God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter. Kacey sings a lot about people who like to judge or go out of their way to make statements about others, and how it can ruin relationships and make the people unhappy, which is why we should all just focus on being our best selves. Since the celebration of the Jubilee is to take place simultaneously in the Holy Land, in Rome and in the local Churches throughout the world» (ibid), it would seem that this openness to people of other religions should also be shown at the local level. Armenian Apostolic Church, which is one of the oldest Christian churches. He believed that art was universal to all religions, so one feature of the Meeting House was a collection of religious art, with paintings and sculptures from a variety of religious traditions. The bookcase in the Meeting House contained, not sutras, sagas, epics, or Torahs, but “original Bibles.” And the Charles Street Meeting House gathered on Sundays, unlike Jews who meet on a different day, or Hindus who don’t have weekly worship services in the Western sense. Patton’s experiments in worship at the Charles Street Meeting House were brilliant, and some still serve as inspiration for many Unitarian Universalist ministers and worship leaders today.

Not only was he chair of the committee that produced the newly-formed Unitarian Universalist Association’s first hymnal in 1964, but I and others believe that our present use of the flaming chalice had its origins in the Charles Street Meeting House: At the beginning of each worship service, Patton lit a flame in a lamp the shape of which was based on Graeco-Roman forms, and photographs in the book show that this lamp looked very much like early flaming chalices. His book describes how he incorporated innovative ideas into worship services, like a service that featured an interpretation of a pagan maypole dance as performed by a modern dance troupe. As an adult, Freud considered himself an atheist, but his Jewish background and upbringing played an important role in the development of his ideas. So how did Freud feel about religion? Religion, Freud believed, was an expression of underlying psychological neuroses and distress-an attempt to gain control over the external world. Even though many of us Unitarian Universalists still want to believe in a common thread running through all religions, when I re-read Patton’s A Religion for One World it seems obvious that we cannot somehow transmogrify ourselves into a universal world religion by incorporating bits and pieces of other religions into our religion.

But unlike Smith, Prothero does not believe we have to try to identify some common thread running through them all. Nor can I fully agree with the Dalai Lama that compassion is the common thread running through all religions; even if I did believe in some common thread, as a Universalist I’d want to say love, not compassion, must be that thread. What is this common thread? Yet some Jewish sages, writing between the 12th and 14th centuries, could speak of Jesus as a “saint”, as one who “served to prepare the whole world for the veneration of God in the communion of hearts”. For seven or eight years, the boy served in a castle as a page. Any flak we receive is just typical stuff that anyone on TV on a regular basis receives,” reasons Kate. “Furthermore, although this is the absolute hardest job –aside from raising eight kids, that is — that Jon and I have ever had, it is also the most amazing blessing that we can be home with our children while working. According to Boyer, early humans were forced to locate food and shelter in order to survive, while constantly being directed by their instincts and senses.

He critiqued religion for being unwelcoming, harsh, and unloving toward those who are not members of a specific religious group. We can first learn about how other religions are different from ours, a task for our religious education departments. What restrictions may be expected from people of other religions? This is not all that different from Huston Smith’s approach: Smith has been teaching people about different religious traditions for years. The purpose of this short article is to take a rapid look at how the followers of some religious traditions might answer this last question. While religions may differ in their metaphysical views, the Dalai Lama says that religious and secular views converge in the realm of ethics. Different scholars operating in the field have different interests and intentions; some for instance seek to defend religion, while others seek to explain it away, and others wish to use religion as an example with which to prove a theory of their own. At various points in his writings, he also suggested that religion is an attempt to control the Oedipal complex (as opposed to the Electra complex), a means of providing structure in social groups, wish fulfillment, an infantile delusion, and a desire to control the outside world.