Lamaism (for lack of a better term) is a very different animal than, say, Sri Lankan Buddhism. My reading is almost exclusively confined to Tibetan works and Mahayana texts that are revered there. I particularly enjoyed the end result of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika - I was sitting there wondering how he was going to say that nirvana is permanent after everything else he had analyzed and declared impermanent, and he then came to the fundamental conclusion that nirvana is not a permanent phenomenon, nor is it distinct from samsara. It was a mind-blowing conclusion that leads me to sometimes wonder why more Buddhists don't discuss it.
Regarding Akhenaten or Egypt's influence on Greece, there isn't really much of the substance you're looking for because it really just isn't there. The black power writers are wrong on pretty much everything Egypt-related. Egypt was strong in mathematics and engineering, and its wisdom literature almost certainly influenced Hebrew wisdom literature (try looking at R.B. Parkinson's Reading Egyptian Poetry), but its astronomy was (contrary to popular belief) very underdeveloped. The very word "chemistry" comes from the native Egyptian word for Egypt, but even through the Middle Ages it was a very rudimentary science.
If you're looking for information on Egyptian religion, there are tons of books out there but little that would interest one from a theological standpoint because Egyptian religion was fairly standard ancient-world paganism. Religion in Roman Egypt by David Frankfurter is probably one of the better books insofar as it traces pre-Christian sources for some Christian motifs (like Horus slaying Set as a prototype for St. George and the Dragon), it talks about actual practice from a period for which the practice is known (as opposed to hypothetical reconstructions of how it was practiced, à la Stephen Quirke's The Cult of Ra). Frankfurter talks about how peasants would scrape away the wall of a temple and drink the powder to try to cure illness, or pour water over hieroglyphs of a prayer and then collect it, believing it to have been made sacred in the process.
Sarolta Takacs wrote a book called Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World that documents the spread of those cults, but both of those cults were actually Roman adaptations of Egyptian ideas rather than actual Egyptian ones. Jacco Dieleman's Priests, Tongues, and Rites on the magical Leiden papyri is a fascinating book (both of the books last mentioned were published by Brill, which should give you a sense that they are serious works). Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind discusses Egyptian-influenced thought in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and of course you can always read the Nag Hammadi codices if you want to read about Gnosticism. The Aesculapius is an interesting text that has a purported Egyptian source, though I personally doubt it - it's just another example of Egypt being used as an "exotic" source of "hidden" knowledge, something that the ancients started and modern New Age wackos perpetuate.
If you want to look at older Egyptian religion I don't think you're going to find anything particularly interesting in a philosophical or intellectual way except by way of satisfying curiosity. The Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead and the bridge between the two, the Coffin Texts, pretty much lay out a fantastic cosmology replete with animal-headed deities and giant serpents.
On the subject of Akhenaton, I can only imagine you're correct, though I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on some of the broader religious and cosmological trends in Egypt. Anything from a metaphysical/philological perspective, like F.M. Cornford or even Martin Heidegger. Anything that precocious undergraduates and soft-headed graduate students get enthusiastic about. Also: anything that documents the extent and manner of Egypt's intellectual influence on Greece. All I've seen are black writers clutching their pearls and bleating about how there was once a mention of wisdom at some point in Middle Egyptian and so egyptians who are obviously black were really the originators and then being laughed at. They probably go to a poetry slam or something afterwards to get it all out. Anyway, recommendations from either would be great.
Regarding Akhenaten or Egypt's influence on Greece, there isn't really much of the substance you're looking for because it really just isn't there. The black power writers are wrong on pretty much everything Egypt-related. Egypt was strong in mathematics and engineering, and its wisdom literature almost certainly influenced Hebrew wisdom literature (try looking at R.B. Parkinson's Reading Egyptian Poetry), but its astronomy was (contrary to popular belief) very underdeveloped. The very word "chemistry" comes from the native Egyptian word for Egypt, but even through the Middle Ages it was a very rudimentary science.
If you're looking for information on Egyptian religion, there are tons of books out there but little that would interest one from a theological standpoint because Egyptian religion was fairly standard ancient-world paganism. Religion in Roman Egypt by David Frankfurter is probably one of the better books insofar as it traces pre-Christian sources for some Christian motifs (like Horus slaying Set as a prototype for St. George and the Dragon), it talks about actual practice from a period for which the practice is known (as opposed to hypothetical reconstructions of how it was practiced, à la Stephen Quirke's The Cult of Ra). Frankfurter talks about how peasants would scrape away the wall of a temple and drink the powder to try to cure illness, or pour water over hieroglyphs of a prayer and then collect it, believing it to have been made sacred in the process.
Sarolta Takacs wrote a book called Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World that documents the spread of those cults, but both of those cults were actually Roman adaptations of Egyptian ideas rather than actual Egyptian ones. Jacco Dieleman's Priests, Tongues, and Rites on the magical Leiden papyri is a fascinating book (both of the books last mentioned were published by Brill, which should give you a sense that they are serious works). Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind discusses Egyptian-influenced thought in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and of course you can always read the Nag Hammadi codices if you want to read about Gnosticism. The Aesculapius is an interesting text that has a purported Egyptian source, though I personally doubt it - it's just another example of Egypt being used as an "exotic" source of "hidden" knowledge, something that the ancients started and modern New Age wackos perpetuate.
