When I'm out of town, I always try to get some readings or some type of new information to where I'm learning more about Islam, just to become the best Muslim I can become.
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.
In listing these tendencies making for a new world, we must not forget developments in the religious or spiritual thinking and feeling of mankind, where also we feel a strong unifying trend.
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.
Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.
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.
Sanctification is a community project.
Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.
It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and not so many arguments and disputes, religion grew more quickly than it has since.
"You ought to be ashamed," a woman in an Easter bonnet told Stein. "Your race gave us our religion..." "From ancient polytheism, the belief in lots of gods," the woman continued a little more eruditely, "the Hebrew nation led us on to the idea that there is only one." "Which is just a step from the truth," said Stein.
Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.
Almost two thousand years, and no new god!
The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves - our weaknesses, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all.
We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become 'self feeders.' We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.
The trend of all knowledge at the present is to specialize, but archaeology has in it all the qualities that call for the wide view of the human race, of its growth from the savage to the civilized, which is seen in all stages of social and religious development.
It therefore become essential for the future of Judaism itself that its advancement should be correlated with a similar effort to advance the cause of religion generally.
Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.
In thousands of years there has been no advance in public morals, in philosophy, in religion or in politics, but the advance in business has been the greatest miracle the world has ever known.
The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.
The history of the Church is the rise and progress of the kingdom of heaven upon earth, for the glory of God and the salvation of the world.
Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.
When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.
All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
Religion of our conception, thus imperfect, is always subject to a process of evolution and re-interpretation.
