Theology De-mythologized

Here is everything you need to know about the four major Western religions in a nutshell:

Moses (most likely 1391–1271 BCE), a member of the royal family in pharoahnic Egypt, organized a slave revolt, liberated the enslaved populace, and established them as a unitary, theocratic nation with a code of laws which governed the actions of kings as well as subjects.

Siddhartha Gautama (most likely 563 - 483 BCE), aka the Buddha, a high-born prince from what is now Nepal, renounced his worldly possessions and family and inheritance once he became conscious of the suffering of the poor and outcast.

Jesus (most likely 2 BCE - 30 CE), aka the Christ, a Middle Eastern rural carpenter's son, took the criminal rap for his friends and family and sacrificed his own life, suffering a brutal execution at the hands of the state, for their sakes.

Muhammad (570 - 632), a merchant from the Arabian peninsula, raised an army and conquered and unified an unruly, polytheistic, pagan tribal region under a unified code of behavior and devotion to a single god.

There is a lot of gobbledy gook surrounding these persons and events—myths and scriptures and teachings and doctrines and interpretations and factions and whatnot—but what it all boils down to is this: militarism and legalism are the key themes in the founding myths of Judaism and Islam; self-sacrifice and empathy for the suffering of others are central to the origins of Buddhism and Christianity.

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FN. I realize Buddhism is not strictly a Western religion, but it is 'major' in the West.

Silence

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Wittgentstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Let's see, that's the quote we left you with last time. You want to know who really understood silence? Sure, I would accept the Buddha as an answer, or even Lao Tsu—good answers both; but those aren't quite the ones I had in mind. No. Someone who really understood the concept of silence in all its full ramifications was Stalin! Yes. If you did not agree with Stalin, you were silenced (exiled, sent to a gulag, disappeared, humiliated, assassinated, executed, etc.). And, thus, he did not have to speak about you. Perfectly rational.

Surely, that isn't what Wittgenstein meant (and, of course, subsequently repudiated) in the Tractatus, though, at the time, he felt it was the answer to (or at least the correct approach to answering) all the intractable questions of philosophy.

Is monomanical ideology (a/k/a sameness, conformity, totalitarianism) necessarily the natural outcome of reason and rationality? Its desideratum? When philosophy searches its soul, this is a question it must confront—especially in light of the brutal history of the mid-20th Century.

Maybe John Cage intuitively sensed this problem: "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." — John Cage, from Silence. See also 4'33" here and here.