Global Religion

Essay about Global Religion.

"In the future, the Global Religion would be a Cosmic Religion. It will transcend the personal God, and will avoid dogma and theology. It will embrace natural and spiritual things. It will be grounded in a religious sense sprout out from all spiritual and natural things as a significant union" Albert Einstein

This is an invitation to awaken our Conscience in order each one of us dares to think to find the Truth, I analyze with total respect, common sense and verifiable documents, the best way to make an effort to present a draft to have a global study to help Mankind to be united with a religion accepted by all people.

Religion’s Origen.


It is accepted all over the world that sense of fear started to be origin of all religions.
When a torment was so strong so as to destroy houses of the primitive man, He decided to create a god of the winds or thunderstorms, in order to have his favor. People believed with some gifts given for that god, will help them not suffer so much. The fear of losing crops moved Man to have a goddess of fertility and established some rituals in order to give to her some gifts, so to obtain better crops.
All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties. Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who in some way speaks. The Word of God has shaped the history of our culture. We have to decide whether the word “God” has any meaning for us today.
One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our culture educates us to focus our attention, on the physical and material world in front of us. One of its consequences is that we have eliminated the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world. In the South Sea Islands, they call this mysterious force mana; others experience it as a presence of spirit; sometimes it has been felt as an impersonal power, like a form of radioactivity or electricity. It was believed to reside in the tribal chief, in plants, rocks or animals. The Latins experienced numina (spirits) in sacred groves.
Sumeria


The first notions about religion are found at Sumeria, and in the epic of Gilgamesh we find some descriptions about that way of thinking.
The cult of the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred. She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece. These myths were not intended to be taken literally, but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was to complex and elusive to express in another way. Mesopotamia, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is now Iraq had been inhabited as early as 4000 years before CE by the people known as Sumerians. In their cities of Ur, Erech, and Kish, the Sumerians devised their cuneiform script, built the extraordinary temple-towers called ziggurats. Afterward the region was invaded by the Semitic Akkadians, who had adopted the language and culture of Sumer. Later in 2000 BCE the Amorites had conquered this Sumerian-Akkadian civilization and made Babylon their capital. Finally, some 500 years later, the Assyrians had settled in near by Ashur and eventually conquered Babylon itself during the eight century before CE. This Babylonian tradition also affected the mythology and religion of Canaan, which would become the Promised Land of the ancient Israelites.

Babylon

In this culture, they celebrated the great New Year Festival during the month of Nisan (April) in this celebration, enthroned the King and established her reign for another year. A scapegoat was killed to cancel the old, dying year; a mock battle reenacted the struggle of the gods against the forces of destruction. On the afternoon of the fourth day of the Festival, priest and choristers filled into de Holy of Holies to recite the Enuma Elish, the epic poem which celebrated the victory of the gods over chaos. A brief look at the Enuma Elish gives us some insight into the spiritual which gave birth to our own God Creator centuries later. Even though the Biblical and Koranic account of creation would ultimately take a very different form, these strange myths never entirely disappeared, but would reenter the history of God at a much later date, clothed in a monotheistic idiom.
In the Enuma Elish the story begins with the creation of the gods themselves. In the beginning, said the Enuma Elish two by two from a formless, watery waste (a substance which was itself divine) In Babylonian myth (as later in the Bible) there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world. Before either the gods or human beings existed, this sacred raw material has existed from all eternity. When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, the taught that it must have been similar to the swampy wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men. In the Enuma Elish, chaos is not a fiery, seething mass, therefore, but a sloppy mess where everything lacks boundary, definition and identity.


