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Anthroposophy

Anthroposophy

Anthroposophy, also called spiritual science by its founder, Rudolf Steiner is a spiritual philosophy and system of beliefs and practice (or, as some opponents claim, a religion), that sprung from the Theosophy movement. The word is derived from the Greek words meaning man-wisdom. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with Anthropology, the scientific study of humankind.

History

The Anthroposophical Society was formed in 1912 after Steiner left the Theosophical Society Adyar over differences with its leader, Annie Besant. She intended to present to the world the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as Christ reincarnated. Steiner strongly objected, and considered any equation between Krishnamurti and Christ to be nonsense. This and other difficulties led Steiner to leave the Theosophical Society. He was followed by a large number of members of the Theosophical Society's German Section, of which he had been secretary. Members of other national chapters of the Theosophical Society followed. Most of the ideas of anthroposophy are claimed by Steiner to be based on his direct experiences of the Akashic Records (by Steiner sometimes called the "Akasha Chronicle"), a spiritual chronicle of the history and pre-history of the world encoded in the aether, and allegedly available to anyone who takes the time to develop sufficient powers of spiritual vision. Sound vision could be developed, Steiner said, in part by practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline, concentration and meditation. However, no anthroposophist since Steiner has yet claimed to be able to read the Akashic Records to any great degree. Anthroposophy has its own concept of history: according to Steiner our present time falls into the post-Atlantean period, since in his view the disaster that hit Atlantis in 7227 BC was a significant turning point in the history of man. The post-Atlantean period is divided into seven epochs, the current one being the European-American Epoch, which Steiner said would last until about the year 3573, unless various counterpossibilities intervened.

Description

Anthroposophy, although having been born into Theosophy and sharing many of the same concepts, emphasizes Western (rather than Hindu or Buddhist) esoteric thought, and perceives Christ and His mission on earth as having a particularly important place, though not viewed in the same way as in the mainstream Christian churches. Steiner's Christianity differs also from that of the Gnostics who viewed the Christ phenomenon through the knowledge gained through earlier gnosticism, whereas for Steiner Christ's incarnation was a historical reality and a pivotal and unique point in human history. Anthroposophy encourages clear and free thought, and the development of human consciousness beyond the material senses. It also encourages the artistic expression of one's perceptions. Steiner defined it as "a path of knowledge leading the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe." His concept of man includes the idea that man has inhabited earth since its creation, albeit in a spiritual form. This spiritual form then processed through a number of stages to reach its current form, stages which included emanation of lesser beings such as animals and plants. Thus every living thing has evolved from mankind (although "mankind" is not here seen in its usual sense, but includes its earlier spiritual forms). The anthroposophist's way could be said to go through becoming more conscious and deliberate about one's thoughts and deeds, but also by becoming more perceptive of and in tune with the spirit in himself and outside of himself . One may reach higher levels of consciousness through meditation and observation. Steiner described and developed numerous exercises for the realization of these goals. Steiner's description of the human being as consisting of seven intimately connected parts, starting on the material level and reaching up into the spiritual levels - and several of which are still in development - is similar to that found in Theosophy. This view is thoroughly explained in many of Steiner's writings and lectures, particularly in his books Theosophy, and An Outline of Occult Science. Anthroposophists however also hold a fourfold view, which Steiner expands on very frequently and puts to practical uses in subjects such as medicine and child education:
- the physical body,
- the etheric body,
- the astral body, and
- the ego or "I" of the human being.

Place in Western Philosophy

The Epistemic basis for Anthroposophy is contained in the seminal work, The Philosophy of Freedom, as well as in his doctoral thesis, Truth and Science. These and several other early books by Steiner anticipated 20th century continental philosophy's gradual overcoming of Cartesian idealism and of Kantian subjectivism. Like Edmund Husserl and Ortega y Gasset, Steiner was profoundly influenced by the works of Franz Brentano and had read Wilhelm Dilthey in depth. Through Steiner's early epistemological and philosophical works, he became one of the first European philosophers to overcome the subject-object split that Descartes, classical physics, and various complex historical forces had impressed upon Western thought for several centuries.

