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discussions two
Religious discussions two
People need to discuss their religious beliefs, because there are many religions in the world today, some are good some are not as good, so by discussing about religions we could make our minds up which one is the most suitable to us.
There are many religions in the entire world, and everyone of them seem to do their job, when they are applied as they are supposed to be applied, but with some of them it is very easy to do the wrong things?
Religious discussions two
One of the many Buddha statue, there seem to be many sorts of Buddha statues around, some are lean some are fat, I suppose that everyone of them has a good reason to be what it is and represents whatever it wants to represent.
Religious discussions two
This is another religious article that is
being written to continue discussions on all sorts of religious issues, we
believe that it is necessary to widen our base; therefore we are going to bring
other people to discuss some of those issues because we believe that a group
discussion may be helpful.
As you know already, in our last article we
have outlined a few things about the need to discuss the religions problems
that exist today, therefore, we have invited a few religious friends to have a
friendly chat or discussions about these religious issues.
So, let these friendly discussions begin by
informing our friends what I would like to talk about today at this meeting.
My introduction
My dear friends at this meeting today I have
something important to tell you, you see, it looks like that I may need your
help, in order to do what I would like to do, so let me briefly explain. As you
all know already I am writing these religious articles and because these
religious issues in them are so complex I would like to ask you to help me find
the right solutions. You see, I wish that with our help we could come up with a
solution to today’s religious problems, or at least a suggestion about which
way to go, so the knowledge of each and every one of you/us could be very
useful to say the least, this is the main reason why I have invited you to come
together at my place.
Now that we are here I invite you to discuss
our religious beliefs and I ask you not to hold back on anything that comes to
your mind, because you and I are here to find and perhaps suggest new ways of
dealing with this very old religious
problem, as you can see in our last article if you have followed our
religious writings we have said that we are trying to come up with a suggestion
of how to overcome these religious problems, and also a way on how to discuss
religious issues without upsetting religious people if possible, therefore we
need to do it in such a way that would not upset religious people.
Therefore now, I would like to ask you to
have your say, if you would like to take part in this undertaking and talk
about existing religions and what they mean to you? Therefore I would be asking
you in turn to have your say if you are taking part in these religious
discussions. We know that some of you don’t know what to say today, but perhaps
later on you want to say what could be on your mind.
Anyhow today to begin with I have already
asked my dear friend Mark to have something ready to say to you all, so that
these religious discussions may really begin. So, Mark please let we hear what
you have to say?
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Mark religious speech
Mark opening speech
My dear friends, I don’t really know how to
start with, but first of all I need to say that I feel honoured to be the first
to be invited to speak to you about religions.
So, today we have to speak about all sorts of
religions and what we think about them, I have to say that with so many
religions around it is hard to start in any ways; here I have also to say that
although I know a bit about religions from some reading I have done a while
ago, I have reason to believe that I don’t really know enough to positively
assure you that what I am going to say next is right or not, it is just the way
I see religions, and you have to accept it as it is, as it is just a way of how
I see religions today, perhaps tomorrow I may have to change my views and
beliefs, who knows?
In order to start these religious speech I
have chosen only a few of the main religions that I am going to talk about; but
first of all I have to say that religions for us humans are necessary, as we
feel this in-borne need to belong to some sort of religions, because we have
always felt the need to believe in something supernatural that would or could
help us when we feel unable to cope with something that is or seems to be stronger
than ourselves.
Having said that, now let us see how some of
the main
religions have set
themselves up, in order to achieve that and be able to explain to their people
their religious beliefs. Anyhow in my speech here I am going to be brief and
therefore I am only talking about the main beliefs and from where they seem to
have started. As we all know, or perhaps I should say that we all should know
that the most important two religions of the world today are: The religions
that come from the Bible and Hinduism, which have split and evolved into
several other religions, of course there are other religions also but we could
say that they are a minority, and there are of course the old pagan religions
that no longer exist.
-
Now, let us start with Hinduism
I am starting with the Indus religions just
because it is believed that they are the first to be written in a text, or they
were written in bits and pieces first as usually happens, and then later on
they would be put together and become a written text.
One of these Indian religious books is The
Laws of Manu; in this book The Laws of Manu it is explained in a nutshell that
an ever existing force or energies has always existed, in the great darkness
that existed before the world was born; this Self existing force or energy
called (Svayambhu or something like that.) These existing energies were so
complex that they were/are unknowable and unfathomable, anyhow this field or
force of energy in the beginning seeded an egg and this egg became Brahman the
progenitor of the whole world, Brahman split in two and created the world as we
know it. Of course there is a lot more to this great Indus religion, specially
how the people and the different cast were born, and we will come back to
discuss it another day, but this is somehow how the Hinduism was started.
