Chinese language and culture. Suffice it to say
> that study of this question is one that has generated many different
> answers (See Needham's colossal work, "Science and Civilization in
> China", which was explicitly spawned by this question, and the work of
> the scholar who is my intellectual godfather in this study, Karl
> Wittfogel). A study of Needham, especially, leads one to the conclusion
> that the impact of "religious" ideas on the experience of technological
> innovation in China was much more an epiphenomenon of underlying
> physical and political realities than a cause of the lack of scientific
> and technological progress. This conclusion is buttressed by the fact
> that there was a vital empirical tradition in China for thousands of
> years.
Greg,
You clearly know more about this than I do. I was going on what I learned
watching James Burke's "Connections". Probably a simplified version for
quick delivery.
FutureQ
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