“Injustice, oppression, aggression, greed, failure to forgive, desire for revenge, and unwillingness to enter into dialogue and negotiate: these are merely some of the factors which lead people to depart from the way in which God desires us to live on this planet. What ancient people built this sacred temple in Chichen Itza? Third, a particular difficulty is presented when words in biblical Hebrew and Greek refer to ancient practices and institutions that do not correspond directly to those in the modern world. Can you guess the present-day location of the ancient Mayan civilization? Don’t even try to guess how many spots so many Dalmatians might have! While state control over Islam has long been present in Syria, the Sunni religious field had undergone change even before the uprising in 2011. In the first decade of the century, smaller urban areas, outside traditional urban centers of religion such as Damascus and Aleppo, gained autonomy from the state in religious matters.

The question of souls is still one that matters. All souls will be reunited with their resurrected bodies on Judgement Day when Christ returns and God finally confirms their destiny. Within Islam, souls await the day of resurrection in their graves. Orthodox Judaism is committed to the idea of the resurrection of the body on Judgement Day and its reunion with the soul, together with heavenly bliss for the saved. Most Christians today believe the soul enters the body at the time of conception. Here, liberation occurs when the soul enters into the oneness of God, rather as a drop of water merges into the ocean, while paradoxically maintaining its individual identity. Although there are divinities galore in Buddhism, the gods are not essential for liberation. Liberation from endless rebirth comes from our realisation that all is suffering and nothing is permanent, including the self. Like Hinduism, Buddhism accepts there was no time when we were not bound to the cycle of birth and rebirth. Within Hinduism, there has been never been a time when souls did not exist. For all three religions, souls will live forever. These three religions all believe there was a time when souls were not.

At the time of death, the sum total of karma determines our status in the next life. But unlike Hinduism, it does not believe there is an eternal, unchanging “soul” that transmigrates from one life to the next. Within Hinduism, we can distinguish four different schools of thought on this. He can move at tremendous speeds, and he can fly. At the everyday level, we can distinguish between truth and falsity. Doxastic venture in relation to faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to be true just to the extent of its evidential support-and only if the legitimate exceptions include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment. There are two exceptions to this: those who die fighting in the cause of Islam go immediately into God’s presence; those who die as enemies of Islam go straight to hell.

God’s power is not a blind power. Ephesians 3:16-17) I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Luckily, though, the queen doesn’t come out on top! Spiritist estimates come from a single source, which gives a relative indication of the size of the Spiritist communities within each country. It is, in effect, wrestling with the meaning of human life – and whether each of us has more ultimate significance than a rock or an earthworm. But the Indian traditions all agree it is the ultimate horror – their aim is to escape from it. In the first of these, known as Samkhya-Yoga, the aim is to realise the essential separateness of the soul from its material body, thus enabling us to live in the here and now without attachment to the things of the world. The practice of Buddhist “mindfulness”, now becoming popular in the West in a secular form, is the continual attentiveness to the impermanence or unreality of the self and the world, and the suffering caused by thinking and acting otherwise.