As I said in the beginning we will be talking
only about the very main parts of religions in a nutshell, because every
religion has a never ending story to tell, and also Hinduism is a very complex
religion; for instance, if we want to find out and write the names of those
Indus religions and their gods, it would fill many pages.
Anyhow, another of these religions that came
from these Indus religions is Buddhism; at the beginning it was part of this
Indus religions, but Budda set it up in a more advanced way, Budda is born in a
royal family in 624 BC so he is a prince, he was named Siddhartha, he was born
with his own destiny, as he was going to be the one that knows everything, the
enlightened one and the founder of the Buddhism.
Today one of the best known religious leaders
of Buddhism is the Tibetan Dalai Lama. There is a lot more to say about this
religion, but this has got to do for the moment, because we would like to talk
about the other religions.
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The old western religions
Paganism was the old western religions
The pagan gods
Before Christianity, while in Asia Hinduism
was one of the most important religions and it is still today; in Europe in
those old times was paganism with their pagan’s gods. Some people say that in
the beginning of paganism, it seems that one of the oldest and most powerful
gods was Saturn. (But there is a lot more to say about this religion and how it
starts in the very beginning of the world, there is a hub in hub pages
explaining all this, check it out with this link, hub.me/agotI ).
But
now let us go back to talk about this god Saturn, this god Saturn had three
sons and they replaced Saturn: the first son of Saturn was Jupiter who became
king of the gods who lived on Mount
Olympus Greece, the second one was Neptune who was king of the seas, and the
third was Pluto king of the underworld or the dead. There were lots of other gods,
goddesses like Apollo the sun god, Mars the war god Eros and Venus the gods of
love and many gods and demigods and others that filled the void of any
supernatural beliefs. But I believe that it would be better for me to come back
another time to talk about them? Or perhaps just we have to let them be the way
they are, since these Gods have been replaced with a new and very powerful God
in the western world, called by some believer Yahweh and from others Allah,
these religions form the main part of the western world religions.
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The western world religions
Today western world religions
Most of the western world religions as we
know them today start with Abraham
and the Bible. The Bible in reality is a history and religious book of the
Jews. Most of us believe, or have been thought to believe that the Bible is the
written word of the living God, as God has spoken through his prophets, at
least this is how we have been told and most religious people believe to be
true.
Anyhow Abraham had many children, even though
he had none until he was very old, his first son was Ishmael, born from his
handmaiden Hagar, and then he had Isaac from his very old wife Sarah. You can
check this story in the Bible Genesis www.catholic.org/bible/
But this is not all and
I quote from what I have found in the Internet: (and I quote),
Also, Abraham had six
other sons besides Ishmael and Isaac through his wife Keturah whom he married
after Sarah died. "Now Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah.
2And she bore to him Zimran and Jokshan and Medan and Midian and Ishbak and
Shuah." (Gen. 25:1-2).
Obviously, this was known by the writers of Genesis as well as Hebrews and Galatians.
(End of quote) So, even then Abraham became the father of many nations, through
his many children.
As most of us know the Bible starts with the
book of Genesis, and it starts with God creating the world, and from there it
tells us briefly what happens from the creation of the world to the times of
Abraham; and from Abraham the history of the Jews begins. In a nutshell the
Jews become slaves of the powerful Egyptian king, they cry to their God to help
them, and God delivers them from the Egyptians with the help of their leader
Moses, who has met God on Mount Sinai in the form of a burning bush, this
burning bush talked to Moses and said that his name was Yahweh (which laterally
means, I am who I am) the God of Abraham and he wanted to deliver his people
from the Egyptian Faeroes. So, God then told Moses to go back to Egypt and help
rescue his people.
After a long argument with the Egyptian
Faeroes with the help of Yahweh Moses succeeds in freeing the Jews from the
Egyptian Faeroes and they leave Egypt to go to the Promised
Land. In the way to the Promised Land the Jews don’t do what Yahweh their
God wants then to do and believe; and Yahweh punishes them by making them stay
for forty years in the desert, that is until all those who did not believe in Yahweh
their God were dead, also Moses dies before they reach the Promised Land, so
the Jews reach the Promised Land under their new leader Joshua and other
leaders that followed.
In the end the Jews have reached the Promised
Land and stay there for a very long time under various leaders the most known
and mentioned even these days are Salomon and David. In the Bible through his
prophets Yahweh
promises the Jews
that from the line of David will be born a man with great powers and he will be
the messiah to the Jews and the world, this great man will let the world know
about everything that there is to know about religions and lead the world.
