Posts Tagged ‘Mongol Empire’
“God has no religion”*…
Your correspondent is off for his annual sojourn in the land of dunes and deep-fried food (this year, with a glimpse of the eclipse); regular service should resume on or around August 28. Meantime…
Not since the angel Gabriel visited Muhammad in a cave around 610 AD, informing him that he is God’s prophet, has there been a new globally influential religion with hundreds of millions of followers. Though the world’s religions are very dynamic, and major faiths continue to shift and evolve in ritual and doctrine, the world today is dominated by the same four faiths that dominated the globe a millennium ago: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. According to a 2012 Pew study, 92 percent of religiously affiliated people around the globe belong to one of these four faiths.
While some relatively recent faiths have succeeded in recruiting millions of followers—such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism), Scientology, and Baha’i—their numbers of adherents are dwarfed in scale by these earlier four. The Baha’i, for example, are a relatively numerous recent faith with an estimated 7 million adherents. That sounds impressive, but it still means that just 0.1 percent of humanity has joined Baha’ism—and the faith has been around for 150 years (since 1863).
Faiths, of course, don’t have to be numerous to deliver spiritual sustenance to their followers, or even to be influential, as Judaism (a religion of 14 million) shows. Still, the small scale of new faiths over the past 1,500 years since Islam raises a question: Why, if creating new faiths is an inextinguishable feature of the human condition, have new religions had such limited recent success?…
The story of one imprisoned prophet illustrates the difficulties of getting a “baby religion” off the ground: “Why Are There No New Major Religions?”
C.F. also: Britannica‘s piece on New Religious Movements.
* Mahatma Gandhi
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As we direct our prayers, we might spare a thought for Genghis Khan, nee Temüjin; he died on this date in 1227. The founder of founder of the Mongol Empire (which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death), he launched the Mongol invasions that conquered most of Eurasia, bringing the Silk Road under cohesive political control. Though renown for the brutality of his campaigns, he practiced meritocracy– and religious freedom.
Imperial dreams…
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.– “Ozymandias” Percy Bysshe Shelly (1818)
The Roman Empire encircled the Mediterranean:
The Mongol Empire once stretched from the Pacific to the Danube:
More recently, the Ottoman Empire was almost as large:
While the British Empire was the most widely dispersed:
As we remark with Shelley that empires come and empires go, we might recall that it was on this date in 1781 that the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were finally ratified, and the Second Continental Congress became the Congress of the Confederation of the United States of America.
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