Indus Valley

In the seventeenth century BCE, Aryans from what is now Iran had invaded the Indus Valley and subdued the indigenous population. They had imposed their religion ideas, which we find expressed in the collection of odes known as the Rig-Veda. There we find a multitude of gods, expressing many of the same values as the deities of the Middle East and presenting the forces of nature as instinct with power, life and personality. Yet there were signs that people were beginning to see that the various gods might simple be manifestations of one divine Absolute that transcended them all. Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately.
The religion of the Vedas did not attempt to explain the origins of life or to give privileged answers to philosophical questions. Instead, it was designed to help people to come to terms with the wonder and terror of existence. The ideas of the indigenous population that have been suppressed in the centuries following the Aryan invasions surfaced and led to a new religious hunger. The revived interest in karma, the notion that one’s destiny is determined by one’s own actions, made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsibly behavior of human beings. Increasingly the gods were seen as symbols of a single transcendent Reality. Vedic religion had become preoccupied with the rituals of sacrifice, but the revived interest in the old Indian practice of Yoga (the “yoking” of the powers of the mind by special disciplines of concentration) meant that people became dissatisfied with a religion that concentrated on externals. Sacrifice and liturgy were not enough: they wanted to discover the inner meaning of these rites. In India the gods were no longer seen as other beings which were external to their worshippers; instead men and women sought to achieve an inward realization of truth.
Hindus and Buddhists sought new ways to transcend the gods, to go beyond them. During the eight century before CE, sages began to address these issues in the treatises called the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, known collectively as the Vedanta: the end of the Vedas. More and more Upanishads appeared, until the end of the fifth century BCE there were about 200 of them. The Upanishads evolved a distinctive conception of godhood that transcends the gods but is found to be intimately present in all things.
In Vedic religion, people had expressed a holy power in the sacrificial ritual. They had called this sacred power Brahman. The priestly caste, (known as Brahmans) were also believed to possess this power. The whole world was seen as the divine activity welling up from the mysterious being of Brahman, which was the inner meaning of all existence. The Upanishads encouraged people to cultivate a sense of Brahman in all things. Everything that happens became a manifestation of Brahman: true insight lay in the perception of the unity behind the different phenomena. Brahman cannot be addressed as “thou”; it is a neutral term, it is neither he nor she; nor is it experienced as the will of sovereign deity. Brahman does not speak to Mankind. It cannot meet men and women; it transcends all such human activities. Nor does it respond to us in personal way: sin does not “offend” it, and it cannot be said to “love” us or be “angry.” Thanking or praising it for creating the world would be entirely inappropriate.
This divine power would be utterly alien where it not for the fact that it also pervades, sustains, and inspires us.
The eternal principle within each individual was called Atman: it was a new version of the old holistic vision of paganism, a rediscovery in new terms of the One Life within us and abroad which was essentially divine.
Thus, even though we cannot see it, Brahman pervades the world and, as Atman, is found eternally within each of us.
Atman prevented God from becoming an idol, an exterior Reality “out there,” a projection of our own fears and desires. God is not seen in Hinduism as a Being, added on to the world as we know it, therefore not is it identical with the world. There was no way that we could fathom this out by reason. It is only “revealed” to us by an experience which cannot be expressed in words or concepts. Brahman is “What cannot speak with words but that whereby the mind can thing.” It is impossible to speak to a God that is as immanent as this or to think about it, making it a mere object of thought. It is a Reality that can only be discerned in ecstasy in the original sense of going beyond the self:

God comes to the thought of those who know It beyond thought, not
to those who imagine It can be attained by thought. It is unknown to
the learned and known to the simple.
It is known in the ecstasy of an awakening that opens the door
of eternal life.

