United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In considering the nature of the Phoenician religion, we must distinguish between its different stages. There is sufficient reason to believe that originally, either when they first occupied their settlements upon the Mediterranean or before they moved from their primitive seats upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Phoenicians were Monotheists.
The Sannyasis and the Swamis are usually Sikhs from the Punjab, and monotheists. They despise idol-worshipers, and have nothing to do with them, though the latter very often call themselves by their names. Our new friend was a native of Amritsar, in the Punjab, and had been brought up in the "Golden Temple," on the banks of Amrita-Saras, the "Lake of Immortality."
The Persians were monotheists; and "Cyrus," as Rawlinson says, "evidently identified Jehovah with Ormazd, and, accepting as a divine command the prophecy of Isaiah, undertook to rebuild their temple for a people who, like his own, allowed no image of God to defile the sanctuary.... The foundation was then laid for that friendly intimacy between the two peoples of which we have abundant evidence in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther."
They began as heathen, though in lapse of years they came to be pure monotheists, even more rigid than the Jews themselves, and today, if you went to Nablus, you would find the small remnant of their descendants adhering to Moses and the law, guarding their sacred copy of the Pentateuch with unintelligent awe, and eating the Paschal Lamb with wild rites.
Hume anticipated the results of modern investigation in declaring fetishism and polytheism to be the form in which savage and ignorant men naturally clothe their ideas of the unknown influences which govern their destiny; and they are polytheists rather than monotheists because,
When they first heard of Christianity, it appeared to be a Gentile religion, accompanied by idolatrous practices, from which severe monotheists, like the Arabians, always recoil, and holding the Jewish race up to public scorn and hatred. This is not the way to make converts. There have been two great colonies of the Jewish race in Europe; in Spain and in Sarmatia.
He quotes a passage from the Narada Pancharata, which represents a pious Brahman of the eighth century A.D., as having been sent to the far northwest, where "white-faced monotheists" would teach him a pure faith in the Supreme Vishnu or Krishna.
Why should not the Jews have gone on worshipping one God, even if they had forgotten that he brought them out of the land of Egypt? Some people now-a-days think that they would, and that they might have very well been what is called Monotheists, without believing all the story of the signs and wonders in Egypt, and the passage of the Red Sea, and the giving of the law to Moses.
We find the cause in the simple, exalted, and comparatively spiritual ideas they had of the Supreme Being; in a word, we shall state the whole ground to be this, that the Greeks were polytheists, and the Jews monotheists. Let us bear in mind that the chorus, and the drama that was built upon it, had a religious association, and were employed in religious devotion.
In brief, what is the present position of India in regard to religious belief; and in particular, what are the prevailing beliefs about God? A rough classification of the theological belief of the Hindus of the present day would be the multitude are polytheists; the new-educated are monotheists; the brahmanically educated are professed pantheists.
Word Of The Day