If you want to look at older Egyptian religion I don't think you're going to find anything particularly interesting in a philosophical or intellectual way except by way of satisfying curiosity. The Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead and the bridge between the two, the Coffin Texts, pretty much lay out a fantastic cosmology replete with animal-headed deities and giant serpents.
On the subject of Akhenaton, I can only imagine you're correct, though I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on some of the broader religious and cosmological trends in Egypt. Anything from a metaphysical/philological perspective, like F.M. Cornford or even Martin Heidegger. Anything that precocious undergraduates and soft-headed graduate students get enthusiastic about. Also: anything that documents the extent and manner of Egypt's intellectual influence on Greece. All I've seen are black writers clutching their pearls and bleating about how there was once a mention of wisdom at some point in Middle Egyptian and so egyptians who are obviously black were really the originators and then being laughed at. They probably go to a poetry slam or something afterwards to get it all out. Anyway, recommendations from either would be great.
They may be "atheolatrial", so to speak, but the existence of deities is not explicitly denied beyond the sense that the permanence and independent reality of anything within samsara is refuted. The "ultimate reality" may be impersonal, but that, if anything, fits with the concept of the divine that many in the present day have when they say the word "God". Few, if any, people these days picture God as a hoary, bearded old man sitting on a cloud and frowning (or smiling, take your pick) down at Creation.
The figure of Christ is actually strikingly similar to the figure of the Buddha. Both offer a way to salvation/enlightenment that involves a renunciation of material attachments, just acts and behavior and a reinterpretation of spiritual reality that makes the old temple cults obsolete and worthless. Both are universalist creeds that grew out of narrow ethno-religious traditions, and both influenced those narrow traditions and forced them to evolve to remain marginally relevant in modern society (though both are essentially relics of a bygone era).
I think that any reading you do on Akhenaten will disappoint you. His "monotheism" was really closer to the "national deity" concept that was present in the Near East in the Iron Age, where a polytheistic world was assumed but one god assumed primacy and was worshipped almost exclusively. The concept is similar to, but not exactly, henotheism. The development was what we would today call "political", though obviously in ancient Egypt the ideas of separate "religious" and "political" spheres would be an alien concept. The temples had grown powerful, and Akhenaten sought to wreck their power and consolidate the state cult around himself as the living expression of his prime deity, the Aten (probably actually a-t:'n based on Amarna transcriptions in Akkadian, the whole name almost certainly pronounced i:x-na-a-ti:'n, though in correspondence he is referred to by his Horus name, spelled "mery-aten" but in Amarna letters mai-ati:'n). It was sort of like the destruction of the monasteries in Reformation England combined with the Stalinist cult of personality, and very, very light on the philosophy from the extant records.
The figure of Christ is actually strikingly similar to the figure of the Buddha. Both offer a way to salvation/enlightenment that involves a renunciation of material attachments, just acts and behavior and a reinterpretation of spiritual reality that makes the old temple cults obsolete and worthless. Both are universalist creeds that grew out of narrow ethno-religious traditions, and both influenced those narrow traditions and forced them to evolve to remain marginally relevant in modern society (though both are essentially relics of a bygone era).
I think that any reading you do on Akhenaten will disappoint you. His "monotheism" was really closer to the "national deity" concept that was present in the Near East in the Iron Age, where a polytheistic world was assumed but one god assumed primacy and was worshipped almost exclusively. The concept is similar to, but not exactly, henotheism. The development was what we would today call "political", though obviously in ancient Egypt the ideas of separate "religious" and "political" spheres would be an alien concept. The temples had grown powerful, and Akhenaten sought to wreck their power and consolidate the state cult around himself as the living expression of his prime deity, the Aten (probably actually a-t:'n based on Amarna transcriptions in Akkadian, the whole name almost certainly pronounced i:x-na-a-ti:'n, though in correspondence he is referred to by his Horus name, spelled "mery-aten" but in Amarna letters mai-ati:'n). It was sort of like the destruction of the monasteries in Reformation England combined with the Stalinist cult of personality, and very, very light on the philosophy from the extant records.
Political correctness is the pettiest form of casuistry.
ἡ δὲ κἀκ τριῶν τρυπημάτων ἐργαζομένη ἐνεκάλει τῇ φύσει, δυσφορουμένη, ὅτι δὴ μὴ καὶ τοὺς τιτθοὺς αὐτῇ εὐρύτερον ἢ νῦν εἰσι τρυπώη, ὅπως καὶ ἄλλην ἐνταῦθα μίξιν ἐπιτεχνᾶσθαι δυνατὴ εἴη. – Procopius
Ummaka qinnassa nīk!