Applications

Practical results of Anthroposophy include work in:
- Architecture (Goetheanum),
- Biodynamic agriculture,
- Holistic Waldorf Education
- Astrosophy as opposed to Astrology,
- Anthroposophical Medicine (Weleda),
- Philosophy (The "Philosophy of Freedom"),
- Goethean Science resulting in new developments in the Arts,
- Eurythmy ("movement as visible speech"), and
- Centres for helping the mentally handicapped (Camphill Villages). Medical doctors in the Anthroposophy movement use, amongst others, homeopathy as a part of their medical practices. In addition, Steiner gave several series of lectures to physicians, and out of this grew a medical movement that now includes hundreds of European M.D.s as adherents, and that has its own hospitals and medical universities.

Social Goals of Anthroposophy

For a period after World War I, Steiner was extremely active and well-known in Germany in part because in many places he gave lectures on social questions. A petition expressing his basic social ideas (signed by Herman Hesse, among others) was very widely circulated. His main book on social questions, Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage (available in English today as Toward Social Renewal) sold tens of thousands of copies. Today around the world there are a number of innovative banks, companies, charitable institutions, and schools for developing new cooperative forms of business, all working partly out of Steiner’s social ideas. One example is The Rudolf Steiner Foundation, incorporated in 1984, and as of 2004 with estmated assets of $70 million. RSF provides "charitable innovative financial services". According to the independent organizations Co-op America and the Social Investment Forum Foundation, RSF is "one of the top 10 best organizations exemplifying the building of economic opportunity and hope for individuals through community investing."

Steiner's Outlook on Social History

In Steiner's various writings and lectures he held that there were three main spheres of power comprising human society: the cultural, the economic and the political. In ancient times, those who had political power were also generally those with the greatest cultural/religious power and the greatest economic power. Culture, State and Economy were fused (for example in ancient Egypt). With the emergence of classical Greece and Rome, the three spheres began to become more autonomous. This autonomy went on increasing over the centuries, and with the slow rise of egalitarianism and individualism, the failure adequately to separate economics, politics and culture was felt increasingly as a source of injustice.

Social Threefolding

:see full description in Social Threefolding article. There are three kinds of social separations Steiner wanted strengthened. This is known as Social Threefolding , # Increased separation between the State and cultural life # Increased separation between the economy and cultural life # Increased separation between the State and the economy (stakeholder economics)

Aspects of Anthroposophic Thinking

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists out of which the material one gradually condensed, and evolved. The spiritual world, Steiner held, can in the right circumstances be researched through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline. Details about the spiritual world, he said, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, not infallibly, but with approximate accuracy. Steiner was periodically at pains to discourage taking his research reports to be accurate or inaccurate -- an interpretation he considered relatively superficial. Steiner preferred readers to enter into the process of his thinking and not cling too rigidly to the fixed results, (i.e. the thoughts that crystallized out of that process). He often said there was a hidden life in thinking and advised people to attend more to the spirit of his words than to the letter. Otherwise he thought readers would fall into an excessive literalism and turn his work into a doctrine, a result he wanted to avoid. Some of Steiner's students support his claim that remaining actively within his process, can have the effect of awakening one gradually into forms of superconscious spiritual awareness. Steiner claims to offer a gradual experiential path from ordinary conceptual thinking into forms of thinking perceptive of living spiritual beings and mobile realities in the spiritual world. They claim that gaining access to the unusual forms of consciousness embodied in some of Steiner's works is not a matter of believing in or having faith in whatever Steiner chose to say about spiritual beings. It is instead they clam rather that Steiner's thinking, if adequately penetrated with one's own active questioning, thinking and feeling, eventually reveals itself as a sort of spiritual music full of aesthetic tensions and relaxations and various kinds of spiritual dynamism. This spiritual dynamism, they see as full of complex metamorphoses of form and color, and can itself eventually be perceived as the speaking and singing of living spiritual beings and of a real spiritual world. His students say that an obstacle to 'getting' Steiner, in this sense, is that reading for people today is rarely a process where the dynamic birth of a concept out of a pre-conceptual background is felt and recreated as we read each word. They see one way of remaining within the process of Steiner's thinking, is to gradually learn through his works how to live consciously at the threshold where a concept comes into being. In this way they say, one is no longer confined to observing things that already are, instead one begins to see realities emerging into being, and that means seeing to some extent into 'non-being', and discovering there more than nothingness buta hidden life of creative non-material beings and processes in a non-material world.

