At the same time, we can erase every word of religious scripture, along with all religious representations in art and literature.
If we wiped all religion away, anthropology suggests, it would rapidly reappear in new yet familiar forms—but probably without monotheism, assuming that history is any guide. Religion in the broad sense clearly represents a human instinct, since we find it in all human societies. If you worship that sort of God, you share in that single, though by now hardly unitary, tradition. The monotheistic tradition of faith seems to focus and amplify the mental faculty of faith, concentrating the idea of the divine into a single, exclusive deity.
Who else but the Jews, those famous monotheists from way back? This essentially polytheistic outlook accords with the frequent mention of other gods in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament , for example.
El was the Canaanite high god, but under him served other gods such as the fertility god Baal and the water god Yam. Perhaps Abraham and his kin adopted El as their own, accepting him as the same god who had urged Abraham to leave Ur and seek out the land of milk and honey in the first place.
Nor, like El before him, does Yahweh appear at first to have been thought of by the Hebrews as a divine creator, at least not according to the picture we get from the last century or so of biblical scholarship.
Scholars believe that not until the eighth century bc was the first biblical account of creation composed starting at Genesis , and that only a couple of centuries later did an anonymous priestly author write down the full-blown version we get starting at Genesis 1. By that time, the Jews were rejoicing in their return to Palestine after the Babylonian Captivity c.
Enjoying a sense of revival and optimism, the Jews built the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Jewish priests acted as ambassadors to their Persian rulers.
Jewish life comes down to earth at this point. The days of the prophets are fading. From here on in, the Jews will be concerned less with further prophecies than with the proper interpretation of past ones. In the coming centuries, the Jews did indeed take the final steps down the long road to true monotheism.
Neither they nor their new conception of faith evolved in a vacuum. Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity.
The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, which the Greeks invented and began using around bc. Earlier alphabets had been missing vowels.
The Greeks took one of them, the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument.
Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes. For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason. Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them.
This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason. It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar.
Thales and his immediate successors came from Ionia, the coast of what is now Turkey, where the mainland cities of Greece proper had established a number of prosperous colonies of which Miletus was the acknowledged leader.
But their explanations always came back to religious mythology. Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation. Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before.
And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc. Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything. Thales thought everything boiled down, so to speak, to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite.
Divine but not divine agents, these ideas straddled the line between religious and secular. Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane.
Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition. So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for.
Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself. As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One.
This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling.
In this holistic world, matter and spirit are the same: people, places, objects, and events merge and mingle with the gods, goddesses, spirits, and demons who animate them. We saw a vivid example of this outlook during the solar eclipse over Asia in July , when some local authorities closed schools and urged pregnant women to stay indoors to avoid ill effects as the evil spirit swallowed the Sun god. The epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey , reflect the oral traditions of this sort of world.
These poems established the classical Greek religious pantheon, in which the gods gleam brightly in the sunlight and the sea, rumble through the land as earthquakes, and darken the sky with clouds or eclipses. Most Jews then lived in Diaspora , as minorities in their communities, until the founding of the state of Israel in When Jews from all over the world came to settle in modern Israel, they found that various subcultures had developed in different areas with distinctive histories, languages, religious practices, customs, and cuisine.
Yiddish, a fusion of German and Hebrew, was the spoken language of the Ashkenazi. In Europe, Jews had tended to be segregated -- voluntarily or not -- from the Christian population.
From the late 19th and through first half of the 20th century, many Ashkenazi Jews came to Palestine to escape the persecution and discrimination they faced because of their religion. They once spoke Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish communities tended to be integrated into their respective societies.
There is great difference of opinion among Israeli Jews over the role Jewish religious law should play in the state. Until recently, Orthodox Judaism was the only form of the religion formally and legally recognized in Israel. Although less conservative branches of Judaism now have partial recognition, Orthodoxy remains dominant politically and legally.
Many Israeli Jews describe themselves in terms of their degree of observance of Jewish law. About half call themselves secular ; about 15 to 20 percent see themselves as Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox; and the rest describe themselves as traditionally observant, but not as strict as the Orthodox. In the United States, debate over the necessity of observing Jewish law has led to the development of three major movements.
Orthodox Jews believe that Jewish law is unchanging and mandatory. Conservative Jews argue that God's laws change and evolve over time. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews believe that these laws are merely guidelines that individuals can choose to follow or not. In addition, there are many Jews in the United States who are secular or atheist. For them, their Judaism is a culture rather than a religion. Jews believe in one god and his prophets, with special respect for Moses as the prophet to whom God gave the law.
Jewish law is embodied in the Torah also known as the Pentateuch and the Talmud collected commentary on the Torah completed in the fifth-century C.
Judaism is more concerned with actions than dogma. In other words, observance of rules regulating human behavior has been of more concern than debates over beliefs in the Jewish tradition. According to Orthodox Judaism, Jewish law, or halakhah , includes commandments given by God in the Torah, as well as rules and practices elaborated by scholars and custom. Jewish law covers matters such as prayer and ritual, diet, rules regulating personal status marriage, divorce, birth, death, inheritance, etc.
Jews do not believe in the prophets after the Jewish prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad. Therefore, they do not subscribe to the idea that Jesus was the Messiah and the son of God, nor do they believe in the teachings of Islam. Christianity started as an offshoot of Judaism in the first century C.
Until the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in C. The development of Christian groups derived from major and minor splits. In the 16th century, Martin Luther, upset at the corruption of the Catholic papacy, spearheaded a reformation movement that led to the development of Protestantism. Christian missionaries proselytize all over the world, and there are large populations of Christians on every continent on Earth, although the forms of Christianity practiced vary.
Many early Christian saints lived in the Middle East. It is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ who lived in the Middle East about 2, years ago. Many historians say that Islam began in Arabia in the 7th century in divine revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed. Muslims believe he was the last prophet. Close to two billion people practise the faith today.
Judaism, meanwhile, began more than 3, years ago. Jews believe that God anointed them as the chosen people to set an example of holiness. There are about 15 million Jews worldwide.
Construction of St Joseph's on Abu Dhabi's Corniche started in , around the time this photograph was taken. Courtesy St Joseph's.
The three are sacred books that tell the story of the three religions. As Abraham was about to deliver the killer blow, God stopped the sacrifice. For Christians, Abraham symbolises obedience to God and foreshadows the fate of Jesus. Muslims refer to him as Ibrahim and consider him to be a major prophet. Ibrahim and the Final Dispensation of Religion. Genesis —3. Genesis ; Genesis ; Romans — About the Author. Burns explains how the gospel can be explained in any cultural context.
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