Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of...
For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, para...
Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of superhumanity. Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary
Enmity shapes our consciousness and identity.
Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that thi...
Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position,...
Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensel...
Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked in...
What Tibetan Buddhists call the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow, so that we feel it almost as intensely as we feel our own. We
It is neither helpful nor accurate to assume that other people are always responsible for our pain.
It is important to assume that the speaker shares the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.
Even the presidents of Harvard and Yale saw the War of Independence as part of God’s design for the overthrow of Catholicism.
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive...
There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.
The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to espouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet’s life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to s...
The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be s...
The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed ove...
The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.
The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The
Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a...