In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.
The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it…
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
As Buddhism moved to the West, one of the big characteristics was the strong place of women. That didn't exist in the countries of origin. It's just a sign of our culture.
The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.
Will Islam modernize or will it be stuck where it has been for hundreds of years?
I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.
In the Christian world, as you remember, Christianity is in the 21st century, Islam is in the 15th century. I don't mean to say that Islam is backward; I mean to say that there are certain experiences that it hasn't gone through. Christianity had the great religious wars of the 17th century. Islam, fortunately for the Muslims, did not have that. Christianity worked out a system of toleration. Islam was always more tolerant of Christendom.
All religions undergo historical face lifts.
Races and religions may have changed, but the marketplace, the living quarters, pilgrimage sites, places of worship, have remained the same. Venus is replaced by the Virgin, but the same life goes on.
The Rosicrucians teach that all great religions have been given to the people among whom they are found, by Divine Intelligences who designed each system of worship to suit the needs of the race or nation to whom it was given. A primitive people cannot respond to a lofty and sublime religion, and vice versa.
Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.
It's a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was 'real' religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that's why it's completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices.
What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
The religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.
Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.
Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.
Jesus Christ, being 2000 years old and some change, is a relatively "new" god of the older god category - and has done quite well for himself, in terms of worship.
The Christian religion seems to have fulfilled its great biological purpose, in so far as we are able to judge. It has led human thought to independence, and has lost its significance, therefore, to a yet undetermined extent.... It seems to me that we might still make use in some way of its form of thought, and especially of its great wisdom of life, which for two thousand years has proven to be particularly efficacious.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions.
As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth, maketh the clouds his chariot, and reigns above the waterfloods as a king.
One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change it would be dead. ... Each time the new ideas appear they are seen at first as a deadly foe threatening to make religion perish from the earth; but in the end there is a deeper insight and a better life with ancient follies and prejudices gone.
Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation.