Critiques of Anthroposophy

Anthroposophy is controversial. Critics have termed it a cult with similarities to New Age movements. Supporters claim that in that case, it is one that strongly emphasizes individual freedom. Still, some critics maintain that anthroposophists tend to elevate Steiner's personal opinions, many of which are at odds with views generally held in orthodox religions, current science and the humanities, to the level of absolute truths. Supporters claim that if there is a degree of truth to this criticism, most of the blame belongs not to Steiner, but to his students. They point out that Steiner frequently asked his students to test everything he said, and on many occasions even begged them not to take anything he said on faith or authority. Another line of criticism asserts that some anthroposophists seem to distance their public activities from the possible inference that Anthroposophy is based on esoteric religious elements, tending to present themselves to the public as a non-sectarian academic philosophy. A difficulty in evaluating this criticism is that it arguably contains hidden bias because it ignores or begs a question anthroposophy sought to raise and answer: Is it possible for one's thinking to be both scientific and spiritually cognitive at once? Anthroposophy claims that it is possible. The aforementioned criticism, on the other hand, assumes that it is not, and therefore finds a contradiction between a claim of non-sectarianism and a foundation in non-physical or spiritual experience. The critics consider spiritual experience to be "religious" rather than cognitive. Such critics then read any reticence on the part of anthroposophists about their spiritual experiences and ideas as an effort to "hide" a spiritual basis for their various public activities, such as Waldorf schools.

External links

- [http://www.goetheanum.ch/ Anthroposophic Society (Goetheanum)]
- [http://www.rsarchive.org/ Rudolf Steiner Archive] (online works, see especially the [http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/ Books section])
- [http://www.anthroposophy.net/ The Anthroposophy Network]
- [http://www.sab.org.br/ Sociedade Antroposófica no Brasil]
- [http://www.anthroposophyindia.org/ Anthroposophical Initiatives in India]
- [http://www.anthroposophy.org/ Anthroposophical Society in America]
- [http://eyelight.webservepro.com/anthroposophy/introRS.html Article: Rudolf Steiner introduced by Owen Barfield.] (Owen Barfield's writings were a significant influence on C.S. Lewis (Anglican) and J. R. R. Tolkien (Catholic), neither of whom were anthroposophists. At the end of the article, Barfield uses the Latin phrase, "homo imaginans et amans" which means "man imagining and loving".)
- [http://www.skepdic.com/steiner.html The Skeptic's Dictionary] is more sympathetic than usual to a new religious esoteric movement.
- [http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/107/ "Audio McCarthyism"] Six page article from "Stereophile" magazine about Dan Dugan, the Secretary of PLANS (link to PLANS immediately below). The article presents Dugan as a user of McCarthyite deception and smear tactics. Dugan is also moderator of the "waldorf-critics" internet mailing list and a critic of anthroposophy.
- [http://www.waldorfcritics.org/ PLANS, People for Legal and Non-Sectarian Schools] (critical of Waldorf schools and Anthroposophy in general) Category:Esoteric Christianity Category:Esoteric schools of thought ja:人智学

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner (February 27, 1861, Murakirály, Hungary (today Donji Kraljevec, Croatia, (Medjimurje county) – March 30, 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker, who is best known as the founder of Anthroposophy and its practical applications, including Waldorf School, Biodynamic agriculture, the Camphill Movement, and the Christian Community. Steiner characterized history as essentially shaped by changes formed through a progressive development of human consciousness. The activity of individualised human thinking was seen as a relatively recent advance which led to the dramatic developments of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. In his epistemological works, he advocated the Goethean view that thinking itself is a perceptive instrument for ideas, just as the eye is a perceptive instrument for light. He characterized Anthroposophy as follows: :"Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe... Anthroposophists are those who experience, as an essential need of life, certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe, just as one experiences hunger and thirst." :::-Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts (1924)

