In a highly vegetative state of “couch-potato” syndrome on Sunday evening, I stumbled across a short lecture by Karen Armstrong on C-SPAN as she talked about her new book “The great transformation: The beginning of our religious traditions” (Yes I actually stopped surfing on C-SPAN) . I have read parts of her previous book “The history of God” and found it interesting. Because of her studies, she has a profound view of spirituality. I recorded the lecture (I love my DVR) and watched it twice so I could pick up some of the really great references. I have the book on order, but her lecture was packed full of great insights.

Here are a few notes along with some of the things that are going through my head as I think about what she said.

The book is about what Religious historians speak of as the Axial Age, about 200-900 BCE—the period of reformers and prophets in all the world’s religions. As modern Christians, we often lose touch with the timeline of when other religions were being developed along with our Judeo-Christian timeline. During this pivotal “Axial age” began the development of Judaism and the age of the prophets (Amos, Jerimiah, etc.) as well as the writing of the Torah (Old Testament). Also during this time were the lives and teachings of Confucius, the Buddha, Plato and Aristotle. It seems that the whole of religious thought was at a turning point. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as we know it today are only derivatives of the profound spiritual developments that took place during this important time. It was a dramatic shift in thought.

The sages from many different religions during this axial period all came up with the central idea that the key to life is about treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. The reoccurring theme in every one of these religions was the removal of our self or ego and the introduction of practices to induce a growing amount of compassion for others. Confucius said that the central element of his teaching was that you should look within yourself and find what causes you pain and then refrain from doing that to anyone else. There is a story about a Jewish Rabbi Hillel that was approached by a pagan. The pagan promised to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. The rabbi replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary.”

During this time, there was little or no interest in what we now consider to be the basis of our current religions, which is the concept of believing our particular set of doctrines to be true and everyone else to be wrong. The introduction of "belief" into religion was a later concept that proved to be decisive, exclusive, and even deadly. For the Axial Age thinkers, religion was about doing things that made a profound transformation in yourself and your community

This obsession that we have with believing as "knowing" is a relatively new thing that developed as a backlash to a more modern understanding of science. The word “belief” actually comes from the old-English word “bileven” which meant to love or to devote ones self to a person or cause. It didn't mean to "know" something or have confidence something happened. The idea of a creed that we now accept as a set of central truths is from the latin “Credo” which comes from “Cordo” which means “I give my heart”. The Greek word that we most often translate as “believe” in the New Testament is “pisteo” which is more likely implies “trust” rather than knowledge. With each translation of the word, we lost a sense of action and replaced it with a deepening sense of “knowing”. We have also began a growing sense of group identity with our particular cultural manifestations of God. Religion during the axial age was not about believing something to be true about the past or about the future or about the particular ontological definition of the divine. Most sages of the Axial age actually thought God was something that could not be defined or spoken about directly. You could only speak about the results of experiencing the divine. This likely explains Jesus’ later use of parables to try and explain the nature of God and how you should live life in ways that would mediate the spirit of God. The teachings of Jesus were a direct result of the philosophies of the Axial Age.

Without belief, what is left? The result is a transformation of our character away from selfishness toward compassion for others above our own needs. The late Jewish rabbi Abraham Joshua Heshel said “if we put ourselves at the opposite pole of ego, we are in the place where God is”. The Buddha talked about a central idea called “Anatta” which means “no self”.

Some people get scared when they think that their brand of religion might not be the only carrier of truth. But for me, the idea that several other cultures long ago had found the same central truths that I’m following today is reassuring that the path I’m on is valid and leads to something worth finding. These things don’t lessen the value of my faith, they give me even more hope and more reason to continue down the path I’ve accepted in Jesus.