WORLD
RELIGIONS
E
UNUM PLURIBUS
From the One, many.
"If
you cannot see God in all,
you cannot see God at all."
Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji
"For
my mother, organized religion too often dressed up
closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and
oppression in the cloak of righteousness.
This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious
instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the
world’s great religions was a necessary part of any
well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the
Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside
books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.
On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me
to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple,
the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and the
ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand
that such religious samplings required no sustained
commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of
human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just
the one of many ways – and not necessarily the best way –
that man attempted to control the unknowable and
understand the deeper truths about our lives.
In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the
anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon
to be treated with a suitable respect, but with suitable
detachment as well." Barack
Obama
"Faith
is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself
to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water,
because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax,
and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging
to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic
in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature
of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let
go,
and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."
Alan Watts
Confucianism 
Hinduism 
Islamism
2002
Poll of U.S. Religious Affiliations
Christianity 77%
(Protestantism 52%)
(Roman Catholicism 25%)
None 14%
Eastern (Combined) 7%
Judaism 2%
What
happens when the government gets involved with religion?
In the country of Malaysia, it is against the law
to convert from Islam to any other religion.
