Religion

"Some Indologists labeled the Hinduism they encountered polytheistic; others even coined new terms, like henotheism, to describe this baffling array of spiritual traditions. Few, however, have realized, and fewer still have written, that India's Sanatana Dharma, or "eternal faith, " known today as Hinduism and comprising nearly a billion followers, is a family of religions with four principal denominations Saivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism and Smartism. This single perception is essential for understanding Hinduism and explaining it accurately to others. Contrary to prevailing misconceptions, Hindus all worship a one Supreme Being, though by different names. For Vaishnavites, Lord Vishnu is God. For Saivites, God is Siva. For Shaktas, Goddess Shakti is supreme. For Smartas, liberal Hindus, the choice of Deity is left to the devotee."

"In British India of the denominations, weights, and fineness specified..., each coin was to be a legal tender for the amount of its denomination."

"Although lay people vary widely in life style, denominations frequently attract people of particular races, ethnicity and social classes. Major denominations in the world include Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, and Taoism. Each is predominant in different areas. Christianity predominates in Europe, the Americas, and Australia and Oceania. Islam predominates in the Middle East and North Africa, and Hinduism predominates in India."

"Prakrit dialects were sufficiently cultivated by the Jain masters — both of the Shvetambara and the Digambara denominations. The early Prakrit works by Jain munis were religious and ethical, naturally leaving very little scope for the ..."

"Spiritual discipline is used in all Christian denominations and also within Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, as well as in other traditions and religions in order to describe the spiritual aspects of these religions or traditions or to refer to special groups or orientations within these religions or traditions."

"The divisions within Islam have existed for so long that Sunni and Shia have become recognized as established sects – groups that have broken from denominations or ecclesiae and have existed long enough to acquire a large following and widespread respectability...Today Shiite Islam predominates in the Islamic republic of Iran (95%) and Sunni Islam predominates in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (77%) and Afghanistan (80%)"

"Scientology has achieved full legal recognition as a religious denomination in the United States, particularly in Germany and Great Britain where government officials that Scientology is more a philosophy or commercial enterprise than a religion."

"I am not at All fatalistic about my faith. I believe that those who believe “will go from strength to strength”(Psalm 84:7) and those who know their God "shall be strong and carry out great exploits.” (Daniel 11:32). But if we are approaching or in fact already in the Laodician age (symbolized by the last of the seven churches of Revelation, we must be on special guard on the pride of denomination and we must walk in Christian love. We need to be devoted to God’s Word everyday."

"Repentance is an hearty sorrow for our pastmisdeeds, AND a sincere resolution and endeavour, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. So that repentance does not consist in one single act of sorrow, (though that being the first and leading act gives denomination to the whole,) but in "doing works meet for repentance" in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ, the remainder of our lives."

"Most religious practice in India is local and consists of multiple rituals and performances that intersect but do not overlap. … that a particular religious practice of any one of the numerically predominant religious denominations in India – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian – will establish ritual and political dominance."

"This denomination also affirmed, that Christ had not satisfied the divine justice nor made an explanation for the sins of men by his death and sufferings; but had signified to us by his meditation, that there was nothing in us that could offend the Deity...Helkesaites, a denomination which arose in the second century. They denied some parts of the old and new testament, did not own Paul as an [[apostle."

"...But is there any reason why we should be suffered to torment them [Animals]? Not that any I can see...The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, has been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing, as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still."

"Definitive stamp is a postage stamp issued as a regular stamp for the country or territory in which it is to be used. Denomination is the value of a postage stamp as printed on the face of the stamp. Denomination is not the same as the value of a stamp on the philatelic marker, which is usually different."

"During the reign of King Ashoka, one of the ancient kings of India, there were actually eighteen denominations of Buddhism. All of them are now defunct except one. The only one that survived out of these eighteen is called Hinayana – the form of Buddhism prevalent today in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. We could call it southern Buddhism. It is considered the oldest, strictest and purest form of Buddhism. For this reason it is also known as Theravada or the “Way of the Elders”. A newer denomination called Mahayana possibly emerged out of India in the first century BC, became a movement in China in the second century, traveled to South Korea and crossed over to Japan by the sixth century. Hence we could call it the Northern Buddhism."