Goethean scholar, philosopher, phenomenologist of spirit and sense perception

Steiner's father was a huntsman in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, and later became a telegraph operator and stationmaster on the Southern Austrian Railway. When Rudolf was born, his father was stationed in Murakirály in the Muraköz region, then part of Hungary (present-day Donji Kraljevec, Međimurje region, northernmost Croatia). When he was two years old, the family moved into Burgenland, Austria, in the foothills of the eastern Alps. Steiner displayed a keen and early interest in mathematics and philosophy. From 1879-1883 he attended the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Vienna, where he concentrated on mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1891, with his thesis Truth and Knowledge, he earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock in Germany. In 1888, Steiner was invited by Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony to edit the complete edition of Goethe's scientific works in Weimar, where he worked until 1896. During this time he also collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work. He wrote his seminal philosophical work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit (The Philosophy of Freedom) in 1894. It advocated the possibility that humans can become spiritually free beings through the conscious activity of thinking (see section on 'Philosophical Debate'). In 1896, Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Forster-Nietzsche, asked Steiner to set the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg in order. Her brother by that time was no longer compos mentis. Forster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher and Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. This book may be of interest, but arguably is not in the category of Steiner's most important works. Students of philosophy in particular are likely to find much more substantial grist if they start with Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom and his doctoral thesis, Truth and Science (Wahrheit und Wissenschaft). See also the list of (mostly non-philosophy) works in the 'Selected Bibliography' at the bottom. In 1897, Steiner moved to Berlin to edit the Magazin für Literatur. A turning-point came when, in the August 28, 1899 issue of this magazine, he published an article entitled "Goethe's Secret Revelation" on the esoteric nature of Goethe's fairy tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This article led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak to a gathering of Theosophists on the subject of Nietzsche. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, eventually becoming the head of its German Section. Beginning around this time (ca. 1900), till his death in 1925, Steiner articulated an ongoing stream of "experiences of the spiritual world" -- experiences he said had touched him from an early age on. Steiner sought to apply all his training in mathematics, science and philosophy in order to produce rigorous, intersubjectively testable presentations of those experiences. He also sought to bring a consciousness of spiritual life and non-physical beings into many practical domains - medicine, education, science, architecture, special education, social reform, agriculture, drama, etc. Steiner held that non-physical beings were in everything, and that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience such beings, and thus be strengthened for creative and loving work in the world. Steiner sought to be phenomenological (experience-based, rejecting immobile abstractions and assumptions). Like Edmund Husserl and Jose Ortega y Gasset, but preceding them, Steiner was intimately familiar with the philosophical work of Franz Brentano and Wilhelm Dilthey, both of whom were central precursors of the phemonenological movement in European philosophy. Steiner was also deeply influenced by Goethe's phenomenological approach to science. Unlike the Theosophists, Steiner encouraged the development of artistic efforts within the Society — and this was poorly received. Steiner also strongly objected when the leaders of the Theosophical Society declared that Krishnamurti was the reincarnation of Christ (Krishnamurti himself later repudiated the attempt to make him into a reincarnated messiah, shocking the other Theosophical leaders). Steiner quickly denied Krishnamurti was Christ, and held that Christ's earthly incarnation was a unique event. Steiner held that what trained spiritual vision could discover about most of the rest of humanity -- namely that the human being goes through a series of repeated earth lives -- did not apply to Christ. These and other conflicts eventually led Steiner and most of the German branch of theosophists to separate from the main body of Theosophists, and form the Anthroposophical Society, which was founded in 1912. The society remained active, and after years of extensive touring and lecturing, the organization needed a home for their activities. In 1913, Steiner was employed as architect for the first Goetheanum building in Dornach, Switzerland. It was built entirely by the work of volunteers who offered their skills of craftsmanship and trade. Once World War I started in 1914, the Goetheanum volunteers could hear the sound of cannon fire beyond the Swiss border, but despite the war, people from all over Europe worked peaceably side by side on the building's construction. By 1919, the first run of Goethe's Faust had been produced there — the same year as the founding of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart. The Goetheanum developed as a cultural centre which included activities in mathematics, medicine, Biodynamic agriculture, and schools of art. It was within the Society that Steiner met his wife Marie von Sievers, with whom he developed a new artform known as Eurythmy (aka 'visible speech'). On New Year's Eve, 1922, the first Goetheanum building was burned down by arsonists. Unwavered, work was begun on a second Goetheanum building — still under construction when he died in 1925. During the Christmas conference in 1923, he founded the School of Spiritual Science, which is also known as the Goetheanum or by some the spiritual Goetheanum. The distinction makes clear that the first Goetheanum was a building, a 'physical' architecture embodying the spirit (hence it was known as the house of the word, while the second Goetheanum consists of the spiritual architecture of those human beings active in it (members of the above school). The School has become increasingly active since Steiner's day, and is structured like a university. As such, it has three classes (years) and various sections (faculties). Within the society, it is seen as a centre of activity in education, agriculture, art, natural science, medicine, and economics.

