The history of the West is of Christianity mostly, and Islam in good measure (the culminating point at the Siege of Vienna).

It’s wrong to interpose a lens of world religions on history. The peoples of the past didn’t subscribe to a notion of world religions. The world religions concept is very new. There isn’t even a word for religion in most cultures earlier than the lat middle ages. The word we use ‘religion’ meant ritual or ceremony not at all what we moderns mean by it.

Overall the danger I see is the Whig temptation to rewrite history in terms of the present rather than to try to understand the past on its own terms. For most of human history, religions (as we use the term) were not conceptually or pragmatically separate from a civilization. In most cases, it defined a civilization. To be Western was to be Christian.

Books:

Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. Brent Nongbri.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion . Alain De Botton.

They’re probably the same as Amazon, with warehouses. In fact, I know for a fact that there are resellers of books at Half, part of Ebay. Amazon also presumably has lists of corporations that do the same.

You refer, I assume, to Dicken’s Great Expectations?

http://www.booksbythefoot.com/shop/pc/About-Us-d2.htm

I was at the local library and found a new shelf of books that was placarded as the staff’s worse picks. Among the books displayed was Thomas Hardy’s Great Expectations. I took the book to the desk and asked the 3 librarians if they had read any Hardy novels. The eldest said she loved Hardy the 40 something and the 20 something both said something to the effect that no, but it was the cover (the cover!) that looked boring.”

LOL

I was at either a restaurant having lunch, or a furniture store buying something for a kid sister, can’t remember which, when I looked at the decorative bookshelves and noticed huge numbers of what one would think were useful older books. One especially pristine one got my attention.

I asked one of the employees where they got them all, and she said at auctions – they bought them by the case or the pound or something from suppliers whose business it was to do just that.

I said to her, “You have a copy of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae sitting there as decoration. It’s not an annotated scholars’ edition [just Adler’s] so it’s not valuable. Ask your boss if I can buy it for say 20 bucks. ”

A short while later the manager came up to me and handed it to me; saying it was mine no charge.

Went to a wedding at Graylyn a couple years back and the suites we were provided all had shelves of 1930’s and 40’s and early 1950s books. My father’s room looked like a study. Travel books and narratives; novels by then prominent authors such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner … ; biographies … literate light reading; all just sitting there as decoration.

I never have discovered where those by the pound booksellers were located.

Many of you will know who he is. Apart from outrageous prices on new old stock hardcovers, there are “fine” to “good” condition used copies generally available for 50 to 60 bucks. [found one cheaper too]

But here is the deal, they are library books. This work was only published in 1994 by the Uni Mich press.

What the hell are libraries doing cycling this out already? Is there so much superior classical scholarship already supplanting it?

I’ve noticed the same thing with any number of significant historical or philosophical works.

Well, maybe they were just extra copies.

In reply to that, I would state that humans are jack of all trades, potentially. We can learn to use reason as true scientists and engineers. We can learn to self deceive and self delude, which many people have a talent for irregardless of formal training. And people can also be magicians and propagandists, by teaching themselves tricks of the trade.

To categorize humans as being only one thing but not another, is primitive on par with Margaret Sanger. Humans may be average or below average, like the masses, but that does not predetermine their talent or lack of it.

That’s like thinking the Roman Republic didn’t accomplish anything past 200 BC.

The fact that they grew into an empire spawning much of the known world, was something.