What do I mean by "Time and Religion".

a man decribes his search for "time" on youtube

I've been asked to explain the title of my blog: Time and Religion.

Time is the first word in title and is the essence of my research "What is Time ?", "How do we perceive time ?", "is our perception of time changing, evolving ?".
As Dan Falk put it "Time surrounds us. It defines our experience of the world, it echoes through our every working hour. Time is the very foundation of our conscious experience. Yet as familiar as it is, time is also deeply mysterious. We cannot see, hear, smell, taste or touch it. Yet we do feel it - or at least we think we feel it. No wonder poets, writers, philosophers, and scientists have grappled with time for centuries.

Religion is the second part of the title. This is the harder part to explain. Every early religion around the world developed in order to grasp the concept of time. From the early days of Shamanism and burial rituals during the Natufian culture that flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 BCE through Neolithic burials, 'homo-religious' as Karen Armstrong calls our ancestors, has tried to deal with the meaning of time, life after death, and eternity.
Our ancestors must have had a need to track time and seasons. Night must have been quite scary back in the days and harsh winter or summers must have had a determining role in our survival. In fact I believe FEAR and DREAMS were the two factors that led mankind to a spiritual awakening. On the one side fear of night, harsh nature and death, and on the other, dreams of fair weather and food in abundance or dreams of a deceased parent that might have been so vivid as to make us truly believe they still lived in another dimension or that we could somehow communicate with them. Most early tombs functioned as some sort of giant clock/calendar. A great example is the "passage tomb" of Newgrange in Ireland dating back to 3,100 BCE, making it five centuries older that the great pyramids of Giza. The tomb is richly decorated with triple spirals and other geometric shapes. The tomb spans 25 meters in length ending in 3 small perfectly preserved and dry alcoves giving it an elongated cruciform design. One of the most intriguing feature though is that once a year, on the morning of the winter solstice, sunlight reaches into the passage into the deepest burial chamber.

Many of the symbols of ancient religions are inspired on the sun, the moon, the seasons and the cycles of the stars. I am using the word ‘religion’ in my title to mean ancient TRANSCENDENTAL RELIGION. It is the sense of sacred that our ancestors had to try to explain time, death and eternity and that evolved around the world in various forms. If we want to fully understand time we need to have a deep understanding of religion and its evolution throughout time.

The above video resumes the concept quite well. It is unfortunate that the man speaking has beliefs that diverge hugely from mine; he speaks of ill credited scientists, believes in conspiracy theories and in other interviews talks of machines that don’t really exist. But in the pursuit of truth I will not be censoring anyone's ideas especially on a subject like the consciousness of time.

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

I spent quite a while in the bookshop last month trying to find a book that could counter The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I respect Dawkins for his insight in 1976 on genetic evolution and the concept of memes but his recent persuit of atheism I find somewhat less appealing. I had read a little book called The Dawkins Delusion as a possible counter but was extremely disappointed by it.
Finally I stumbled upon this Case for God and the first page has Karen’s biography. Now there was someone who really seemed to know her subject. The book turned out to be much more than an answer to Dawkins and was one of my best reads of 2010.
Right from the start we plunge into the history of religion, shamanism and what might have been similar to Heidegger’s  philosophy of ‘Being’. From the documents of later Neolithic and pastoral societies, we know, Karen writes, that Being rather than a Being was revered as the ultimate sacred power.

In chapter 3 she writes about, among other Greek  philosophers, Parmenides who became convinced that to attain the truth, human reason must rise above common sense and unverified opinion. The idea of change, for example, was pure convention. The Milesians had been wrong to imagine the world had developed gradually. Reality consisted of a unified, single, complete and eternal being. It might appear that creatures came into being and passed away, but true reality was unaffected by time.

The book then continues through two thousand years of evolution of philosophy, wars and religion until the present day.

“Just as the feats of a dancer or an athlete are impossible for an untrained body and seem superhuman to most of us, these people all developed a spiritual capacity that took them beyond the norm and revealed to their followers the untapped ‘divine’ or ‘enlightened’ potential that exists in any man or woman”.

¡Olé!

Karen Armstrong is one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, but left her teaching order in 1969 to read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1982, she became a full time writer and broadcaster. She is a best-selling author of over 16 books. An accomplished writer and passionate campaigner for religious liberty, Armstrong has addressed members of the United States Congress and the Senate and has participated in the World Economic Forum. In 2005 she was appointed by Kofi Annan to take part in the United Nations initiative ‘The Alliance of Civilizations’. In 2008 she was awarded the Frankiln J. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal for her work on religious liberty.