Waldorf education

In 1919 Emil Molte, on behalf of workers of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, invited him to lecture on the topic of education. This, and subsequent lectures, formed the basis for the Waldorf Education movement (known in some countries as Steiner Education) — including, perhaps, the largest independent schooling system in the world. As of 2004, there are some 870 schools worldwide, including about 170 in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Somewhat independently of the Waldorf schools, a separate school for Spiritual Science was founded at the Goetheanum during Christmas 1923. Within the Anthroposophical society, it is seen as a centre of research in education, agriculture, art, natural science, medicine, and economics. This school has become increasingly active since Steiner's day.

Steiner the activist and the threefold nature of social life

Steiner's outlook on social history

The three kinds of social separations Steiner wanted strengthened

1) Increased separation between the State and cultural life Examples: The state should not be able to control culture; i.e., how people think, learn, or worship. A particular religion or ideology should not control the levers of the State. Steiner held that pluralism and freedom were the ideal for education and cultural life. 2) Increased separation between the economy and cultural life Examples: The fact that churches, temples and mosques do not make the ability to enter and participate dependent on the ability to pay, and that libraries and museums are open to all free of charge, is in tune with Steiner’s notion of a separation between cultural and economic life. In a similar spirit, Steiner held that all families, not just rich ones, should have freedom of choice in education and access to independent, non-government schools for their children. Other examples: A corporation should not be able to control the cultural sphere by using economic power to bribe schools into accepting ‘educational’ programs larded with advertising, or by secretly paying scientists to produce research results favorable to the business’s economic interests. 3) Increased separation between the State and the economy (assoicative economics) Examples: A rich man should be prevented from buying politicians and laws. A politician shouldn’t be able to parlay his political position into riches earned by doing favors for businessmen. Slavery is unjust, because it takes something political, a person’s inalienable rights, and absorbs them into the economic process of buying and selling. Steiner also advocated a more humanly orintated form of capital economy precisely because unfettered capital tends to absorb the State and human rights into the economic process and transform them into mere commodities.

Education's relation to the state and the economy

Steiner’s view of education’s social position calls for special comment. For Steiner, separation of the cultural sphere from the political and economic spheres meant education should be available to all children regardless of the ability of families to pay for it and, on the elementary and secondary level, should be provided for by private and|or state scholarships that a family could direct to the school of its choice. Steiner was a supporter of educational freedom, but was flexible, and understood that a few legal restrictions on schools (such as health and safety laws), provided they were kept to an absolute minimum, would be necessary and justified.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and three examples of macrosocial imbalance: # Theocracy, # Communism/state socialism, # Conventional capitalism Steiner held that the French Revolution’s slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” expressed in an unconscious way the distinct needs of the three social spheres at the present time: liberty in cultural life, equality in a democratic political life, and (uncoerced) fraternity/sorority in economic life. According to Steiner, these values, each one applied to its proper social realm, would tend to keep the cultural, economic and political realms from merging unjustly, and allow these realms and their respective values to check, balance and correct one another. The result would be a society-wide separation of powers. Steiner argued that increased autonomy for the three spheres would not eliminate their mutual influence, but would cause that influence to be exerted in a more healthy and legitimate manner, because the increased separation would prevent any one of the three spheres from dominating. In the past, according to Steiner, lack of autonomy had tended to make each sphere merge in a servile or domineering way with the others. For example, under theocracy, the cultural sphere (in the form of a religious impulse) fuses with and dominates the economic and political spheres. Under communism and state socialism, the political sphere fuses with and dominates the other two spheres. And under the typical sort of capitalist conditions, the economic sphere tends to dominate the other two spheres. Steiner points toward social conditions where domination by any one sphere is increasingly reduced, so that theocracy, communism, and the standard kind of capitalism might all be gradually transcended. For Steiner, threefolding was not a social recipe or blueprint. It could not be "implemented" like some utopian program in a day, a decade, or even a century. It was a complex open process that began thousands of years ago and that he thought was likely to continue for thousands more. Apart from his central book on social questions, Toward Social Renewal, there are at least two others available in English: World Economy (14 lectures from 1922) and The Social Future (revised edition 1972). My kid goes here and its a great school - John Lewis www.silvertrain.com