So, the messiah is born in the form of our
Lord Jesus Christ at the time when the Promised Land is occupied from the
Romans; the Jews hope and believe that the messiah is going to be their king
and be able to deliver them from the Romans that were occupying their Promised
Land. But when they saw that Jesus Christ was not what they wanted him to be,
they found a way how to eliminate him by crucifying him with the help of the
Romans. But the follower of Jesus Christ continued to believe in Jesus Christ
and thus a new religious era was born, Christianity. At the same time the Jews
rejected Jesus as the messiah and continued in believing God in the same old
ways of their religious order.
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There are many Christian religions
Christianity is a
general name that includes many religions; they all come from The New Testament
of Bible, and they all believe in our lord Jesus Christ.
So, as we can see
Christianity is a modified continuation of the religious laws and beliefs of
Abraham and Moses, that after the death of Jesus Christ and many other
happenings it split away from the Jewish beliefs and became another religion in
its own rights, or perhaps we should say that it formed a few religious groups
that today are known as Christianity. Of course Christianity took a long time
to become the main religion of the western world as we all know, because at the
beginning it was not accepted and many people died martyrs just because they
believed in this new religious order of Christianity, history is full of many
prosecutions that the new Christian had to endure before they became accepted
as a religious order. There are reasons to believe that Christianity became
accepted under the Roman emperor Constantine the great early in the fourth
century AD. Emperor Constantine was the first Roman emperor that converted to
Christianity.
Christianity
nowadays has got several orders like the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutherans,
Anglicans and many others. As we can see all these religions have come from the
Bible, and one can go on talking about these religions for a long time, if one
has to explain them better, So, I better stop talking about them now, as there
is another main religion that I would like to talk about now, which is the
Islamic religion.
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Islam, Koran book is their Bible.
Islam religion
There are reasons to believe that the Koran
also comes from the Bible, and even though today we (the western world) seem to
be so far away from our supposed to be brothers Muslims the fact remains that
they are descended of Ishmael first son of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian
maidservant, then Abraham had his second son was Isaac with his wife Sarah:
These two are the most important children of Abraham, and therefore we can say
that through Abraham we are brothers with the Muslims.
Now, I would like to say that we should
really try at least to read some of the Koran, so that we might be able to
understand what these Muslims are talking about. Therefore we need to put aside
those extremists fanatic that in their twisted way seem to think that they need
to kill those that do not follow their religion.
Anyhow, I have read part of the Koran and it
seems to me that God is the same God of Abraham, and it says so many times God
himself in the Koran, the only difference is that here they call their God
Allah instead of Yahweh, and have also many different laws compared to our Christian
religious laws that were modified with the coming of Jesus Christ. It seems to
me that the Moslems also modified the Bible, but it was modified in a different
way, as they reject most of the new ways of Jesus Christ, but retain most of
the old ways of The Old Testament. So, here we can say that even if we are
brothers with the Moslems through Abraham, at the same time we are not, since
we have different beliefs and we go in different direction; anyhow we still
need to learn a lot more before we pass our own judgment on this religion?
(Writer comment) So hereunder is a link that
might take you to the Koran, let us hope it works in hub pages.
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Speech conclusions
Mark speech conclusions
I need to say that there are a lot more
religions in the world today which have come from different civilizations, and
we could go on and make a list of them all and it will be a long list. Anyhow
here and now, our task is to find which one is the most suitable to use, or to
make up another religion capable of satisfying the human need for religions. As
I have already said before, Man needs
God. And I have also said that God is hope for those who need hope
most.
That is all I want to say now, as my speech
has been too long and some of you wonder when I am going to stop. Thanks for
listening anyhow.
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Frank (me the writer) short comment
At the end of Mark speech we all were congratulating
Mark and saying that he knew more than most of us about
religions, and that we surely would reflect on what he had said: I said I
am sure that our friends here are going to discuss a lot more about religions
because of what you said, so let us see what they are going to argue about
soon. Look over there, I see our friend Gino looking at John as if he wants to
speak to him, perhaps he is going to have a good interesting chat with him
presently. We might even have a laugh Ha, ha, ha.
My dear readers, let us postpone what Gino
and John are going to argue about for next article, because I believe that we
have said enough in this hub. But, let me say briefly what sort of conclusion
we can find in Mark speech. The only conclusion that I can see, is that there
is no conclusion at all, because religions are very complex and we are going to
need a lot of time to sort them out, if we have the courage and strength to continue
to look for a solution.
Dear readers, this is not the end of the
meeting and if you would like to see what happened next at the end of Mark
speech you have to wait when we post our next hub; Religious discussions three.
May God bless us all?
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