United States or Burkina Faso ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
These are the basement students of the gargoyle philosophies, the gargoyle sciences, the gargoyle religions. Perpetual motion machine inventors, alchemists with staring, nervous-eyed medieval faces, fourth dimensionists, sun worshippers, cabalistic researchers, voodoo authorities the old-book store is suddenly alive with them.
In Japan, where there is a large foreign community, the thinking, logical Japanese has had abundant opportunities for studying not only the principles of Western religions and Western morality, but also the practice of them by Western residents in his own land. The result has been to give him much food for reflection.
A feeling of devoutness does not cover at all the sense I mean. A man's spirituality, as I would reckon it, has to do with the power he can bring into the world of matter from the great universe of spiritual force which is God, or the emanation of God, as all the great religions reverently agree. I do not mean to bring cults or creeds or hymns or affirmations into the schools.
Here Jesus deals another powerful blow to the self-righteousness of the Pharisaical "good" people of the sects, creeds and cults of all lands, time and religions. He warns against that "Thank God! I am holier than thou" attitude that so many vain formalists affect in their dealings with other men.
Was He not—He for Whom the Báb had suffered and died in such tragic and miraculous circumstances—made, for nearly half a century and under the domination of the two most powerful potentates of the East, the object of a systematic and concerted conspiracy which, in its effects and duration, is scarcely paralleled in the annals of previous religions?
The saints and the populace are, in the hands of their directors, automatons, moved at pleasure. Religion is an affair of custom and fashion. We must do as others do. But, among the numerous religions in the world, which should men choose? This inquiry would be too painful and long.
These researches might have been extended still farther; enough, however, has been said to establish the following leading principles: That Freemasonry is, strictly speaking, a science of symbolism. That in this symbolism it bears a striking analogy to the same science, as seen in the mystic rites of the ancient religions.
It was among the people of the provinces, from which they sprang, that they had found this faith, which is for ever brooding on the soil of France, while in vain do windy demagogues struggle to deny it. Olivier knew well that faith: it had lived in his own heart and mind. The same breath of living idealism and passionate liberalism brought new life to the other religions in France.
He justly observes, that in the recent changes, both religions had been alternately disgraced by the seeming acquisition of worthless proselytes, of those votaries of the reigning purple, who could pass, without a reason, and without a blush, from the church to the temple, and from the altars of Jupiter to the sacred table of the Christians.
Nor can the wit of man evade the conclusion." And what makes this exclusiveness the more repulsive is its modernness. Paul himself quoted from the sublime hymn of Cleanthes to prove to the Greeks that they too recognized the Fatherhood of God. The early Christian apologists, living face to face with the elder religions, made no exclusive claims.
Word Of The Day