[E. Pluribus Unum]

The emergence of world religions, they say, was triggered by the rising standards of living in the great civilizations of Eurasia...

It was more likely the cause of rising standards of living.

Lefties always get everything backwards. That's what happens when agenda rather than logic drives your positions.

[Cicero]

Good point. No question that Christianity was responsible for the rise of Western civilization. And from what I know of it, Confucianism in China, with a dose of Buddhism.

[donna]

I just found this quote today:

“[Communism] is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision.

Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communists vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.”

- Whittaker Chambers, Witness, p. 9.

[ctdonath2]

My thought too. You don’t raise an advanced culture without _first_ establishing a strong social morality; an advanced culture does not arise from crude selfishness/tribalism and _then_ decide “hey, let’s be nice to each other because a higher power obligates it”. Authors see the correlation, but confuse the causality.

[Vigilanteman]

Exactly. When society sees things as a zero sum game, they are far more likely to delve into things like human sacrifice (e.g. abortion), taboos (fossil fuels) and primitive dogmas not based in reality (man-made global warming).

Once a society becomes morality based, it becomes far more caring and civilized.

[SunkenCiv]

In hunter-gatherer societies and early chiefdoms, for instance, religious tradition focused on rituals, sacrificial offerings, and taboos designed to ward off misfortune and evil.

Religion is one thing, standard of living is another. If there's an agenda in the paper, it's some kind of wackadoodle vegetarian crap.

During European colonization of much of the world, standards of living rose. The world population hit a billion around 1900, 408 years after Columbus set sail for the Americas (actually China and India, but he never seemed to figure that out). The crumbling of the remaining ruins of various civilizations and cultures didn't lead to wholesale rejection of precolonial religions or wholesale adoption of moralizing religions.

Buddhism is on that list, but the core idea behind it is to reject all attachment to material things -- the Buddha was a prince who went schizo, IMHO, but anyway, he abandoned his wife and child and his riches.