Part Two: The Secret Life of Religion: Understanding the Inner Torah and the Inner Gospel

Religion has two faces; a public face and a private face. The public face is the outward observances, practices and behavior of those who practice it. The public face is what can be seen overtly by those who share the practice and by those on the outside. It ( Read more... )

Part One: Hanukah -The Festival of Lights: Christianity’s Unpaid Debt to Judas Maccabes

The banner that our Neo-Gnosticism marches under is “Be Your Own Messiah!” Frankly I stole the idea several years ago from a wonderful book, There Is No Messiah...And You’re It, written by Reform Rabbi Robert N. Levine. The idea is provocative and could serve in ( Read more... )

"There is a dividing line. We have always had a demand that is written even in the books of law: a person may be a great scholar, extremely intelligent and all that-but if he doesn't measure up to what he says, he is of no value and he shouldn't be honored. He shouldn't be respected; he's only talking.

~Excerpted from The Beginning of Wisdom

There is no use in talking about religion with anybody who is sure that God does not exist. {The subject matter} will irritate such a person and give him no light. I cannot change his mind, and I am not attempting it. But, I suggest that agnosticism, when it becomes ear-stopping dogma, may be as bad a mental handicap as superstition. There has ( Read more... )

Peter was the first Pope. That is what the Roman Catholic Church teaches. But historically this is not true. The tradition is based in scripture but not in historical fact. The Pope is, or was, the Bishop of Rome, an office that did not exist in Peter’s time. The Bishop of Rome didn’t come into being until well into the second century and it was ( Read more... )

The Judeo-Christian world tends to view the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God as an innovation in justice and holy living. Yet that is not the case. The Ten Commandments are a natural outgrowth or development of previous codes of justice that existed prior to that time. God may or may not have actually given the Ten Commandments to Moses that ( Read more... )