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...
You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self.
You could stamp on this natural shoot of compassion, Mencius argued, just as you can cripple or deform your body, but if you cultivate this altruistic tendency assiduously, it will acquire a dynamic p...
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...
When these impoverished, indebted folk asked him what they should do, he told them to share what little they had with those who were even worse off—an ethic that would become central to Jesus’s moveme...
What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.
We weten niet wie de evangeliën geschreven hebben. Toen ze voor het eerst opdoken circuleerden ze anoniem, en ze werden pas later toegeschreven aan belangrijke figuren uit de jong christelijke kerken....
We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thi...
We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are...
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...
Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to l...
Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to prove the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus’ feeding of the five thous...
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...
The book of Job, based on an ancient folktale, may have been written during the exile. One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering...
The aim of this step is threefold: (1) to recognize and appreciate the unknown and unknowable, (2) to become sensitive to overconfident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people, and (3) t...
The Taliban’s discrimination against women is completely opposed to the practice of the Prophet and the conduct of the first ummah. The Taliban are typically fundamentalist, however, in their highly s...
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 Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people...
Suffering and want are no longer confined to distant, disadvantaged parts of the globe.
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...