The Quran did not put forward any philosophical arguments for monotheism; its approach was practical, and, as such, it appealed to the pragmatic Arabs. The old religion, the Quran claimed, was simply...
One of the first things I discovered was that Paul did not write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Only seven of them are judged by scholars to be authentic: 1 Thessalonians, Gal...
One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in th...
Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an...
On 26 April 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi planes, under the orders of General Franco, attacked the Basque capital of Guernica on its market-day, killing 1654 of its 7000 inhabitan...
Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual.
Muhammad had close links with three of the leading hanifs of Mecca. ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was his cousin and Waraqah ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadijah: both these men became Christians.
Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus’s life was the moment when he forgave his executioners,
Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine state of exception during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh’s adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of...
Jesus’s demonstration in the temple was not, as is often assumed, a plea for a more spiritual form of worship. As he rampaged through the money changers’ stalls, he quoted the Hebrew prophets who had...
In the official imperial theology, the titles Son of God and Lord usually applied to the emperor and the word gospel referred to his achievements. By speaking of Jesus in these terms, Paul was tacitly...
In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.
Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize th...
He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was ‘the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity’.75 True poetry had no...
Deuteronomy had listed a number of obligatory laws, which had included the Ten Commandments. During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated into a complex legislation consisting of t...
De rabbijnen wezen er graag op dat koning Salomo ter verklaring van elk vers van de Tora 3000 gelijkenissen gebruikte en dat hij van elke gelijkenis 1005 interpretaties kon geven. Dit betekende dat er...
Compassion does not, of course, mean to feel pity or condescend, but to feel with
But it was more than that. Paris represented life, sensuality, freedom, and fun. And that somehow made it impossible.
Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an i...
As we have seen, so many of the things we once took for granted have proved unreliable that we may have to forget old ways of thought in order to meet the current challenges.