It’s always sad when the last candy falls out of the pinata.

Yup, Voltaire can be a pretty effective wrecking ball. So much so that his head was appointed to replace certain lopped off ones at a certain point, and in general the self-appointed philosopher king business didn’t seem to go so well…

The Karen Armstrong is from this book.

I got the video from this site (the timing of the video’s release is eerie considering the recent fracas over there…) I don’t know who did it.

MrW: thx. I was probably dozing during my english class. Leibniz was still fat though.

V. interesting. From where?

Pedantic footnote: Candide was a novel. Then it was a musical, but not until much later.

What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level. Before the Axial Age, ritual and animal sacrifice had been central to the religious quest. You experienced the divine in sacred dramas that, like a great theatrical experience today, introduced you to another level of existence. The Axial sages changed this; they still valued ritual, but gave it a new ethical significance and put morality at the heart of the spiritual life. The only way you could encounter what they called ‘God,’ ‘Nirvana,’ ‘Brahman,’ or the ‘Way’ was to live a compassionate life. Indeed, religion was compassion. Today we often assume that before undertaking a religious lifestyle, we must prove to our own satisfaction that “God” or the “Absolute” exists. This is good scientific practice: first you establish a principle; only then can you apply it. But the Axial sages would say that this was to put the cart before the horse. First you must commit yourself to the ethical life; then disciplined and habitual benevolence, not metaphysical conviction, would give you intimations of the transcendence you sought.

Luckily, guys like me usually only show up on blogs and in Dixie nightmares.