Chapter 4 (Culture & Religion)

Chapter 4: Culture and Religion in Eurasia/North Africa (500 b.c.e.–500 c.e.)

I. China and the Search for Order

• Legalist answer
• High rewards, heavy punishments
• Legalist principles:
• Human nature is naturally selfish
• Intellectualism and literacy is discouraged
• Law is the supreme authority and replaces morality
• The ruler must rule with a strong, punishing hand
• War is the means of strengthening a ruler’s power.
• The Confucian Answer
• Confucius, Analects, & Confucianism
• Moral example of superiors
• Education and state bureaucracy
• Government service required an entry test, heavily based on the Analects
• Filial piety and gender expectations

II. Cultural Traditions of Classical India

• South Asian Religion: From Ritual Sacrifice to Philosophical Speculation
• Vedas
• Brahmins, and rituals
• Early Indian texts originally passed down orally
• Various Indian religious texts
• Cycle of birth, death, and rebirth
• Life governed by consequences of actions (karma)
• Gender and the Laws of Manu
• Women came to be seen as unclean and inferior
• Laws of Manu enforced these judgments against women
• Young girls to marry older men
• Wives obedient
• Widows never remarry

III. Toward Monotheism: The Search for God in the Middle East

• Persian state support
• Achaemenid Dynasty
• Ahura Mazda versus Angra Mainyu
• Constant struggle between the forces of good and evil
• Human free will, struggle of good versus evil, a savior, and judgment day
• Judaism
• Migrations and exiles of a small Hebrew community

IV. The Cultural Tradition of Classical Greece: The Search for a Rational Order

• The Greek Way of Knowing
• Questions, not answers
• Socrates
• Plato
• Aristotle
• Rational and non-religious analysis of the world
• The Greek Legacy
• Alexander the Great spread
• Rome embraced
• Academy in Athens preserved Greek thought
• Greek learning in the Islamic world studied and built upon

V. The Birth of Christianity… with Buddhist Comparisons

• The Lives of the Founders
• Encounter with a higher level of reality
• Messages of love
• Jesus’ miracles and dangerous social critique
• Buddha didn't create social conflict
• didn't discuss the issue of gods