*MySmiley*
ἡ δὲ κἀκ τριῶν τρυπημάτων ἐργαζομένη ἐνεκάλει τῇ φύσει, δυσφορουμένη, ὅτι δὴ μὴ καὶ τοὺς τιτθοὺς αὐτῇ εὐρύτερον ἢ νῦν εἰσι τρυπώη, ὅπως καὶ ἄλλην ἐνταῦθα μίξιν ἐπιτεχνᾶσθαι δυνατὴ εἴη. – Procopius
Ummaka qinnassa nīk!
*MySmiley*
Atheism: The Iconoclasm of the West?
10/03/2012 05:42:56 AM
- 1294 Views
I think about as highly of athiesm as I do of christianity. *NM*
10/03/2012 05:54:20 AM
- 356 Views
I would chide you on that basis for having a love/hate relationship with God, but who does not?
10/03/2012 06:05:11 AM
- 524 Views
If the divine made men...
10/03/2012 06:27:42 AM
- 519 Views
True, but by the same token, in denying our nature we deny the divine.
10/03/2012 06:57:40 AM
- 534 Views
I was actually just saying in Skype this is the first post you've made in a long time I've enjoyed.
10/03/2012 07:02:56 AM
- 553 Views
But you do comparable things all the time!
10/03/2012 08:35:31 AM
- 747 Views
You've made this analogy before and it's still a bad one, those aren't comparable
10/03/2012 03:43:08 PM
- 632 Views
You said what I was thinking far more respectfully than I probably would have.
11/03/2012 12:14:55 AM
- 600 Views
You're right and wrong.
10/03/2012 05:09:32 PM
- 944 Views
Re: You're right and wrong.
11/03/2012 12:28:25 AM
- 851 Views
Nope, Buddhists are explicitly atheist and also explicitly Ontologically engaged
11/03/2012 01:39:20 AM
- 852 Views
Actually, Buddhists are not explicitly atheist in the conventional sense of the world.
11/03/2012 02:42:36 AM
- 650 Views
Yeah, that's very true.
11/03/2012 03:27:09 PM
- 745 Views
My Buddhist readings are definitely Tibet-focused.
11/03/2012 04:00:17 PM
- 797 Views
I guess it is that old impersonalism that seems the great disappointment in most Eastern religions.
11/03/2012 04:48:54 AM
- 753 Views
What you talkin' 'bout, Willis? *NM*
10/03/2012 06:29:35 PM
- 279 Views
I think he's saying that most arguments used on behalf of Atheism actually come from the Bible.
10/03/2012 06:58:50 PM
- 641 Views
Basically what Dan said; atheism as iconoclasm sans icons (unless we count religion as symbolism.)
11/03/2012 12:46:52 AM
- 655 Views
What exactly do you mean by "The irreparable damage it inflicted in the Great Schism"?
10/03/2012 07:57:59 PM
- 721 Views
That Byzantiums iconoclasm was one of the many wedges between it and Rome that led to the Schism.
11/03/2012 12:27:05 AM
- 644 Views
Bull. Shit.
11/03/2012 01:54:07 AM
- 715 Views
I did not say it was decisive, but that it did irreparable damage to the relationship.
11/03/2012 04:23:43 AM
- 732 Views
Bull. Shit.
11/03/2012 04:30:08 AM
- 596 Views
It is not like I just pulled it out of my rear, any more than my HS history text or Wikipedia did.
11/03/2012 04:57:31 AM
- 674 Views
Bull. Shit.
11/03/2012 05:14:01 AM
- 749 Views
Irreparable damage is damage that cannot be repaired, not necessarily serious or fatal.
11/03/2012 10:34:57 AM
- 819 Views
Mierda.del.Toro
11/03/2012 12:36:59 PM
- 700 Views
1969 may be "sometime back" in Roman Catholic history,but is ~a millenium after the time in question
12/03/2012 05:47:11 PM
- 950 Views
You really must get steamed by anyone calling you out on your hyberbolic comments
12/03/2012 06:55:06 PM
- 811 Views
On the contrary, I am not the one screaming "bullshit" in as many languages as possible.
13/03/2012 12:07:54 AM
- 853 Views
ο κοπρος. του ταυρου.
11/03/2012 02:19:11 PM
- 780 Views
Very edifying; can you do Mandarin or Swahili next?
12/03/2012 05:47:23 PM
- 686 Views
No. Even English seems to be beyond your grasp.
12/03/2012 06:29:50 PM
- 594 Views
Citing scripture does not justify telling me to kill myself.
13/03/2012 12:08:02 AM
- 728 Views
Give it up already. You are wrong.
12/03/2012 12:53:37 AM
- 899 Views
I will do the former at least; pretty sure this "discussion" has reached rock bottom.
13/03/2012 12:12:46 AM
- 542 Views
More or less your last line
11/03/2012 01:37:42 AM
- 618 Views
That is a broader argument, but more consistent with iconoclasms established meaning.
11/03/2012 05:12:12 AM
- 731 Views
Would you include the iconoclasm that Joel cites in the canonical Judeo-Christian tradition as well?
11/03/2012 12:44:49 PM
- 598 Views