It is simply not true that religion is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and cre...
Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.
Moses explained, the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries am...
Most of the Israelites chose to stay in Babylon, where they would make an important contribution to the Hebrew scriptures. The returning exiles brought home nine scrolls that traced the history of the...
One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and of our incredible role in it.17
Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descar...
People who have been taught to despise themselves cannot easily respect others.
People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!
Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in...
Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.
Shu required that all day and every day we looked into our own hearts, discovered what caused us pain, and then refrained, under all circumstances, from inflicting that distress upon other people. It...
Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period.
Suffering and want are no longer confined to distant, disadvantaged parts of the globe.
The Kingdom of God has come upon you.’30 The Kingdom became present whenever somebody had the compassion to admit a needy stranger to his home, when that stranger received food from another and then o...
The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the...
The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy’s ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest...
The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
There are stories that explain how the High God was deposed: Ouranos, the Sky God of the Greeks, for example, was actually castrated by his son Kronos, in a myth that horribly illustrates the impotenc...
This, of course, directly contradicts Paul’s insistence that in Christ there should be full gender equality. So glaring is this discrepancy that many scholars believe that this passage was inserted in...
Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item—albeit the highest—in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no re...
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