Marauder

So I've learned I can't just make a topic with any resolution I want a find interested opponents here, so i'm going to test the waters and get a feel for what people think and believe on this next topic before I construct a debate resolution around it.

How many of you have heard of the Axial Age? a designation given to a part of history by a academic named Karl Jaspers.

What are your thoughts about it? Do you deny that it occurred (a hard sell if you do) and if you don't then how do you explain the Axial Age, what do you make of it?

How can for thousands and thousands of years religion across the globe basically take one of two shapes exclusively (Animism and Polytheism) then all of a sudden across the globe, every religion as we know it today was born? Isn't that just a little mind blowing? If you had a time traveling private jet, you could theoretically go to a single year that's roughly around 500 B.C. and pick up Siddhartha, Confucius, Lao Tsu, the author of the Upanishads, Daniel and Jeremiah, Xenophanes and Anaximander, and bring them all to the same room and hold a religious summit with the founders of every major religion and schools of thought in western and eastern philosophy.

Industrial Revolutions are pretty easy to explain because they just hinge on a breakthrough in some kind of technology and how fast that tech can spread. But a diverse religious renaissance across the globe in relatively isolated cultures?

"well it was a turbulent time in history, people needed to turn to new ideas to help them through it. The Waring States Period was going on in China, the Temple had been destroyed in Jerusalem and their people sent into exile, the Persian and Peloponnesian war was going on in greece." Yeah but it's not like war and significant social disrupting events hadn't occurred before in history. The Bronze Age Collapse ended the written word, and sent multiple advanced developed kingdoms back to the stone age and to barbarianism. Yet for the most part, with the exception of Israel (and even they were not much of an exception) the whole world stuck with animism and polytheism like they always had.

What was different during the Axial Age? and is "it was just a coincidence" a good enough explanation for you in explaining why it happened everywhere all at once or is their a systemic social and cultural historic explanation for this religious renaissance that satisfies you? I'd love to hear it cause this is interesting stuff.

What do you make of this if you are a christian in terms of your faith? does it challenge your faiths notion that Jesus is the only way if it seems God was inspiring religious thinkers across the world all at once, or do you have a way to view these religious awakenings in a somewhat positive light without giving them the same degree of credit and status you do your own faith? or some other explanation for all this?

If your an atheist what you make of the Axial Age? do you find it interesting at all?