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Updated: May 24, 2025
To remain steadfast in their commitment to this insight required of these early believers—on whose sacrifice of self much of the foundation of the present-day Bahá’í communities both in the West and many other lands were laid—that they resist not only family and social pressures, but also the easy rationalizations of the world-view in which they had been raised and to which everything around them insistently exposed them.
This folk, point of departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for political order, but as well the central factor of the entire world-picture.
National Socialism, as has been said a hundred times, is exclusively the sum total of the German world-view. Similar assurances by Nazi leaders were frequently made in order to induce a sense of security in neighboring countries.
And what has been the relation of these world-views to the social order? To prepare the way for our final answer to these questions, we confine ourselves in this chapter to a study of the inner nature of the Buddhist world-view.
They are true within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis wide enough to contain them. It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to live.
What Japan needs to-day is a religion satisfying the intellect as to its world-view, and thus justifying the sanctions it holds out. These must be neither exclusively communal, like those of Shinto, nor exclusively individual, like those of Buddhism. While maintaining at their full value the sanctions for the social life, it must add thereto the sanctions for the individual.
So, dissatisfied with its world-view and realizing that it is incomplete, the self seeks at first hand, though not always with clear consciousness of its nature, the Reality which is the object of religion.
When these discrepancies between a world-view governed by the Christian's faith in Revelation and one governed by the theory of evolution are once clearly understood, there will be no need to inquire, why, on the one hand, enemies of the Bible in all ranks of life greeted with such joyous acclaim the principle announced by Darwin and, why, on the other hand, a chief purpose of Christian apologetics has become the demonstration that Christianity is justified even by reason in the world-view which it inculcates, and that, on the other hand, the evolutionary hypothesis is contradicted by the facts of religion, of history, and of natural science.
Whenever Japanese came into contact with foreign peoples, it was natural to consider them outside of the divine providence, aliens, whose presence in the divine land was more or less of a pollution. This world-view was well calculated to develop a spirit of submissive obedience and loyal adherence to the hereditary rulers of the land, and of fierce antagonism to foreigners.
Whether as world-view or simple appetite, materialism’s effect is to leach out of human motivation—and even interest—the spiritual impulses that distinguish the rational soul. “For self-love,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said, “is kneaded into the very clay of man, and it is not possible that, without any hope of a substantial reward, he should neglect his own present material good.” In the absence of conviction about the spiritual nature of reality and the fulfilment it alone offers, it is not surprising to find at the very heart of the current crisis of civilization a cult of individualism that increasingly admits of no restraint and that elevates acquisition and personal advancement to the status of major cultural values.
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