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The Awakening Cloud of Witnesses: Humanity is God, Civilization the Antichrist
Paperback
Series: The Bible Isn't What You Think It Is, Book 1
PhilosophyReligion General General Christianity
ISBN13: 9781523812516
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: Feb 2 2016
Pages: 532
Weight: 1.55
Height: 1.07 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
WHAT IF MODERN CIVILIZATION HAS FUNDAMENTALLY MISREAD ITS MOST INFLUENTIAL TEXTS?
What if we acknowledge that ancient writers were pre-scientific in the modern, technological sense of the word... but not pre-reasoning?
What if the Bible was never primarily intended as cosmic or civilizational history, naive physical science, or supernatural mythology?
What if its stories, symbols and metaphors were actually attempts to preserve profound observations about consciousness, language, morality, power, civilization and the survival of humanity itself? A deep and comprehensive knowledge of Human Nature and the nature of reality.
A CRISIS OF MEANING... OR A CRISIS OF INTERPRETATION?
Why has modern civilization become increasingly incapable of reading for deeper meaning, beyond the realms of religious readership?
Why do modern societies suffer a growing crisis of meaning, identity, fragmentation and psychological dislocation despite unprecedented technological advancement?
What if humanity's growing inability to think metaphorically is itself part of the crisis?
And what if literalism itself - on the part of religious and anti-religious readers alike - is part of the problem?
THE BIBLE THROUGH A RADICALLY DIFFERENT LENS
In The Awakening Cloud of Witnesses, Gavin Bartlett re-examines the Biblical writings through the lenses of metaphor, anthropology, evolutionary thought, cognition, language and human consciousness. This is not a conventional work of theology. Nor is it an attack upon spirituality.
Rather, it is an attempt to recover a lost mode of symbolic reasoning that ancient cultures understood deeply, but which civilization progressively obscures through institutional dogma, ideological conditioning, linguistic decay and the collapse of critical thought.
THE BOOK EXPLORES QUESTIONS OF:
- consciousness and identity
- metaphor and cognition
- morality and social organization
- power, hierarchy and domination
- the evolution of civilization
- the meaning crisis of the modern world
- and humanity's long struggle to remain truly human within civilized societies
THROUGHOUT THESE PAGES, FAMILIAR ASSUMPTIONS ARE REVERSED
The ancient writers of scripture are reconsidered not as irrational primitives, but as highly observant human beings communicating through symbolic structures modern readers increasingly no longer understand.
Literalism becomes a loss of meaning.
Metaphor becomes cognitive infrastructure.
Scripture becomes encoded human experience.
Religion becomes inseparable from questions of language, consciousness and human survival.
Civilization itself emerges as a system requiring far deeper examination than modern culture is generally willing to permit, let alone endorse or encourage.
NEITHER RELIGIOUS APOLOGETICS NOR SECULAR DISMISSAL
Drawing from Biblical analysis, history, language, evolutionary thought and social critique, the work challenges religious orthodoxy and modern secular reductionism without comfortably belonging to either.
It explores the relationship between spirituality, critical thinking, social organization, elitism, symbolic literacy, psychological development- the long-term survival of humanity.
Some readers will find these ideas provocative. Others may find them unsettling.
But for readers sensing that something foundational has gone wrong in modern culture, communication, spirituality and human self-understanding, this work offers a radically different interpretive framework through which to reconsider the Biblical writings - and civilization itself.
THIS IS NOT A BOOK OF EASY ANSWERS
It is an invitation to think again. To read again. And perhaps to see civilization, religion and humanity itself through an entirely different lens.
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