Modern Mythmakers

"Modern Mythmakers is a collection of 35 interviews from horror and science fiction's most influential writers and filmmakers, including Ray Bradbury, Dean Kootz, Richard Matheson, John Carpenter, John Saul, Joe McKinney, the Night of the Living Dead crew (including John Russo, Kyra Schon and Russ Streiner), Elvira, Whitley Strieber, Christopher Moore, and many more."--Provided by publisher.

The years 1650 to 1750 - sandwiched between an age of 'wars of religion' and an age of 'revolutionary wars' - have often been characterized as a 'de-ideologized' period. However, the essays in this collection contend that this is a mistaken assumption. For whilst international relations during this time may lack the obvious polarization between Catholic and Protestant visible in the proceeding hundred years, or the highly charged contest between monarchies and republics of the late eighteenth century, it is forcibly argued that ideology had a fundamental part to play in this crucial transformative stage of European history. Many early modernists have paid little attention to international relations theory, often taking a 'Realist' approach that emphasizes the anarchism, materialism and power-political nature of international relations. In contrast, this volume provides alternative perspectives, viewing international relations as socially constructed and influenced by ideas, ideology and identities. Building on such theoretical developments, allows international relations after 1648 to be fundamentally reconsidered, by putting political and economic ideology firmly back into the picture. By engaging with, and building upon, recent theoretical developments, this collection treads new terrain. Not only does it integrate cultural history with high politics and foreign policy, it also engages directly with themes discussed by political scientists and international relations theorists. As such it offers a fresh, and genuinely interdisciplinary approach to this complex and fundamental period in Europe's development.

The Gnostic revival of the Enlightenment witnessed the erection of what could be called the “Kantian Rift,” an epistemological barrier between external reality and the mind of the percipient. Arbitrarily proclaimed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, this barrier rendered the world as a terra incognita. Suddenly, the world “out there” was deemed imperceptible and unknowable. In addition to the outer world, the cherished metaphysical certainties of antiquity—the soul, a transcendent order, and God—swiftly evaporated. The way was paved for a new set of modern mythmakers who would populate the world “out there” with their own surrogates for the Divine. Collectively, these surrogates could be referred to as the Beyond because they epistemologically and ontologically overwhelm humanity. In recent years, the Beyond has been invoked by theoreticians, literary figures, intelligence circles, and deep state operatives who share some variant of a technocratic vision for the world. In turn, these mythmakers have either directly or indirectly served elitist interests that have been working toward the establishment of a global government and the creation of a New Man. Their hegemony has been legitimized through the invocation of a wrathful earth goddess, a technological Singularity, a superweapon, and extraterrestrial “gods.” All of these are merely masks for the same counterfeit divinity... the Beyond.

Nelson provides a historical overview of the theoretical and ideological evolution of the modern state, from pre-state and pre-modern state formations to the present. A major theme of the book is the need to understand the modern state holistically, as a totality of social, political, and ideological factors.

The book examines the intersection of two philosophical developments which define define contemporary life in the liberal democratic west, considering how democracy has become the only legitimate and publicly defensible regime, while also considering how modern democracy attempts to solve what Leo Strauss called the "theologico-political problem."

An approach to understanding religion that draws on both humanities and natural science but rejects approaches that employ simple monisms and radical dualisms. In Beyond Heaven and Earth, Gabriel Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis for the formation of the narratives and beliefs of individuals. Religion grows out of the universe, but to make sense of it we have to recognize the paradox that the universe is both mental and material (or neither). We need both humanities and natural science approaches to study religion and religious meaning, Levy contends, but we must also recognize the limits of these approaches. First, we must make the dominant metaphysics that undergird the various disciplines of science and humanities more explicit, and second, we must reject those versions of metaphysics that maintain simple monisms and radical dualisms. Bringing Donald Davidson’s philosophy—a form of pragmatism known as anomalous monism—to bear on religion, Levy offers a blueprint for one way that the humanities and natural sciences can have a mutually respectful dialogue. Levy argues that in order to understand religions we have to take their semantic content seriously. We need to rethink such basic concepts as narrative fiction, information, agency, creativity, technology, and intimacy. In the course of his argument, Levy considers the relation between two closely related semantics, fiction and religion, and outlines a new approach to information. He then applies his theory to discrete cases: ancient texts, modern media, and intimacy.