RELIGION AND THEOLOGY

Religion and Theology

Religion and Theology

Discussion 1

The heyday of ancient Greece lasted five centuries. Then the Greeks turned into a nation of shepherds. They will never again reach its former greatness. Quite different is the case with the Jews. They retain the creative activity throughout their four millenniums of history. They have contributed to the development of East and West, while East and West do not always realize the importance of this contribution, and even conscious, not always prepared to recognize themselves in debt to the Jews.

From the Jewish people came Jesus, whom Christians, 850 million, the largest religious community in modern times, says the Son of God. From the Jewish people came Paul, the founder of the Christian Church. The Jewish religion had a significant influence on Islam - the second largest religion of the modern world, numbering over 400 million followers, who consider themselves descendants of Abraham and Ishmael. Mormons say they are descendants of the tribes of Israel.

Another Jew worships more than one billion people. It - Karl Marx, whose book "Capital" is a secular gospel of world communism. Jewish mathematician Albert Einstein for his research in theoretical physics ushered in the atomic age, and opened to mankind the way to the moon. Jewish psychiatrist Sigmund Freud raised the curtain on the mysteries of the human mind. The discovery of psychoanalysis revolutionized all conceptions of man about himself and about the attitude of mind to matter. For three centuries before Freud Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza proclaimed the liberation philosophy of mysticism, thus opening the way for rationalism and modern science.

In the course of centuries, Jews have developed concepts such as prayer, church, salvation, universal education, charity. They introduced them in their everyday life for many centuries before all else, humanity was able to perceive. And yet, until 1948, for nearly two thousand years, Jews did not even have their own country. They lived among the Babylonians, lived in an environment of the Hellenistic world were present at the deathbed of the Roman Empire, flourished in the Islamic civilization, once again took to the stage of darkness, called the Middle Ages, and reached peaks of intellectual in modern times.

The great pagan nations that have arisen along with the Jews had since disappeared from history. The Babylonians, Persians, Phoenicians, Hittites, Philistines - all these people, once attained fame and power, have disappeared from the face of the earth. The Chinese, Indians and Egyptians are the only three people, whose age is comparable to the age of the Jews. But each of these people had only one period of cultural flowering. Their influence on the subsequent development of civilization was not so great. In contrast, Jews were not expelled from their lands and were not delivered before the problem of survival in foreign countries.

In Jewish history we see the three elements that distinguish it from all other people's stories. Jews account for over a 4000 years of continuous living history, their relentless spiritual and intellectual activity continues for more ...