Sam Eccleston's Reviews > Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions

This is probably one of the most peculiar books I have ever read. One the one hand, Lings is clearly a perceptive scholar; extremely well read and with a strong poetic sensibility, he often expresses complex and subtle ideas in prose which is bordering on the sublime in its apposite use of imagery and economy of expression. At the very same time, he makes almost no attempt to justify or defend the many controversial theses which he delivers throughout the book. He throws around without any seeming concern such controversial statements as the claim that the majority of serious researchers in the field have given up on the idea of evolution ever being theoretically justified, or that, despite the obvious differences between religions, they are at root all basically the same, and all equally true.

Of course, it is possible to read religious beliefs in this manner by deliberately interpreting all of the inconvenient philosophical differences between faiths as either being trivial or in some sense not meaning what they seem to mean, but such a reading is superficial and motivated by the conclusion it aims at, rather than by the scholarly desire to understand religious traditions in their own terms. Like the Baha'i who Lings seems to scorn, he is desperate to find commonalities between religious traditions which are deeply divided by ethics, metaphysics, theology, psychology, and any number of other elements of their respective weltanschauungen.

Despite these many failings his prose is, as I said, often wonderful; he is a creative thinker who can draw uncommon parallels between phenomena not usually linked, and his intuitive understanding of the process of spiritual development seems to be highly developed. Worth the read, but hard to take entirely seriously.