Was human sacrifice a big deal in the pre-Christian Middle East/Mediterranean?
Religion, what's the point?
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Was human sacrifice a big deal in the pre-Christian Middle East/Mediterranean?
You're a muslim, and a Liverpool fan?
A proof that prayers doesn't work right there
My FIVE time prayers work just fine, thanks.
My FIVE time prayers work just fine, thanks.
Wafers in Catholic mass have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity, and it could even turn out that it would be a cream cracker. Or the guy from the bakery where it was produced might be shocked to hear someone call it flesh. He may even wonder why he did not keep it for his barbecue. You are correct it is just a wafer, get 2 of them and put some icecream in between supposed to be very tasty
BastardMy FIVE time prayers work just fine, thanks.
I know you asked for specific historical knowledge, which I can't provide. But still, the numerous references to human sacrifice in the Tanakh/Old Testament (and its repeated rejection/demand of substitutional practises) suggest it was a big deal once, and that its prohibition must have been seen as a major question of humanity.
I don't think these passages must necessarily be understood as an account of the time of their writing (which was done over centuries anyway), as I suspect the origins of many of these stories and commandments lie even deeper in human history.
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Since someone else also linked to Gervais, his bit on Noah's ark is classic imo:
Ricky Gervais is great, too bad the horrible spelling in the subtitles makes the video look a bit dumb.
Pretty interesting how Agnosticism has grown in the past century.
That has a lot to do with the Chinese communist party.
How many people genuinely switched religions because of them ?
I think so, since most who seem to identify with one, also frequently identify with the other as well (even though they are somewhat different).
People didn’t switch, just that those born in China in the past 70 years or so are far more likely to be agnostic
I'd suspect a lot of the people that are counted under 'Christianity' are actually CINO's and would be a lot closer to agnostics/atheists from their positions. My guess is that churches are pretty much empty in Western Europe bar the few elderly, is there a country with a different picture?
Yes, legally speaking me and a ton of others I know would be Christians on that form but I've not bothered with religion in years and it's probably the case for a great number of people. Especially in the UK where church institutions remain quite prominent in certain aspects of society even though the number of people who actively participate in religion is now very small.
Hinduism outnumbered Islam only a 100 years ago? Really? Considering the number of continents each religion covers.
The Middle East was seriously underpopulated a century ago, the Ottoman and Qajar empires may have had less than 25 million between them on the eve of WW1 and not all of these were Muslims.
I'm not doubting the numbers. Just really surprised. Northern and central Africa were reasonably populated.
Typical evangelical thinking in the Southern US.
Nikki P** G**---BUT, there have been so many blessings. God’s fingerprints are everywhere in our circumstances. I mean, when your refrigerator happens to stop working on the weekend they are all on sale, that’s a blessing. Some people might say it’s luck, but I know better.---
Nikki P** G**---BUT, there have been so many blessings. God’s fingerprints are everywhere in our circumstances. I mean, when your refrigerator happens to stop working on the weekend they are all on sale, that’s a blessing. Some people might say it’s luck, but I know better.---
omg, literally.
God wants you to have a new refrigerator
For me the main difference has always been that Agnostics basically say "I don't know if there is a god or not." While Atheists point of view is usually "There is no proof for a god ergo there is non."
Scores of Church where I come from have closed in recent years. The one near me merged with two others as attendance was getting so low. The congregation is old too.
Most people who are functionally atheists are actually agnostics. If you decide things on evidence then you have to be open to changing your view if the evidence changes. Not that it ever is so it is a moot point but, ironically, an important moot point.
I always find it odd that the religious use evidence to form their opinions every day except in one situation. They don't use the total lack of evidence that you fall upwards to walk off cliffs for example.
Religion for me, namely Islam, is a spiritual compass. It's not about fairy tales, but deciphering the logic of Allah's word whilst being mindful of the time, place, society and context in which they were communicated. It's evolution of man rather than revolution.
Muslims are not the only people of God, but the people of his final messenger. I also don't believe that someone who lives an honest altruistic life will be condemned to hell while some jihadi cnut waltzes in to heaven cos he knows 2 words of Arabic. End of the day, the communications are there to further us, it is not Allah that needs us but rather us that can improve via his connection.
Prayer for me is meditation. 5 times a day, we perform our ablution, clear our minds of worldly conditions/influences and centralise our thoughts. I love the words "to be in the world, but not of it".
Science isn't an enemy of religion, but the tool and lense through which we witness/investigate/comprehend Allah's incredible creations/systems. Brings me to another quote great quote, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” - Einstein.