Architecture, eurythmy and free spiritual culture

Steiner developed an organic style of architecture for the design and construction of some seventeen buildings. The most significant of these are the first and second Goetheanums. These two structures, both built in Dornach, Switzerland (the first beginning in 1913), were intended to house a University for Spiritual Science. The first Goetheanum was burned down by arsonists on New Year's eve 1922. Several surrounding buildings he designed survived the blaze (the Glasshaus, Haus Duldeck, the Transformerhaus, etc.). Construction of the second Goetheanum building began on the same site shortly before he died in 1925. He conceived it as an organic extension and metamorphosis of the first building, inspiring and pre-dating architects such as Le Corbusier, and Eero Saarinen's Kennedy Airport (1962). Within the Society, Steiner met his wife Marie von Sievers, with whom he developed a new artform (that also has therapeutic uses) known as Eurythmy (German: "Eurythmie")— sometimes referred to as "visible speech and visible song". It is interesting to note, however, that the "designs" for Eurythmy were never fully completed. Whereas now Eurythmists only use their arms to create diffrent "sounds" (with the lower half of the body used for walking the rhythm) Steiner wanted the legs to create "sounds" too- unfortunately he died before he could introduce the idea. Eurythmy performances are still held at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and at various theatres throughout the world. There are now a number of Eurythmy schools where a full four-year training is given. As Playwright, he wrote four "Mystery Dramas" between 1909 and 1913, including "The Portal of Initiation" and "The Soul's Awakening". They are still performed today. As a sculptor, his primary work was The Representative of Humanity (1922). This enormous work carved in wood is still on display at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Weleda, biodynamic farming, Camphill

A philosophic basis rooted in a practical sensibility yielded continuations to his work. In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda, which now distributes natural medical products worldwide. In 1924, a series of lectures to a group of farmers concerned about the destructive trend of "scientific farming" originated the practice of biodynamic agriculture, which is now practiced throughout much of Europe, North America, and Australasia. Biodynamic farming is not merely organic -- in addition it works with the movement patterns of the stars and the moon, and with the non-physical beings in nature, and seeks to do testable research on how agriculture can produce the best quality food. In 1939, based on a series of lectures Steiner gave in the 1920s on special education, physician Karl Konig founded the Camphill Movement in Scotland as a place to provide treatment for children with severe learning disabilities. There are currently more than a dozen Camphill Villages and eight Colleges providing a home for more than 1000 residents.

A few aspects of Steiner's way of thinking

According to Steiner, a real spiritual world exists out of which the material one gradually condensed, so to speak, and evolved. The spiritual world, Steiner held, can in the right circumstances be researched through direct experience, by persons practicing rigorous forms of ethical and cognitive self-discipline. Steiner described many exercises he said were suited to strengthening such self-discipline so that a practicioner's consciousness could enter the 'spiritual world'. Details about the spiritual world, he said, could on such a basis be discovered and reported, not infallibly, but with approximate accuracy. Yet Steiner was periodically at pains to discourage taking his spiritual research reports as either accurate or inaccurate 'information' -- an interpretation he considered relatively superficial. Steiner preferred for readers to enter into the process of his thinking and not cling too rigidly to the fixed results, i.e. the thoughts that crystallized out of that process. He often said there was a hidden life in thinking and advised people to attend more to the spirit or 'drift' of his words than to the letter. Otherwise readers would fall into an excessive literalism and turn his work into a doctrine, a result he said he wanted to avoid. Those of Steiner's students alert to this distinction (e.g. Georg Khulewind, author