Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.
Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.
Fundamentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly...
Fighting and obtaining wealth were inseparable and interconnected: freed from the need to engage in productive work, the nobility had the leisure to cultivate their martial skills.84 They certainly fo...
Elle Wiesel, premio Nobel, había vivido sólo para Dios durante su infancia en Hungría; su vida había estado configurada por el Talmud y esperaba ser iniciado un día en los misterios de la cábala. Cuan...
Compassion dervies 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 el...
Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate,
It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.
When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.
لم يكن الطقس الطقوس الدينية في العالم قبل الحديث نتاج أفكار دينية بل على النقيض فقد كانت الأفكار نتاج الطقوس
We find a combination of three themes that would recur in the ideology of all successful empires: a dualistic worldview that pits the good of empire against evildoers who oppose it; a doctrine of elec...
And by a militant rejection of all later accretions, which included medieval fiqh, mysticism and Falsafah, which most Muslims now regarded as normative. Because the Ottoman sultans did not conform to...
They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide.
Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives without provocation—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory...
The word qur’an means recitation. It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was importa...
The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed.27 The h...
The good leader in war is not warlike The good fighter is not impetuous; The best conqueror of the enemy is he who never takes the offensive. The man who gets the most out of men is the one who treats...
The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his...
The Qur’an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart, but it...
The Qur’an had begun to develop a primitive just war theory. In the steppes, aggressive warfare was praiseworthy; but in the Qur’an, self-defense was the only possible justification for hostilities an...