All people are believers. Some rational beliefs are necessary and good. But the willing acceptance of pure fiction should be avoided. Both types of beliefs come from the same place, but education, social support, and critical thinking separate can make one person less prone to accept the unbelievable. When we look back on our history, […]
Section 1 walked through 50,000 years of religious history, stopping to explore various religious views from around the world. We saw many common threads during this journey, but the most pronounced was that religious thought is a most universal human trait. Humans are a race of believers. Every culture and every people, no matter how […]
So has modern man lost his desire for religion? The evidence does and doesn’t support this notion. While many a preacher would like to convince his audience that the world should return to some “Godlier time” lost in the past, the truth is that the number of people professing to be religious is about as […]
Mankind raced into the twentieth century like a child dashing into a circus tent. Looking at everything, imagining wonderful things, full of dreams and hopes. The natural sciences continued to amaze as better instruments revealed more and more about the universe. The inquisitive were measuring and experimenting with everything—mechanics, medicine, electricity, radio, psychology, and even […]
Around the globe, British, French, and Spanish explored new lands, met new peoples, and saw new cultures—often godless and quite happy places. Prosperous and moral people without any knowledge of a god who made the world in seven days, destroyed it in a flood, or would damn one to hell for not believing. Priests were […]
The new age of science, nationalism, missionary zeal, and, above all, economic desire for world trade routes, came together on the scores of ships embarking from Spanish and Portuguese ports. The explorers and traders pressed further out into the Atlantic, up to Greenland, and down the coast of Africa, trying to find a trade route […]
This chronology of the western religious experience is approaching familiar ground. Names, dates, and events of the Renaissance along with the courage, tenacity, and audacity of the great explorers are drilled into our youth. With familiarity and hindsight, it is easy to project modern preconceptions into the past, making the outcome of historical events look […]
Throughout the ages, people have looked back on their “golden age” of faith, be it ten years or a thousand years earlier, and idealize it as a better time—a more pure and true time. If ever there was a golden age for Christianity it occurred during the Middle Ages, in a time where the heart […]