of From Normal to Healthy) are wont to affirm Steiner’s claim that remaining actively within the process, as opposed to the results of Steiner's thinking, can have the effect of awakening one gradually into forms of superconscious spiritual awareness. Steiner claims to offer a gradual experiential path from ordinary conceptual thinking into forms of thinking perceptive of living spiritual beings and mobile realities in the spiritual world. Perhaps because the spiritual path Steiner offers claims to be based, in many respects, on the gradual transformation of thinking into a wholly new activity of the whole person -- an activity of thought, feeling and will seamlessly integrated into a form of spiritual awareness that eventually leaves the body and peregrinates through spiritual worlds -- Steiner's teaching has attracted a number of trained scientists, physicians, and scholars in various fields. Steiner periodically affirmed that gaining access to the unusual forms of consciousness supposedly embodied in some of his works was not a matter of believing in or having faith in whatever he chose to say about spiritual beings. It was rather that some of the thinking in some of those works, if adequately penetrated with one's own active questioning, thinking and feeling, would eventually reveal itself as a kind of spiritual music full of aesthetic tensions and relaxations and various kinds of spiritual dynamism, and this spiritual dynamism, full of complex metamorphoses of form and color, would itself eventually be perceived as the speaking and singing of real, living spiritual beings and of a real spiritual world. And this would still be only a hint of what a student could experience who learned to enter the spiritual world fully and carry out further 'research.' Steiner also occasionally averred that this consciousness of the spirit was not so much related to the content of his statements, where he tells readers the characteristics of this or that spiritual being (or something similar) that he says he has perceived. It was not so much such content that was effective, he said, but rather something a bit deeper, within the content, that he indicated would lead one to begin to enter higher states of awareness and 'hear' or 'see' spiritual beings as one thought through his 'research reports'. The mere content was so to speak thrown up to the surface of Steiner's thinking by the style, or more precisely, by the movement and metamorphic-metaphoric process of his thinking, and it was this underlying formative process (or portions of it in some of his lectures and books), he said, that could gradually lead to a sort of superconsciousness awareness of living in spiritual worlds at least as real and persuasive as the physical world. Whereas mere content could be memorized like recipes, and then parroted mindlessly, formative process could only be experienced if one actively recreated it from within. Some of Steiner's more philosophically inclined students argue that an obstacle to 'getting' Steiner, in the just mentioned sense, is that reading for people today is rarely a process where the dynamic birth of the conceptual out of a pre-conceptual background is felt and recreated as we read each word. When reading is creative today, that creativity tends to be confined within conceptual life, and only rarely extends to the threshold between conceptual and pre-conceptual life, the threshold where not just this or that concept, but conceptuality itself, can be experienced in the process of its creative origination, and seen at its core as fundamentally an imaginative birthing activity. Lacking awareness of this particular threshold, we also lack consciousness of the elastic poetic dynamism at the very basis not only of our most 'literal' ideas and scientific terminologies, but at the basis of the world process itself. Again, some philosophical students of Steiner claim that one way of remaining within the process (as opposed to the results) of Steiner's thinking, would be to gradually learn through his works how to live consciously at the threshold where conceptuality comes into being. There one would supposedly no longer be confined to observing things that already are -- one would begin to see realities emerging into being, and that would mean seeing to some extent into 'non-being' itself, and discovering there more than mere nothingness: a hidden life of creative non-material beings and processes in a non-material world.