The Quran is also very particularly about the persuit of knowledge being the responsibility of the individual rather than institutions. Of course there are scholars who would be significantly more knowledgable, but the spirit of the Quran was to carve out the individual from the tribe (in -1400 years ago Arabia) and equip him with his own moral agents.
Muslims are not the only people of God, but the people of his final messenger. I also don't believe that someone who lives an honest altruistic life will be condemned to hell while some jihadi cnut waltzes in to heaven cos he knows 2 words of Arabic. End of the day, the communications are there to further us, it is not Allah that needs us but rather us that can improve via his connection.
Prayer for me is meditation. 5 times a day, we perform our ablution, clear our minds of worldly conditions/influences and centralise our thoughts. I love the words "to be in the world, but not of it".
Science isn't an enemy of religion, but the tool and lense through which we witness/investigate/comprehend Allah's incredible creations/systems. Brings me to another quote great quote, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” - Einstein.
The Quran is also very particularly about the persuit of knowledge being the responsibility of the individual rather than institutions. Of course there are scholars who would be significantly more knowledgable, but the spirit of the Quran was to carve out the individual from the tribe (in -1400 years ago Arabia) and equip him with his own moral agents.
“Bless your hearts. Don’t y’all know he works in mysterious ways?”God wants you to have a new refrigerator
Your views on religion are great but the unfortunate truth is that most people don't have such a watered down view view of religion. Until people stop taking it too seriously and literally science will remain incompatible with religion.
Agree, wish all religious people shared his view on it.
Only thing i react on, is his username, lol.
That's not how i was taught that religious people are supposed to behave.
Maybe christianity and islam are different in that matter.
Hinduism is actually a blanket term for several religions anyway that existed in that time. Anything from blind worship to the heights of philosophy in Vedanta.
The Charvaka believed that nothing exists beyond the body and the sole purpose of life is to enjoy -- even by stealing, if need be. They were hedonists. Purva Mimamsa school of thought believed that karma determines everything, thus there is no need for a god to dispense the fruits of actions. They are atheists in that sense, but of a different kind than the Charvaka as they performed austerities and recommended the contextual usage of rituals. Yet every one of them is classified as a "hindu" in modern parlance.
I dont give a shit about religion or God nor do I judge people if you have a religious belief but my friend brought up a question during a recent conversation: Do Muslims want Islam to spread throughout the world? Is that why these refugees are pushing out of middle east into Europe and different areas of the globe and not fleeing to say Saudi Arabia? Why arent the other Muslim countries taking in as many refugees as some of the other Western countries? @iluvurmummy
Do you know what Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey have shouldered in the wake of the Syrian war?
You call it “watered down”, I think it’s a matter of perspective.
Here’s a piece of commentary on the book Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, which I highly recommend.
Agree, wish all religious people shared his view on it.
Only thing i react on, is his username, lol.
That's not how i was taught that religious people are supposed to behave.
Well, the world would be a better place if everyone thought like me tbhtbh
But in all seriousness ‘Islam’ and ‘political Islam’ are two very different things.If you wouldn't be condemned to hell for living an honest, altruistic life then why bother with anything else?
It’s a little bit deeper than just being a good to one another, and I think the hell and heaven thing gets people to ask the wrong questions. I am a student of the Sufi school; which is the spiritual order of Islam (or Islamic mysticism if you will) and the purpose of it is to strive towards curing the illnesses of the human condition and development of a higher form of perception. Our spirits are little pieces of the divine and worldly existence is disunion (or severance) from the Great Spirit that is Allah, and the life to come is reunion.
I’ll share a story I quite like that’s in relation to the bolded bit:
City of Storms
Once upon a time there was a city. It was very much like any other city, except it was almost permanently enveloped in storms.
The people who lived in it loved their city. They had of course, adjusted to its’ climate. Living amid storms meant they did not notice thunder, lightning and rain most of the time.
If anyone pointed out the climate, they thought he was being rude or boring. After all, having storms was what life was like, wasn’t it? Life went on like this for many centuries.
This would have been all very well, but for one thing: the people had not made a complete adaptation to a storm-climate. The result was that they were afraid, unsettled and frequently agitated.
Since they had never seen any other kind of place in living memory, cities or countries without some storms belonged to folklore or the babbling of lunatics.
There were two tried recipes which caused them to forget, for a time, their tensions: to make changes and to obsess themselves with what they had. At any given moment in their history, some sections of the population would have their attention fixed on change, and others on possession of some kind. The unhappy ones would only be those who were doing neither.