Like the gods, reason is not denied but transcended. The experience of Brahman or Atman cannot be explained rationally any more than a piece of music of a poem. Intelligence is necessary for the making of such a work of art and its appreciation, but it offers an experience that goes beyond the purely logical or cerebral faculty. This will also be a constant theme in religions.
The ideal of personal transcendence was embodied in the Yogi, who would leave his family and abandon all social ties and responsibilities to seek enlightenment, putting himself in another realm of being. In about 538 BCE, a young man named Siddhartha Gautama also left his beautiful wife, his son his luxurious home in Kapilavashtu, about 100 miles north of Benares and become a mendicant ascetic. He had been appalled by the spectacle of suffering and wanted to discover the secret to end the pain of existence that he could see in everything around him. For six years he sat at the feet of various Hindu gurus and undertook fearful penances, but made no headway. The doctrines of the sages did not appeal to him, and his mortifications had simply made him despair. It was not until he abandoned these methods completely and put himself into a trance in one night that he gained enlightenment. The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced. Yet again, as in the pagan vision, the gods, nature and mankind were bound together in sympathy. There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. At first, the demon Mara tempted him to stay where he was and enjoy his new found bliss: it was not use trying to spread the word because nobody would believe him. But two of the gods of the traditional pantheon-Maha Brahma and Sakra, Lord of the devas-came to the Buddha and begged him to explain his method to the world. The Buddha agreed and for the next forty-five years he tramped all over India, preaching his message: in this world of suffering, only one thing was stable and firm. This was Dharma, the truth about right living, which alone could free us from pain.
This was nothing to do with God, and urged his disciples to save themselves. This was possible by living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and refraining from anything like drugs, or intoxicants that cloud the mind. The Buddha did not claim to have invented this system. He insisted that he had discovered it: “I have seen an ancient path, an ancient road, trodden by Buddhas of a bygone age”
Karma bound men and women to an endless cycle of rebirth into a series of painful lives. But if they could reform their egotistic attitudes, they could change their destiny. The Buddha compared the process of rebirth to a flame which lights a lamp, from which a second lamp is lit, and so on until the flame is extinguished. If somebody is still aflame at death with a wrong attitude, he or she will simply light another lamp. But if the fire is put on, the circle of suffering will cease and nirvana will be attained. “Nirvana” literally means “cooling off” or “going out.” It is not a merely negative state, however, but plays a role in Buddhist life that is analogous to God.

Nirvana is permanent, stable, imperishable, immoveable, ageless,
deathless, unborn, and unbecoming, that it is power, bliss and happiness,
the secure refuge, the shelter and the place of unassailable security; that
it is the real Truth and the Supreme Reality; that it id the good, the supreme
goal and the one and only consummation of our life, the eternal, hidden
and incomprehensible Peace.

Some Buddhist might object to this comparison because they find the concept of “God” too limiting to express their conception to ultimate reality. Attaining nirvana is not like “going to heaven” as Christians often understand it. We could not define nirvana because our words and concepts are tied to the world of sense and flux.

Israel

The person who started de Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is known as a wandering chieftain who had laid their people from Mesopotamia toward the Mediterranean at the end of the third millennium BCE. These wanderers, some of whom are called Abiru, Apiru o Habiru in Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources, spoke West Semitic languages, of which Hebrew was one. They were not regular desert nomads like the Bedouin, who migrated with their flocks according to the cycle of the seasons, but were more difficult to classify and, as such, were frequently in conflict with the conservative authorities. Some served as mercenaries, other become government employees, others worked as merchants, servants or tinkers. Some became rich and might then try to acquire land and settle down. The stories about Abraham in the book of Genesis show him serving the King of Sodom as a mercenary and describe his frequent conflicts with the authorities of Canaan and its environs. Abram, who will later be renamed Abraham (“Father of a Multitude”), is commanded by Yahweh to leave his family in Haran, in what is now eastern Turkey, and migrate to Canaan near the Mediterranean Sea. We have been told that his father, Terah, a pagan, had already migrated westward with his family from Ur. Now Yahweh tells Abraham that he has a special destiny: he will become the father of a mighty nation that will one day be more numerous than the stars in the sky, and one day his descendants will poses the land of Canaan as their own.
But who is Yahweh? It is highly likely that was El, the High God of Canaan. The deity introduces himself to Abraham as El Shaddai (El of the Mountain) which was one of El’s traditional titles. Elsewhere is called El Elyon (The Most High God) or El of Bethel. The name of the Canaanite High God is preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El. Abraham’s god El is very mild deity. He appears to Abraham as a friend and sometimes even assumes human form. This type of divine apparition, known as an epiphany, was quite common in the pagan world of antiquity. Please read Chapter 18 of Genesis. The myth of the Exodus from Egypt, when God led Moses and the children from Israel to freedom is equally offensive to modern sensibilities. Pharaoh was reluctant to let the people of Israel to go, so to force his hand God sent ten fearful plagues upon the people of Egypt. Pharaoh decided to let the Israelites leave but later changed hid mind and pursued them with his army. He caught op with them at the Sea or Reeds, but God saved the Israelites by opening the sea and letting them cross dry-shod. When the Egyptians following in their wake, He closed the waters and drowned the Pharaoh and his army. This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies. He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his own favorites and is simple a tribal deity. Some mother scholars suggest that the Exodus story is a mythical rendering of a successful peasants rendering of a successful peasants’ revolt against the suzerainty of Egypt and its allies in Canaan. The bloody story of the Exodus would continue to inspire dangerous conceptions of the divine and vengeful theology. In Book Numbers Chapter 31, we find the terrible act of vengeance dictated by Moses to his people, in order to destroy the Midianites. These instructions are more vengeful than the worst acts of Hitler and Stalin together, and we may know there, a pagan god is talking and not the real God. We may read in Numbers 31, 17 Mosses commanded: “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” That was commanded by a pagan god, not by God.
While the God of Moses had been triumphalist, the God of Isaiah was full of sorrow. The prophesy, as it has come down to us, begins with a lament that is highly unflattering to the people of the covenant: the ox and the ass know their owners, but “Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing” (Isaiah 1:3) Yahweh was utterly revolted by the animal sacrifices in the Temple, sickened by the fat of calves, blood of bulls and goats and the reeking blood that smoked from the holocausts. He could not bear their festivals, new Year Ceremonies and pilgrimages (Isaiah: 11-15). This would have shocked Isaiah’s audience: in the Meddle East these cultic celebrations were of the essence of religion. The pagan gods depended upon the ceremonies to renew their depleted energies; their prestige depended in part upon the magnificence of their temples. Now Yahweh was actually saying that these things were utterly meaningless. Isaiah felt that exterior observance was not enough. Israelites must discover the inner meaning of their religion.
Yahweh wanted compassion rather than sacrifice:
You may multiply your prayers,
I shall not listen.
Your hand are covered with blood,
Wash, make yourself clean.
Take your wrong-doing out of my sight.
Cease to do evil.
Learn to do good,
search for justice,
help the oppressed,
be just to the orphan,
plead for the widow. (Amos 7:15-17)

