Coexist
Let us cultivate love and compassion, both of which give true meaning to life. This is the religion I preach, more so than Buddhism itself. It is simple. Its temple is the heart. Its teaching is love and compassion. Its moral values are loving and respecting others, whoever they may be. Whether one is a layperson or a monastic, we have no other option if we wish to survive in this world – His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.There will be no peace in the world, without peace among the religions, there will be no peace among the religions without dialogue, and no dialogue without emphasis on a common ethic. Without dialogue, we shoot each other. H.K.
A Review of Islam: Past, Present, and Future, by Hans Kung
New book by controversial theologian-priest gets much right, despite flaws
By Father Francis V. Tiso and Neil Sloan
7/27/2007
In Islam: Past, Present, and Future, Father Hans Kung completes his trilogy on three world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A Swiss theologian and Catholic priest, Father Kung is known for his controversial approach to Christian theology and for his commitment to interreligious dialogue as the basis for world peace. ("No peace among the nations without peace among the religions; no peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.")
Because of his third principle ("No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundations of the religions"), Father Kung takes a vigorously historical approach to Islam based on models or paradigms that summarize the world of beliefs, values, techniques and practices that are shared by believers.
In 662 pages of text, the author is able to cover far more ground than any other single recent publication in English on Islam. Other Catholic authors such as John Esposito, John Renard and Elias Mallon have written relatively slender introductions to Islam for the general reader. Father Kung takes up some of the topics that these authors do not address and he is self-confident enough to raise the difficult issues that often shape the kinds of questions that Americans and Europeans wish to ask about Islam.
He does this with extreme candor, with all rancor removed -- not an easy achievement. Father Kung clearly wishes to prepare the modern (or postmodern?) Christian for fruitful dialogue with Islam. This requires a survey of historical facts, reform movements, theological perspectives and political tendencies.
Father Kung never fails to assert his own interpretations of Christian theology and history in an effort to reorient the reader to these views, some of which he believes will make fruitful dialogue with Islam possible. In fact, it is clear that Islam is a source for some of the author's own convictions about Christianity, some of which Catholic readers will find troublesome.
Father Kung seems to believe that the authentic message of Jesus was best preserved by what he calls Jewish Christianity. He then proceeds to claim that, in some way, Islam arose in Arabia among the last remnants of Jewish Christianity.
This is the theological backbone of this book, and it leads him to deny key doctrines of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christianity. The Trinity, for example, goes by the board several times, most notably on page 509, and in the following pages there is the demolition of Chalcedonian Christology, all on the basis of Father Kung's distaste for Hellenistic thought.
The lack of evidence for the beliefs and even the existence of Jewish Christianity before the late second century makes it difficult to prove continuity with the mission of Jesus. Moreover, the claim that some form of Jewish Christianity is proto-Islamic is based more on conjecture than on accessible historical data.
Ultimately, the author's attempt to use Islam as evidence for an early Christianity opposed to Orthodox and Catholic belief is unpersuasive.
However, both Christians and Muslims have much to learn from his analysis of Islamic history. He has the facts right about Arabic Christianity before Islam, about possible sources of the contents of the Quran, about Mohammed as a prophet and leader, about Muslim religiosity, about Islamic law and its ongoing evolution, about the conflict between reason and revelation, about mysticism and mass movements, about the encounter with modernity and colonialism, and prospects for the future.
Without concealing the aggressive, deeply troubling political mores of Islamic empires down through the ages, Father Kung manages to give a balanced assessment of their contributions to the sciences, philosophy, architecture and spirituality. He discusses the issue of jihad with candor and in this, as in most other matters Islamic, he resists the temptation to find ideal types that manage to "explain" everything, or worse, to "predict" everything.
There is a savvy open-endedness to his assessments of modernity and postmodernity in Islam and in the world in dialogue with Muslims of our times. So, in spite of some extremely problematic interpretations of Christianity, this may be the best single volume introduction to Islam currently available in English.
Father Tiso is associate director and Sloan is program assistant in the U.S. Catholic bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. (Click here for Hans Kung BBC interview over his 4 hour-long meeting with the pope)
Islam: Past, Present, and Future, by Hans Kung. Translated by John Bowden. Oneworld Publications (Oxford, England, 2007). 767 pp. $39.95.
C.S. Lewis & Abraham J. Heschel Quotes
Although this page contains a compilation of hundreds of quotes from C.S. Lewis' & Abraham J. Heschels' books, we encourage the reader to focus in just a few through a new everyday discipline. Like the U2 songs, the quotes are deeper and invisible to the superficial eyes.Abraham Joshua Heschel l (January 11, 1907, Warsaw, Poland - December 23, 1972) was considered by many to be one of the most significant Jewish theologians of the 20th century.
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotlely, for something supreme.
God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.
It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
Man is a messenger who forgot the message.
Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.
Attributed
GodAwe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. ... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.
We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
Prayer
Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.
The focus of prayer is not the self.... It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer.... Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer. We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost.
The deepest passion in any human being is the craving for meaning of human exsistence- God is the meaning beyond
Man
Man is a messenger who forgot the message.Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
Life and Death
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior for our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here now.
C.S. Lewis' books are here recommended as a support literature for all those who still haven't found what they are looking for (all of us). C.S.Lewis' writings make good companion to U2 lyrics. Both avoid sectarianism, spiritual dishonesty and simplistic answers to complex human problems. Both are golden roads to a deeper engagement in the personal, social and global dimensions of life. Love, Sex, God, Truth, Justice and Compassion are eternal gifts and principles that whenever wisely applied create an environment of heaven on earth in the here and now.
- A Grief Observed
- The Screwtape Letters
- The Weight of Glory
- The Case for Christianity
- Reflections on the Psalms
- A Preface to Paradise Lost
- The Abolition of Man
- The Problem of Pain
- Mere Christianity
- Christian Reflections
- Surprised by Joy
- A Grief Observed
- Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.
It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
- The Screwtape Letters
- Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' their bodies—those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. - The Weight of Glory
- The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.
When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends.
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude...that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing. - The Case for Christianity
- Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.
Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it. - Reflections on the Psalms
- It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.
The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance. - A Preface to Paradise Lost
- Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige.
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.
A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers--including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. - The Abolition of Man
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.
A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.
The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct.
If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
If we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity...
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.
No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power.
If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.- The Problem of Pain
- If the universe is so bad...how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.
If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one...
The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.
It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.
We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.
It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth.
Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?
Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.
Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor.
Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.
Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.
God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.
Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall.
From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.
At this very moment you and I are either committing [selfishness], or about to commit it, or repenting it.
The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.
A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun.
For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.
What is outside the system of self-giving is no earth, nor nature, nor 'ordinary life', but simply and solely Hell. Yet even Hell derives from this law such reality as it has.
That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality...
The gravitation away from God, 'the journey homeward to habitual self', must, we think, be a product of the Fall.
[One] can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. - Mere Christianity
- All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys...
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.
The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.
The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.
The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ.
Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.
Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self...
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...
When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails...If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is...
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. - Christian Reflections
- The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum...
The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe.
A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid...
The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.
Looking for God--or Heaven--by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters... - Surprised by Joy
- Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side.
You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'.