Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious at...
We are meaning-seeking creatures.
We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of...
We should also make ourselves aware that our cultural, ethical, religious, and intellectual traditions have all been profoundly affected by other peoples’.
When he described the dramatic arrival of the Christ, instead of drawing on the conventional imagery of Jewish apocalypse, he used terminology that was quite new to the Jesus movement, presenting Jesu...
When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistoric...
Where establishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad’s religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their ap...
Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increa...
You who reject the faith (kafirun) I do not worship what you worship And you do not worship what I worship I am not a worshipper of what you worship You are not a worshipper of what I worship. A recko...
All rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews o...
Compassion derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning to suffer, undergo, or experience. So compassion means to endure [something] with another person, to put ourselves in somebody e...
Dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, s...
Each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.
Finally ‘Ali, a gawky thirteen year old, could bear it no longer: O prophet of God, he cried, I will be your helper in this matter! Muhammad laid his hand tenderly on the boy’s neck: This is my brothe...
In a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the principle of charity; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an interpretation...
Man of the Axial Age, Confucius wanted people to become fully conscious of what they were doing. Performance of the li was
Men and women were naturally prone to lie, steal, and murder, and these evil impulses could be forcibly held in check only by a strong, authoritative government.
So Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism.
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars were the crucible in which some of the competing forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into new compounds …...
True insight does not consist of the acquisition of information but comes from mastering our egotism and greed.5
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