Rained poured down, but nobody did anything about it because it was not a recognised problem. Wetness was a problem, but nobody connected it with rain. Lightning started fires, which were a problem, but these were regarded as individual events without consistent cause.
— — —
“The ordinary man is said to suffer from confusion or ‘sleep’ because of his tendency to use his customary thought patterns and perception to try to understand the meaning of his life and fulfilment. Consequently, his experience of reality is constricted, and dangerously so because he tends to be unaware of it. Sufis assert that the awakening of man’s latent perceptual capacity is not only crucial for his happiness but is the principal goal of his current phase of existence - it is man’s evolutionary task.”
I highly recommend (for those who are interested) to read the works and poetries of Sufi masters like Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī. Beautiful stuff.
That's a very good piece and I couldn't agree more with the points that Mustafa Akyol raised. There's no doubt that secularism and liberal democracies have had a moderating effect on Christianity. In hindsight, "watered down" was completely the wrong word. The point I was making is that while your view of religion is great it is quite simply not the view of the majority who practice the religion. It is true that people can find the Qur’an and find it very liberal but it is also just as true that people can read it that conclude entirely the opposite. And neither side would be wrong. Hopefully more people come down towards your way of interpreting it
In the current form of Hinduism, people who claim to be Hindus atheists usually do it to take some kind of misguided moral high ground over other religions and bash them. It's utterly transparent, dishonest and bigoted.
That's a very good piece and I couldn't agree more with the points that Mustafa Akyol raised. There's no doubt that secularism and liberal democracies have had a moderating effect on Christianity. In hindsight, "watered down" was completely the wrong word. The point I was making is that while your view of religion is great it is quite simply not the view of the majority who practice the religion. It is true that people can find the Qur’an and find it very liberal but it is also just as true that people can read it that conclude entirely the opposite. And neither side would be wrong. Hopefully more people come down towards your way of interpreting it
It certainly wouldn’t be a new innovation, Muslims always had two fundamentally different approaches when it came to the Hadiths (records of the Prophet’s sayings, actions and applications of Quranic principles as witnessed by his companions) that were compiled 200 years after his death: The Rationalists (intellectuals that reasoned and debated, promoted critical thinking - Hanafis) who are of my persuasion, and the the conservative Traditionists (who sometimes promote unquestioning obedience, interpret all text literally and are more fixated on the prophet’s actions rather than what they were meant to achieve essentially viewing every application to be timeless - the shafi schools, and the extremist types of the Hanbali school (later to evolve in to modern Wahhabism)).
For loads of historical reasons (including the libraries and manuscripts the mongols destroyed in the 1258 sacking of Baghdad, the 80,000 books Spanish Inquisitor Ximenex de Cisneros destroyed in 1499 which included collaborations between Muslims Christians and Jews (these libraries and collections were mostly the works of the Rationalists)), as well as internal political power struggles of the Caliphate, the wars etc the Traditionists eventually became the prominent thought.
Inshallah Islam will slowly but surely return back to the days which saw us in to the golden age.
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That's true. Those people are just atheists, period. But one thing to be admitted is that if you consider all these different traditions as "Hinduism", there is no heresy or blasphemy in our culture. The different traditions debated with each other to discuss and highlight flaws in their systems openly. This is what these modern day atheists are pointing out, though in a crass manner that hurts others perhaps.
From a theistic perspective, Gita itself says that people follow different faiths (theistic or non theistic) due to their different inclinations over many rebirths and it is something natural to them, stemming from external influences called" vasanas". As an analogy, if you bring an iron rod close to a fire, it remains hot even when you remove it from the fire for awhile, though the heat is not part of it or natural to it. Similarly, diverse beliefs are shaped by our coming in contact with such external factors over the course of many births.
Due to such multiplicity of opinions, debate is encouraged as follows:
Of those who indulge in Jalpa (argument) and Vitanda (perverse criticism) etc., I am the fair reasoning (Vada) which determines the truth (~ Gita 10.32).
There are 3 types of debates - "Jalpa", in which a person simply keeps arguing for the sake of it with no substance, "vitanda" in which the person knows he is wrong but argues against the truth due to his inability to overcome bias and "Vada" -- which is the fair open minded argument aimed at ascertaining the truth. It is said that Vada is naturally superior.
True Hindu atheism or agnosticism comes in different forms.
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Easter and April Fool’s Day are on the same day this year... there’s some irony there.
Hell is death.