Customer Reviews

Alternative Tradition: A Study of Unbelief in the Ancient World (Religion & Society)

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A Sept. 20 00 review of: James Thrower: The Alternative Tradition. Religion and The Rejection Of Religion In The Ancient World. Moulton Publishers 1980 236 p.

Most average people, with interests in points of contention about religion versus skeptics and science, will suppose that this arguementative give and take is a strictly post-Darwin modern times development. Not so. Thrower takes us far back into the past. And behold, The Vedas, of ancient India has comment about the silliness of creationism doctrine easily excelling anything I have seen by Huxley or any other modern critic. Dealing only with rejections of conventional religions of long ago, the reader will find these observations from other religions and other peoples and continents to still today be right on target. After the Vedas come: The Upanisadic period; Lokayada; Samkhya; Jains; and Buddhist religions, all of India. The earliest Buddhism was an atheistic religion which later developed into supernaturalism and theistic tendencies. For China, traditionally, heaven was not the product of a creator, but more of a spontaneous evolution out of the self existant and the rythems of ying and yang. Followers of Confucius have been notably humanist and remain so until these tmes. Thrower uses half his pages commenting on Eastern religions before getting to Ionian Greek Philosophers. And includes Democritus and the Sophists in this section. Then more on the Classical Greek period;the Alexandrian Hellanistic age; Epicureanism; and the Skeptics and Stoics. Each school has it's own special kind of rejection of the conventional religion of that particular time. Rome and the Early Empire have spokesmen including Cicero and Lucretius, and with whom Kant came to be influenced. Finally, with ancient Israel and the ancient Near East, anti-religion is not the norm, but some Hebraic pessimism and irreligion makes a showing. Thrower stops there and does not analyse modern times. Worth reading, eapecially by pastors and teachers and the somewhat more than the average literary browser. Informative, scholarly. I recommend it and predict it will be time pleasurably and profitably well spent. I give it an appreciative five star approval.

There is already an excellent review, so I will only suggest reading the following in addition to this book: a) "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach," by Moojan Momen (astonishingly encyclopedic); b) "Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: A Prehistory of Religion" by Brian Hayden (great overview of religion origins and development); and c) "The God Question: What Famous Thinkers from Plato to Dawkins Have Said About the Divine" by Andrew Pessin (he makes everything sound easy in a few pages' length).