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Thomas: But this age is all about its obsession with re-invention! ... The last thing we need is man-made religions, or more rampant spiritual consumerism. Thomas, we live in a consumer world. (So did the Jews in Jesus' time, by and large. And there was "rampant spiritual consumerism" then...

Henry David Thoreau: In wildness is the preservation of the world. Thoreau's writings were read by philosophers, but not written for philosophers. How Thoreau experienced reality - the manner in which he grasped the natural world before him - by implication, dismantled classical philosophy and...

path of one: I can point to one example to start you on the real history of the matter. In many Celtic lands, pre-Christianity, women had relatively equal rights with men. They were leaders, both political and spiritual. When the "civilization" that accompanied Roman Catholicism entered, it...

Religion is a system ... regulated by the divine. Strong regulators and weak regulators: Think: estrogen and testosterone in human beings. Women and men have both of these regulatory hormones in their physiological system. The adrenal glands, and other glands produce small quantities of...

I think the word you are looking for is: Terrene. (We are all Terrenes. Citizens of this planet, fellow congregants.)

Country-X and Country-Y each have a population of 1,000,000 people. This year, each country faces 3 major crises upon which it has to make serious decisions for the future - in April, in August, in September. Country-X brings business and society to a halt for all of April and all of August...

& & & Back when my grandfather was 86, I remember him at Christmas as being as spry as he was at 70. Back straight, head high, walking with a confident stride every day to the Boulevard and back, working half-an-hour each morning in the yard, straightening the kitchen immediately after meals...

Hi TU. Welcome. It's the pits, isn't it?: Trying to put complex thoughts into clear, concise language ... ? Try this ... 1. Throw out the classical concept "form." It is a meaningless word, scientifically. 2. Stop using the word "order" like a concept which describes reality (it does...

Is the 'religious instinct' hardwired into people? & & & Inca ceremonies carried their mummified kings of old, in a procession, thru the streets of Cuzco. When the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire, the Catholic church did not put an end to this 'Pagan' ritual. Catholicism, instead, co-opted...

Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli I've been reading, off and on over the past year, a book called Renegade Tribe: The Palouse Indians and the Invasion of the Inland Pacific Northwest. History from my own backyard. The ancestral home of the...

Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli Ur ha-Khashdim Got out my world atlas and magnifying glass. Found Lake Van and Lake Urmia. Found two Zab Rivers which are tributaries of the Tigris. I assume you are referring to the northern most, which...

Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli Like your style, Bob! And, yeah, I will admit that you are correct. In the ancient and classical world, the heroes of legend-stories had, as their source, some real historical individual. Like you, I've never...

Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli Can't help wondering, Bob, if King Josiah himself wrote the Book of Joshua ... 1. As a kind of 'battle plan' for his own "conquest of Canaan" - the reunification of David's kingdom. 2. As propaganda that would...

Hi Path Way back, when I was in middle school, my grandmother gave me an ancient copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. I ate them up. Emerson was a theologian, but also a philosopher. A minister, but also a poet. He was a popular lecturer on the Lyceum circuit in mid-19th century America. He...

Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli Have not read Menina e Moca. (Sounds interesting.) But I believe it is written in a genre of Renaissance literature called a 'shepherd romance.' If it does have Kabalistic symbolism, then it anticipates the...

Re: EXODUS Did the Israelites exit from Egypt, or Egypt exit from land of the Israeli Hi Bob X I greatly enjoyed reading your scholarly analysis in the Antique Hebrew inscription discovered thread. Admire the range of your knowledge (my knowledge on any of these subjects is rarely more than...

Sorry, Thomas, if I've seemed testy in a couple of my previous posts. I genuinely appreciate the long and detailed posts you made in response to my first two theses. I sat down a couple days ago to reread them, and design a response. But then I saw Taijasi's witty post about the Knights...

& & & Early Carracci: The Butcher's Shop Boy Drinking The Dead Christ Samson Imprisoned Later Carracci: Gallery Farnese The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (Farnese Ceiling) The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (Farnese Ceiling) (detail) Early Caravaggio: The Card Sharps Narcissus...

Divine Communication 3. The Immediacy of Raw Visual Experience There is another important distinction between the monotheism of Judaism and Islam, on the one hand, and the monotheism of Christianity on the other. Judaism and Islam have a deep suspicion of visual iconography. Pagan temples...

Guilty as charged, Thomas. (But you are being awfully sassy about it.) There is not a lot of solid info out there, about Mithraism. They were very secretive, so the cult remains obscure to this very day. So yeah ... I did grab whatever sources I could find - some perhaps not reputable. (Not a...