The prophets had discovered for themselves the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the mayor religions. Amos was the first of the prophets to emphasize the importance of social justice and compassion. The prophet Hosea makes Yahweh to say: “What I want is love, not sacrifice; knowledge of Elohim (God) not holocausts. (Hosea: 6, 6)
In the Babylonian and Canaanite myth developed before the existence of Israel, we find the god Yahweh was an important god in the Council of gods in Canaan. The religion of the One God was not coming as easily to the Israelites as Buddhism or Hinduism to the people of the subcontinent. Yahweh did not seem able to transcend the older deities in a peaceful, natural manner. He had to fight it out. Thus in Psalm 82 we see him making a play for leadership of the divine assembly, which had played such an important role in both cultures:

Yahweh takes his stand in the Council of El
to deliver judgments among the gods.

“No more mockery of justice
no more favoring the wicked!
Let the weak and the orphan have justice,
be fair to the wretched and the destitute,
rescue the weak and needy,
save them from the clutches of the wicked!”

Ignorant and senseless, they carry on blindly,
undermining the very basis of human society.
I once said, “You too are gods,
sons of El Elyon, all of you”;
but all the same, you shall die like men;
as one man, gods, you shall fall.
When he stood up to confront the Council over which El has presided from time immemorial, Yahweh accused the other gods of failing to meet the social challenge of the day.
We shall see that later in the history of religions, some Jews, Christians and Muslims worked on this early image of the absolute reality and arrived at a conception that was closer to the Hindu or Buddhist visions.

The prophets were in an important sense creating a god in their own image. Isaiah a member of the royal family had seen Yahweh as a king. Amos had ascribed his own empathy with the suffering poor to Yahweh; Hosea saw Yahweh as a Jilted husband, who still continued to feel a yearning tenderness for his wife. All religion must begin with some anthropomorphism. A deity which is utterly remote from humanity such as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover can not inspire a spiritual quest.
Also we have in 2 Sam 11:15 The story about the cruelty and big sin of king David who committed adultery with the wife of his most loved friend, general Uriah who was also killed by him. And in Gen 19, 31 it is explained how Lot committed incest with his 2 daughters. These horrible stories are mentioned in the sacred Koran book, as terrible mistakes written in the Bible.
Unlike the pagan deities, Yahweh was not in any of the forces of Nature, but in a realm apart. He is experienced in the scarcely perceptible timbre of a tiny breeze in the paradox of a voiced silence. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism. Some scholars believe Israel’s religion, started to be a pagan religion, which was evolving so much that their concept of God at the beginning, was quite different from the one they have now.