"In Mahayana Buddhism they are mixing some of the local belief systems with traditional Buddhism. They honour other Buddhas in addition to the historical Buddha. They add a mythology of ghosts, gods, goddesses, protecting spirits and so called Mahayana saints (Sanskrit: bodhisatvas)"

"Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or smelling of something else."

"Tibetan Buddhism emerged later in the seventh century, adding new scriptures with new instructions such as how to prepare the dying, Theravada stayed strictly with the original teachings of Buddha. Therefore it is considered the purest nikai or denomination."

"We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul."

"I told her in detail how [...] I had been welcomed by the Essenes, mostly Israelites, who, through music and ancient Hebrew songs, had grown plants in half an hour."

"I have coined the phrase “Thinking is linking.” I thought of Kerenyi — “Mythology occupies a higher position in the bios, the Existence, of a people in which it is still alive than poetry, storytelling or any other art.” And of Malinowski — “Myth is not merely a story told, but a reality lived.” And, along with those, the word “Pollen,” the most pervasive substance in the world, kept knocking at my ear. Or rather, not knocking, but humming. What hums? What buzzes? What travels the world? Suddenly I found what I sought. “What the bee knows,” I told myself. “That is what I’m after.” But even as I patted my back, I found myself cursing, and not for the first time, the artful trickiness of words, their capriciousness, their lack of conscience. Betray them and they will betray you. Be true to them and, without compunction, they will also betray you, foxily turning all the tables, thumbing syntactical noses. For — note bene! — if you speak or write about What The Bee Knows, what the listener, or the reader, will get — indeed, cannot help but get — is Myth, Symbol, and Tradition! You see the paradox? The words, by their very perfidy — which is also their honorable intention — have brought us to where we need to be. For, to stand in the presence of paradox, to be spiked on the horns of dilemma, between what is small and what is great, microcosm and macrocosm, or, if you like, the two ends of the stick, is the only posture we can assume in front of this ancient knowledge — one could even say everlasting knowledge."

"You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for — if you are honest — you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one."

"We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child."

"Things essentially incorporeal, because they are more excellent than all body and place, are every where, not with interval, but impartibly. Things essentially incorporeal are not locally present with bodies but are present with them when they please; by verging towards them so far as they are naturally adapted so to verge. They are not, however, present with them locally, but through habitude, proximity, and alliance. Things essentially incorporeal, are not present with bodies, by hypostasis and essence; for they are not mingled with bodies. But they impart a certain power which is proximate to bodies, through verging towards them. For tendency constitutes a certain secondary power proximate to bodies."

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it."

"By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality. Explanation — I say absolutely infinite, not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation."

"Let no one think, however, that when we give him the name "wisdom of God" we mean anything without hypostatic existence that is, to take an illustration, that we understand him to be not as it were some wise living being, but a certain thing which makes men wise by revealing and imparting itself to those who are able to receive its influence and intelligence. If men it is once tighdy accepted that the only begotten Son of God is God's wisdom hypostatically existing, I do not think that our mind ought to stray beyond this to me suspicion that this hypostasis or substance could possibly possess bodily characteristics, since everything that is corporeal is distinguished by shape or color or size. And who in his sober senses ever looked for shape or color or measurable size in wisdom, considered solely as wisdom?"

"The world will accept you changing your style for them, but pretty soon they’re going to demand that you change your substance. They’re going to demand that you – well, they liked the fact that you’ve taken their method, but they’re going to demand you change your message."

"We shall see when we come to Newton's laws of motion that in the words "so far as in it lies," properly understood, is to be found the true primary definition of matter, and the true measure of its quantity. Descartes, however, never attained to a full understanding of his own words (quantum in se est), and so fell back on his original confusion of matter with space — space being, according to him, the only form of substance, and all existing things but affections of space. This error runs through every part of Descartes' great work, and it forms one of the ultimate foundations of the system of Spinoza. I shall not attempt to trace it down to more modern times, but I would advise those who study any system of metaphysics to examine carefully that part of it which deals with physical ideas. We shall find it more conducive to scientific progress to recognise, with Newton, the ideas of time and space as distinct, at least in thought, from that of the material system whose relations these ideas serve to co-ordinate."

