When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing wh...
We have seen that, like the weather, religion does lots of different things. To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and...
We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village.
Unlike Descartes, who had proved the existence of the self, God and the natural world in that order, Newton began with an attempt to explain the physical universe, with God as an essential part of the...
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...
Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same wa...
The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul’s Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul wa...
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...
Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element.
Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.
Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily i...
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...
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...
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...