Christianity

SS Johan Paul II was the most important leader of Christianity. When he left Mexico said: “We arrive at the end of this Second Millennium, with Man despising Man” Also he asked pardon to Mankind for the crimes committed by the Catholic Church (Inquisition, Crusades, ...) Let’s help restore the wonderful teachings of Jesus, in order to help Mankind to live in peace and with true responsibility.
Please dare to think how would be your life if you would have borne as a sincere Jew. Would you think Christian worship a Jew? How would be your life if you would have born a sincere Muslim? Would you think Christian worship a Jew? For them, Jesus is a Prophet, a Great Master, and for them the sentence “Son of God” is a blasphemy. Most people agree it is impossible for a creature to explain its Creator. However, some religious leaders say it is explained by the Revealed Teaching. However, which one of the Revelers is the right? The One offered by Jews, or by Muslims, or by Christians, or by Hindus, or Which One?


Christianity has its origins in The Book of Genesis.

a) It is grounded in de Original Fault, explained in Genesis.

Eva was cheated by the serpent, and then she cheats her husband Adam. Then they have two children. One kills the other. Cain kills Abel.
The big sin is done when they disobey the commandment of God: “You will not eat from the forbidden fruit”
That is an infinite sin. In order to erase that sin, it is necessary to have an infinite repair. This infinite repair is done when The Only One God’s Son, in an infinite act of generosity, gives His Life to get the pardon of that infinite sin. The very ground of these teaching is in the statement that Our Creator made Man at His image and resemblance. So we may say Our Creator is a Perfect and Infinite Person, and Mankind is not. In other religions, they believe Our Creator is much more than a Person.

b) Each behavior made against the God’s Will, is an infinite sin. This sin, only may be pardoned when the sinner ask forgiveness, and believe Jesus is The Only One God’s Son, Whom has an infinite grace to obtain that pardon.

These way of thinking is very dangerous, because with that facts is possible to say or understand that a very big sin, like abortion, or many others, can be easily pardoned if the sinner ask for pardon, believes in Jesus, and assures he will not repeat that sin again. But as in the Good News is stipulated, the sinner may be pardoned 70 times 7, (Matthew 18:21-22) so it is very easy to repeat the same procedure. This situation in some way is the origin of actual corruption, some Scholars say.

Some people think Jesus was and is the wisest of men. He said: “Resist no evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:39) Really it is not a principle which is a matter of fact Christians accept. This text was intended in a figurative sense, or not?
Jesus said also: “Judge not lest ye be judged” That principle was not popular on the law courts of Christian courts. Also The Lord said: “Give to Him that asketh (Matthew 5:42) of thee and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” Other wonderful sentence said by Jesus was: “If thou will be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give it to the poor.” (Matthew 19:21) If we analyze the way we behave, maybe most of the ones whom put in themselves the label of Christians, will recognize they really they are not Christians.
In the wonderful teaching of Jesus, also we find:
“The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do inquiry, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:41) Then we may remember how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to those on his left: “Depart from me, ye cursed into everlasting fire.” (Matthew 25:41) Then He says again, “If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; (Mark 9:43) it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is nor quenched.”
There are other thinks of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine (Matthew 8:28) where Christ certainly was not very kind of the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree. We remember that Jesus was hungry, and seeing a fig tree afar of having leaves, He came if haply if He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: ‘No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever’ … (Mark 11, 14) and Peter … said unto Him: ‘Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.’” (Mark 11:21)
He says also that He has come to set a man at variance against his father, the daughter against her mother, and he that loveth father and mother more than Him is not worthy of Him (Matt.12,35-37). In chapter 12, 46 of the book of Matthew, He says: 46 While He was still talking to the multitudes, behold, His mother and brothers stood outside, seeking to speak with Him. 47 Then one said to Him, “Look, Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, seeking to speak with You.”
48 But He answered and said to the one who told Him, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” 49 And He stretched out His hand toward His disciples and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 50 For whoever does the will of My Father in Heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” All this means the breakup of the biological family tie for the sake of creed.