"Whatsoever can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, belongs altogether only to one substance: consequently, substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through another. So, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways. This truth seems to have been dimly recognized by those Jews who maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by God are identical. ...Thus, whether we conceive of nature under the attribute of thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find the same order, or one and the same chain of causes — that is, the same things follow in either case. ...Wherefore of things as they are of themselves, God is really the cause, inasmuch as he consists of infinite attributes."

"This identification of extension with substance runs through the whole of Descartes's works, and it forms one of the ultimate foundations of the system of Spinoza."

"This Idea of Spinoza's we must allow to be in the main true and well-grounded; absolute substance is the truth, but it is not the whole truth; in order to be this, it must also be thought of as in itself active and living, and by that very means it must determine itself as mind. But substance with Spinoza is only the universal and consequently the abstract determination of mind ; it may undoubtedly be said that this thought is the foundation of all true views — not, however, as their absolutely fixed and permanent basis, but as the abstract unity which mind is in itself. It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy. For as we saw above … when man begins to philosophize, the soul must commence by bathing in this ether of the One Substance, in which all that man has held as true has disappeared ; this negation of all that is particular, to which every philosopher must have come, is the liberation of the mind and its absolute foundation."

"The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature."

"Spinoza redefines the problem of Modern philosophy, which is the conquest of the world and the liberation of humanity, and destroys both its multiple antinomies and the continually resurgent separation (dualistic, transcendental, etc.) in the theory of knowledge and history, in the same way that criticism has always destroyed Zenonian sophism: moving forward, putting reality in motion. Spinoza's philosophy is born from the radicalization of the ontological paradox of being: in the recognition that the hypostasis, the only possible hypostasis, is that of the world and of the development of its necessity from physics to practice. It is a conception of the world that immediately produces, as if from its own basis, a completely modern conception of science and worldly knowledge, both technical and liberatory. It is a radically materialistic conception of being and of the world."

"The Divine Logos is God reflected in His own eternal Thought; in the Logos God is His own Object. This infinite Thought, the reflection and counterpart of God, subsisting in God as a Being or Hypostasis, and having a tendency to self-communication,—such is the Logos. The Logos is the Thought of God, not intermittent and precarious like human thought, but subsisting with the intensity of a personal form. The very expression seems to court the argument of Athenagoras, that since God could never have been ἀλογος, the Logos must have been not created but eternal."

"In the Trika the god Śiva mostly appears in the hypostasis of Bhairava."

"Our Substance is our Father, God Almighty, and our Substance is our Mother, God, All-wisdom; and our Substance is in our Lord the Holy Ghost, God All-goodness."

"What matters for the progress of the myth is the fact common to all versions that the godhead, to meet the aggressor, had to produce a special "creation" representing his own self... in response to the ensuing fate of this divine hypostasis the further multiplication of divine figures out of the supreme source comes about. This is the general gnostic principle of emanation..."

"The being of substance does not appertain to the essence of man — in other words, substance does not constitute the actual being of man."

"Spinoza's use of the term finite tends to make space the only form of substance, and all existing things but affections of space, and this, I think, is really one of the ultimate foundations of his system."

"Substance is in its nature infinite, immutable, indivisible..."

"The trika is the essence of the śaiva tradition, and the Mālinī is the essence of the trika. (Abhinavagupta)"

"God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists."

"It is also clear that there can be no accident in God. If all perfections are one in Him, and if existence, power, action, and all such attributes pertain to perfection, they are necessarily all identical with His essence. Therefore none of these perfections is an accident in God."

"It's an indulgence to sit in a room and discuss your beliefs as if they were a juicy piece of gossip."

"Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal."

"I like doom and gloom with a sense of humour. Maybe it's a Scottish thing, we like to undercut indulgence with a laugh."

"...of the world and drudgery of business, seeks a pretense of reason to give itself a full and uncontrolled indulgence."

"Remember that every guilty compliance with the humors of the world, every sinful indulgence of our own passions, is laying up cares and fears for the hour of darkness, and that the remembrance of ill-spent time will strew our sick bed with thorns and rack our sinking spirits with despair."

"They err, that through indulgence to others, or fondness to any sin in themselves, substitute for repentance anything less."

"The taste for w:Luxuryluxuries increases with marvelous rapidity under indulgence."