Paradise : a history of the idea that rules the world

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Title:

Author:

Rushby, Kevin.

ISBN:

9781845290016

Personal Author:

Rushby, Kevin.

Publication Information:

London : Constable, 2006.

Physical Description:

xv, 272 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Contents:

Origins : 800 B.C.-A.D. 1000 -- Pythagoras and harmony -- Apocalypse and Eden -- Muhammad and the perfect man -- Hastening the apocalypse : 1000-1500 -- Martyrs, messiahs and assassins -- Crusaders and last days -- Christopher Columbus discovers Eden -- New Edens in an old world : sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- New routes to paradise : relics and indulgences -- The collectors -- The English Eden -- The separatists head for America -- The birth of science -- The decline and fall of witchcraft -- Selling the American Eden -- The modern paradise : 1700-1945 -- The comforts of the new earthly paradise -- Creating the new Adam -- Robert Owen and the godless millennium -- Religious America tries to build a new Adam -- Social Darwinism : Eden by eradication -- Consumer idylls of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries : rural retreats and shopping malls -- A consumer durable Eden -- 'Wilderness is paradise enow'.

Subject Term:

Paradise.

Paradise -- History of doctrines.

Heaven.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:VCSD	1:GEN-BOOK	000108575	202.3 RUS	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Brought up by parents who belonged to and were expelled from a fundamentalist Christian sect, Kevin Rushby learnt when young that promises of paradise are not always what they seem. From the Church in the Middle Ages to the people who prepare suicide bombers, or even Make Poverty History campaigners, there is always someone promising a better tomorrow if only we'll do what they say.

Rushby sets out on two journeys: a physical one to the Mountain of the Assassins in Iran, home of the myth that 'bright-eyed maidens of Paradise' await those who die serving Allah. And an intellectual one, back through the history of our ideas about Paradise in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.

The Ancient Greeks divided writing into tales of the gods (mythos) and verifiable facts (logos). Rushby reveals the reasons why we have come to live in such a divided world by showing how rationalist thought stretches from Pythagoras to Jacobean England and how tales of the gods have brought destruction and terror, from the Book of Relevations to the London Underground in 2005.

See www.kevinrushby.com