This individualism culminated in the doctrine of the immortality of the individual soul, which was to enjoy hereafter endless bliss or endless woe according to circumstances. For example, if you died immediately after you have asked pardon for your faults to a priest, and repents of them, you inherited eternal bliss; if Hitler and Stalin would have liked to confess their sins, they also would have gone to eternal bliss; whereas, if after a long and virtuous life you happened to be struck by lighting at a moment when you were using bad language because you had broken a bootlace, you would inherit eternal torment.

About half of Mankind believe or knows the above Genesis’s teachings: “Then God said, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all[b] the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth Gen 1, 26.” The other half of Mankind, believe The Creator is above all explanation, and of course more than a Person. He can not be explained, but revered, respected and followed as our final destiny. Then we will arrive to plenitude of being and existing in whom gave us Life.
In the true teachings of Moses, Jesus and The Sacred Qur’an (Book of Muslims) we find each one of them makes an emphatic emphasis about human responsibility: “Verily, God does not change men’s condition unless they change their inner selves” With this reality and knowledge, all of us are invited to be more responsible, and to forget the easy way to pardon faults that actually is thought by most of the Protestant Pastors and some Catholic Priests. In this way we will help in this Third Millennium, man esteem Man instead of the actual despise men have for men, as was stipulated for SS Johan Paul II

Which country is the biggest buyer of drugs in the world? Why?

We may say is USA, and more than 90% of the people are Christians, almost half Catholics and the other half of them Protestants. Has failed Christianity? Or has failed the teaching of Christianity because it has been twisted?
If we review the above considerations, we will find some reasons why a lot of people are eager to avoid reality by means of drug consumption. The main reason may be the American people do not understand why America has had several wars without understanding the reason to go there. Mainly the Iraq’s war has had as a terrible result, thousands of death people in that war without understanding the motif or justification of that war. Hundreds of thousands of youngest wounded. It promotes a big discouragement the bad government. That desperation looks the way to avoid that horrible reality, and then is when use of drugs is so big solicited. The real solution of that problem is by all means teaching in the proper way the wonderful teachings of Christianity, and helping the government to avoid so big mistakes. When George W Bush won presidency of US, the country had a surplus of 5 billion dollars, and when He finished, the country had a deficit of one trillion dollars and the worst economical crisis worldwide. Please let’s make ours the motto of Mankind: “Let all of us become genuinely sincere, grateful and respectful of The One Who gave us Life, to Nature and to ourselves”
In the wonderful prayer “Pater Noster” (Matt. 6, 9-13) The Lord teaches all of us are brothers, including Jesus Christ, and invite us to pray directly to His Father, asking forgiveness for our faults, worshiping directly to Him, and many more wonderful teachings.

Are there some contradictions in the four Canonical writings of Mark, Luke, Matt, and John? To answer this question, please ask ourselves which ones were the last words of The Lord. We will find the answers as follow:
Mark: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Luke: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”
John: He said to his mother: “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “here is your mother” Later knowing that all was now completed, said, “I am thirsty.” Then “It is finished”
Matt: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”



