President Ronald Reagan, "Everything is falling into place. It can't be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God's people. That must mean they'll be destroyed by nuclear weapons...Gog, the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Israel, will come out of the north...Gog must be Russia...now that Russia has set itself against God...it fits the description of Gog perfectly." But in case there is a god, then I have a neat little prayer: God please protect me from your followers.
Absurdities of the Christian Religion or childishness of Christianism. The idea that God, conceived as a spirit equally infinite in power and goodness, keeps a place of torment in which billions of the weak humans he has created will suffer agonies for ever, is a revolting idea on the moral side and a childish idea from the intellectual angle; and that the further idea, that he condemned the whole race to this vast torture-chamber because the first human pair were guilty of a trivial and melodramatic act of disobedience, and that his "wrath" was averted only by some part or aspect or other childish-concieved duplicate of himself becoming a y many Islamic slave-owning societies; it helps to account for the ferocity and frequency of their slave raids, for they had a need for constant replenishment of their slave supplies. In Christian slave societies, on the other hand, the principle that the tenure of slavery should be limited was almost completely ignored.
Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (b. Dec. 22, 1694, Hamburg--d. March 1, 1768), German philosopher and man of letters of the Enlightenment who is remembered for his Deism, the doctrine that human reason can arrive at a religion more certain than religions based on revelation. Gotthold Lessing obtained fragments of the work from Reimarus' children for publication under the title Wolfenbütteler Fragmente in his own Zur Geschichte und Literatur (1774 and 1777). The appearance of the fragments aroused a controversy known as the Fragmentenstreit (German Streit, "quarrel") that provoked both liberal and conservative criticism. Reimarus also became known for his treatment of the life of Jesus. Jesus, he claimed, was a mere human afflicted by messianic illusions; after his death his body was stolen and hidden by his disciples to maintain his resurrection. Reimarus consistently denied miracles except for creation itself and claimed that the ethical doctrines necessary for the survival of human society were accessible to reason without the aid of revealed principles.
Pope John XII, taught that no one can renounce property rights altogether, as the Franciscans claimed to do, since the use of things consumed in use (such as food and drink) presupposes property in them; he therefore condemned as heresy the Franciscan doctrine that Christ and the apostles had had no property. He also contradicted certain traditional doctrines of property. Theologians commonly held that property came into existence after Adam's sin, by human enactment; according to John, property exists by divine law and not by human enactment, and Adam had property in the garden of Eden. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. -Isaiah 45:7
The Bhagavad Gita is the highest expression of philosophical Hinduism. It is a chapter of the immense Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the saga of the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Arjuna, hero of the Pandavas, is about to confront the army of the Kauravas on the battlefield of Kuruksetra. Among the opposing army are his friends and relatives. Convinced that it would be wrong to kill his own kinsmen, Arjuna is overcome by despair. He lays down his bow and declares that he will not fight. The God Vishnu, incarnated as the charioteer Krishna, explains that Arjuna should do his duty and do battle. The human soul, which is part of the universal soul, is immortal - therefore no-one is actually slain. If people perform the duties appropriate to their station, without attachment to success or failure, then they cannot be stained by action. The rest of the poem provides the full philosophy underlying this insight. The Gita is variously dated between the third century BC and the fourth century AD. The reason for uncertainty is that the Gita is not always consistent and may be the work of several hands. One strand was probably written by a follower of the philosophy expressed in the Upanishads, in which Brahman is the highest unity underlying reality. Another strand, focussed on a more personal deity, may have been added later by a devotee of the supreme god Vishnu.
Even Gould's recent book 'Rock of Ages,' which claims to reconcile science and religion, draws this moral from the story of evolution: we live in a universe that is 'indifferent to our suffering'.
For over a century New Testament scholars have been trying to find the historical Jesus . A German theologian, Albert Schweitzer [1875 - 1965], has made a careful review of the work of these scholars, and thus summarizes the results of their efforts ( Quest of the Historical Jesus , 2nd English Ed. 1926):
" THERE IS NOTHING MORE NEGATIVE THAN THE RESULT OF THE CRITICAL STUDY OF THE LIFE OF JESUS .
"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.
"This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another, and in spite of all the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence which was applied to them, refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed, and were no sooner covered over than they appeared again in a new form....
"Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus ...will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thought and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. Nor will He be a figure which can be made by a popular historical treatment so sympathetic and universally intelligible to the multitude. The historical Jesus will be to our times a stranger and an enigma. "'