Judaism supposedly created Israel, and Judaism also is the parent of Christianity and Islam, so the issue of Judaism and Ancient Israel, from which it supposedly emerged, are not trifling topics. The fact is, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, there was no "ancient Israel" as depicted in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historical document, and trying to understand the history of Palestine by reading the Bible is like trying to understand Medieval history by reading Ivanhoe.

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[...]
He begins the preface by observing that in the 1920's few people seem to care about art, religion, or philosophy. He says that the modern era is unique in that there are plenty of people producing art, religion, and philosophy, but no one seems interested in consuming them. "The coexistence of overproduction on the one side with unsatisfied demand on the other," he says is "the special problem of modern life" (21). So Collingwood sees the problem of modernity as this separation between these types of producers and the everyday consumers indifference to them. This is especially problematic because Collingwood asserts, "Art and religion and philosophy are not vain quests, they are normal activities of the human mind" (20). If these activities are indeed normal (and important), then the modern age is in a strange predicament. How did this happen?

Collingwood then uses a historical survey to try explain this indifference to these works. He says that the Middle Ages were different from the modern modern era in that the people at the time possessed a greater 'unity of mind'. Furthermore, that the Middle Ages possessed institutions that were able to organize people's lives for them. They were, more than us, able to to engage in work that both supported them and made them feel like they were doing something worthwhile. "In every case there was an organization which gave the individual what to do and - in a rough and ready way, perhaps - looked after him so long as he did it" (24). But this institutional structure was not the main thing that separates the middle ages from the modern era.

The more important thing, as I mentioned, was the unity of mind that they possessed. What Collingwood means by this is that art, religion, and philosophy had not yet been divided into distinct disciplines. Instead, religion served as the basis by which art and philosophy were oriented. These three things were always working in relation to one another. This interrelationship of these forms of thought, Collingwood claims, allowed individuals to experience a mental unity. They were more comfortable, more complete, more okay with their ways of living and the ideas that they had. On the contrary, Collingwood believes that we are no longer able to experience this type of mental unity. He says that we have to choose between being religious, scientific, philosophical, artistic, et cetera. That we have to choose which type of knowledge we subscribe too. "What is wrong with us is precisely the detachment of these forms of experience-art,religion, and the rest-from one another; and our cure can only be their reunion in a complete and undivided life" (36).

He says that this happened because art and philosophy came to maturity and had to free themselves from their connection to religion. And while it is good that these disciplines came to their maturity, the inevitable result is a sort of disunion within our own minds. He makes this point clear when he says: "In the middle ages the artist was perhaps not much of an artist, the philosopher was by our standards only mildly philosophical, and the religious man not extremely religious; but they were all men, whole of heart and secure in their grasp on life. To-day we can be artistic, we can be philosophical, we can be religious as we please, but we cannot ever be men at all; we are wrecks and fragments of men, and we do not know where to take hold of life and how to begin looking for the happiness which we know we do not possess" (35). In any case, Collingwood thinks that our era is marked by a disunion between the disciplines and thus a disunion in our own minds.

The men of the middle ages, as we look back on them, appear to us half children and half giants. In the narrowness of their outlook, the smallness of the problems they faced, their fanciful and innocent superstition, their combination of qualities and activities which a reflective or critical society would find intolerably contradictory, they are children, and it is difficult for us to believe that human beings could be so simple. But in the solid magnitude of their achievements, their systems of law and philosophy, their creation and organization of huge nation-states, their incredible cathedrals, and above all their gradual forging of a civilized world out of a chaos of barbarism, they seem possessed by a tenacity and a vastness of purpose that we can only call gigantic. They seem to be tiny people doing colossal things.

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