David Novak Quotes
The community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.
Novak, David. Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005.
In 1996 the Tennessee Senate passed a resolution to post the Ten Commandments in homes, schools and businesses. Cohen was then a Senator of the Tennessee State Legislature.
Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy. And if any Christian in Europe made the same statement, he would have been excommunicated at least if not tortured and murdered.
Priests at the time were mostly uneducated. They would tend to make up their own Biblical stories that the people would prefer rather than the official church versions. The bishops wanted this practice stopped.
Franklin was a deist. He believed in God and the Creation but not the Bible which is often referred to as “revealed” truth. He did believe that classic Christianity was a positive force as some people were led to good works and a moral life by it.
David Novak, FRSC is a Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law (Halakha). He is an ordained Conservative rabbi and holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. His areas of interest are Jewish theology, Jewish ethics and biomedical ethics, political theory (with a special emphasis on natural law), and Jewish-Christian relations.