Islam

About the year 610 an Arab merchant of the thriving city of Mecca in the Hijaz, who had never read the Bible and probably never hard of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, had an experience that was uncannily similar to theirs. Every year Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a member of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh, used to take his family to Mount Hira just outside the city to make a spiritual retreat during the month of Ramadan. This was a common practice among the Arabs of the peninsula. Muhammad would have spend the time praying to the High God of the Arabs and distributing food and alms to the poor who came to visit him during this sacred period.
The Arabs were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad knew that the Quraysh were on dangerous course and needed to find an ideology that would help them to adjust to their new conditions.
They felt that they have become the masters of their own fate, and some even to have believed that their wealth would give them a way of immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency would mean the disintegration of the tribe. Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm. Individuals were started to build personal fortunes and took no heed of the weaker Qurayshis. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egotism and greed, his tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife.
Unlike the Torah, however, which according to the biblical account was revealed to Moses in one session on Mount Sinai, the Koran was revealed to Muhammad bit by bit, line by line and verse by verse over a period of twenty-three years.
Muhammad believed he was putting the ineffable Word of God into Arabic, for the Koran is as central to the spirituality of Islam as Jesus, the Logos, is to Christianity. We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other mayor religion. In this sacred book, God seems to comment on the developing situation: he answers some of Muhammad’s critics, explains the significance of a battle or a conflict within the early Muslim community and points to the divine dimension of human life. As each new segment was revealed, Muhammad who could neither read nor write, recited it aloud, the Muslims learned it by heart and those who were literate wrote it down. The Koran was not meant for private perusal but for liturgical recitation. He did not believe that he was founding a new universal religion but saw himself bringing the old religion of the One God to the Quraysh. If Arabs failed to reproduce God’s benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with the true nature of things. Consequently, Muhammad made his converts bow down in ritual prayer twice a day. This external gesture would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and reorient their lives. Eventually Muhammad’s religion would be known as Islam, the act of existential surrender that each convert was expected to make to al-Lah: a Muslim was a man or woman who has surrendered his or her whole being to the Creator. Muslims were to cultivate a symbolic attitude:


Verily,
in the creation of the heavens and of the earth and the succession of night and day and in the ships that speed through the sea with what is useful to man: and in the waters which God send down from the sky, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless, and causing all manner of living creatures to multiply thereon: and in the change of the winds, and the clouds than run their appointed courses between sky and earth: (in all this) there are messages indeed for a people who use their reason.
A study of the workings of the natural world showed that it had a transcendent dimension and source which we can talk about only in signs and symbols: even the stories of the prophets, the accounts of the Last Judgment and the joys of paradise should not be interpreted literally but as parables of a higher, ineffable reality.
But the greatest sign of all was the Koran itself: indeed its individual verses called ayat. Western people find the Koran a difficult book and this is largely a problem of translation. Arabic is particularly difficult to translate: even ordinary literature and the mundane utterances of politicians frequently sound stilted and alien when translated into English, for example, and this is doubly true of the Koran, which is written in dense and highly allusive, elliptical speech. Muslims say that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound, rather as Muhammad was enveloped in the embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira or when he saw the angel on the horizon no matter where he looked. It is nor a book to be read simply to acquire information. It is mean to yield a sense of the divine, and must not be read in haste:
And,
thus have We bestowed from on high this (divine writ) as a discourse in the Arabic tongue, and have given therein many facets to all manner of warnings, so men might remain conscious of Us, or what it give rise to a new awareness on them.
(Know) then, (that) God is sublime exalted, the Ultimate Sovereign (al-Malik), the Ultimate Truth (al-Haqq): and (know this), do not approach the Koran in haste, ere it has been revealed unto thee in full, but (always) say: “O my Sustainer, cause me go to grow in knowledge”

It was the Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality “out there” and brought Him into the Mind, heart and being of each believer.

"In the future, the Global Religion would be a Cosmic Religion. It will transcend the personal God, and will avoid dogma and theology. It will embrace natural and spiritual things. It will be grounded in a religious sense sprout out from all spiritual and natural things as a significant union" Albert Einstein

When teaching of religions became to be more grounded in responsibility sense, about the great value of life and its transcendence, then by conviction, more than by law or threaten, each one of us will become “Genuinely sincere, grateful and respectful of The One Who gave us Life, (God, Jehovah, al-Lah, Brahman) to Nature and to ourselves”. The Social Injustice will diminish as well as violence, in a natural way by conviction of our eternal Transcendence; if we really surrender our will to the One Who gave us Life. Most religions teach the way to be able to obtain “Salvation” This concept may be explained by different ways; maybe the best is “To be able to arrive at Plenitude of Being and Existing, where there is mo matter, no space no time, but Plenitude in The One Who gave us Life”

It would be useful for each one of us, respond to the question: How will be our concept of transcendence or salvation if we were born in a different culture than ours? Which is the best way to obtain First Class ticket for our last Trip? The above reflections may help us to answer that important question.
Sincerely,
Paul Hertre