Yes, polygamy is one of the relics of Adam, of Enoch, of Noah, of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses, David, Solomon, the Prophets, of Jesus, and his apostles.
A country that has really resonated with me and I was really impressed with was Israel. I found that the whole country had a very special atmosphere. I was there to perform, but it was one of the few places that I've visited over the years that I had some free time to explore, and I was hugely impressed by all the religious history there.
I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.
Luther and the Reformation were of fundamental importance to Denmark. We Danes are still Lutherans today. We spoke about him a lot in school, and we feel very close to him.
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical.
All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.
The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally.
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.
My sincere hope is that 'The Da Vinci Code,' in addition to entertaining people, will serve as an open door to begin their own explorations.
We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God. But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people.
Now that they talk about Islam as being a violent faith, when you look at the history of Christendom, the Crusades and the many wars of religion that were fought, the cruelty of Christians in burning what they believed to be witches and burning heretics, and then very recently they were responsible for the Holocaust... it was Christians.
In American religious history, theological qualms tend to get pushed aside when politics intervenes.
A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
I was born and raised in the University of Chicago area and had an uneventful middle-class Catholic childhood. I had a heavy Catholic upbringing and Catholicism is terrible - it's the reason there were slaves. Mass every morning at seven o'clock during Lent. It's a totally negative, man-made religion.
The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.
Men of patriarchal cultures have been committing heinous acts in the name of their God ever since they created a god for themselves. It seems that the earlier, goddess-oriented, nature-centered religions were far less cruel.
Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.
The Christian is a [person] of joy... A gloomy Christian is a contradiction of terms, and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its connection with black clothes and long faces.
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.
Moses led his people through the wilderness and he wasn't permitted to enter the Promised Land. Jesus was crucified. Mohammad founded a state which soon became an empire, so that Islam from the very beginning is involved with government, with politics. And therefore there is a very clear strong political tradition in Islam.
Never forget that Hitler was a Catholic.
To support its conclusion that 'this is a religious people... this is a Christian nation,' the Court paraded a veritable litany of precedents from American history: taken from Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S.; 143 U.S. 457-458 (1892).
Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.