Steiner criticism

Though the emphasis anthroposophists place on individual freedom and thought limits the tendency toward group-think and prevents anthroposophy from turning into a cult - if a cult is something that deprives its members of spiritual and intellectual freedom - a critical approach to the works of Steiner is not as common as some would like and not always welcomed within some Anthroposophic circles. Given Steiner's clear statements about political democracy being the proper kind of State for humanity, his consistent and emphatic support for liberty and pluralism in education, religion, scientific opinion, the arts, and in the press, not to mention his rejection of the idea that the State should take over economic life - one cannot justly link Steiner or his movement with a totalitarian intent. There are scientists acquainted with the topics Steiner touched-upon who regard him as substandard and unprofessional in his methods, and therefore completely disregard his works. However, a number of trained physicists, biologists, medical doctors, architects, philosophers, and other scholars claim to find creative genius in Steiner's comments on detailed aspects of each of their fields. Research centers staffed by trained professionals in various fields of study do research along lines suggested or inspired by Steiner's ideas. Some of the better known scientists and scholars who have been deeply influenced by Steiner are listed two paragraphs down. Access to Steiner's original manuscripts is controlled by Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung. Most of the some 350 volumes of works by Steiner are based on third-party stenographic reports of his lectures. Often more than one stenographer was present taking down a lecture, so the reliability of these reports and their accuracy is frequently good or excellent, but certainly not perfect. There are some scientists and intellectuals who admire Steiner's efforts to transform ordinary thinking gradually into a higher thinking that is at the same time a perceiving of the spiritual world. Examples of books and authors profoundly influenced by Steiner: physicist Henri Bortoft's The Wholeness of Nature, physicist Arthur Zajonc's Catching the Light, physicist Georg Unger's Forming Concepts in Physics, physicist Stephen Edelglass' The Marriage of Sense and Thought, biologist Craig Holdrege's Genetics and the Manipulation of Life, theoretical chemist Jos Verhulst's Developmental Dynamics in Humans and Other Primates, theoretical chemist Georg Khulewind's From Normal to Healthy, biologist Wolfgang Schad's Man and Mammals: Toward a Biology of Form, medical doctor Robert Zieve's Healthy Medicine, medical doctor Victor Bott's Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine, philosopher Owen Barfield's World's Apart, philosopher Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind, cultural critic Theodore Roszak's Unfinished Animal. See also computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's comments on Steiner, or those of Albert Schweitzer. Andrei Belyi, the great Russian symbolist writer, was also profoundly influenced by Steiner and wrote essays about him. Franz Kafka gave what, from his own particular literary perspective, was perhaps the highest compliment, in his diaries calling Steiner's mystery plays 'incomprehensible' (or something similar). See also the collection of scientific articles edited by physicist Arthur Zajonc and architect David Seamon, Goethe's Way of Science, A Phenomenology of Nature. Nevertheless, Steiner remains unknown by many and rejected by others. The high regard in which Steiner is held within the Anthroposopical movement, which sees his teaching as foundational, has prompted some critics to see Steiner as a founder of a religion, not as a philosopher in the usual sense of the word. The idea, if there is a degree of truth to it, evolves from overzealous students, not from Rudolf Steiner. Steiner frequently asked his students to test everything he said, and not to take his statements on authority or faith. He also said that if it had been practicable, he would have changed the name of his teachings every day, to keep people from hanging on to the literal meaning of those teachings, and to stay true to their character as something intended to be alive and metamorphic. Nor was Steiner shy about saying that his works would gradually become obsolete, and that each generation should rewrite them. Individual freedom and spiritual independence are among the values Steiner most emphasized in his books and lectures. Steiner's views of Christianity have been criticized as heretical. Only a very simplified account of those views can be given here, because though they only amount to about 4% of his total works, that 4% still amounts to about 15 volumes of books and lectures -- and many of the other 335 or more volumes contain additional scattered comments on Christianity. Steiner said that anyone could develop disciplined spiritual vision and that such vision could see that there were two Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ (one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke— this might seem a bit less strange when one recalls that 'Jesus' was a common name in biblical times); that the divine "Christ Spirit", the Son-God of the Trinity, incarnated in the Nathan Jesus at the moment of the baptism by John; that up until the moment of the baptism by John in the Jordan, the Nathan Jesus was a very great holy man, but not yet the divine Son of God; that "the Christ Being" is not only the Redeemer of the Fall from Paradise, but also the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and of human history; that Yahveh (Jehovah) dwelt in the moon, but Elohim in the Sun; and that the second coming of the Christ meant the Christ would, for slowly increasing numbers of people, become manifest in the etheric realm beginning around the year 1933. (Steiner was not referring to the hypothetical ether of 19th century physicists, and on several occasions carefully distinguished his own use of the term from their use of it.) Occasionally Steiner is criticized for his advice to delay reading until students reach the age 6 or 7. Still, a government commission in Germany conducted a study in the 1990s and found that German Waldorf school (Steiner school) graduates scored significantly higher than German public school graduates on the Abitur, a high school graduate exam widely administered in Germany. The significance of this finding is questionable, because not all Waldorf students are admitted to prepare for the Abitur. On the other hand many Waldorf Schools have a lack in teaching staff, this results in most Waldorf students not having the possibility to select the subjects they want to be tested on for the Abitur, like it is still being done in public schools of some federal provinces. But in the wake of the centralized Abitur this practice will eventually diminish in the next few years. Some critics say the Waldorf schools' emphasis on imagination and creativity can sometimes lead to child-led class sessions without focus or direction. To the contrary, Waldorf educators report that it is a highly structured, disciplined educational model. The emphasis on arts and creativity complements a challenging curricula.

Philosophical debate

The claim he made in this book to have disproved transcendental idealism, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant—he had read the whole of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by the age of 14—has been rejected by some philosophers, accepted by others, and remains unknown to many. Richard Tarnas, in his book The Passion of the Western Mind, includes Steiner as one significant figure within the whole history of thought. Tarnas wrote, ...at almost precisely the same time that the Enlightenment reached its philosophical climax in Kant, a radically different epistemological perspective began to emerge—first visible in Goethe...developed in new directions by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, and Emerson, and articulated within the past century by Rudolf Steiner. Each of these thinkers gave his own distinct emphasis to the developing perspective, but common to all was a fundamental conviction that the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory...In essence this alternative conception did not oppose the Kantian epistemology but rather went beyond it, subsuming it in a larger and subtler understanding of human knowledge. The new conception fully acknowledged the validity of Kant's critical insight, that all human knowledge of the world is in some sense determined by subjective principles; but instead of considering these principles as belonging ultimately to the separate human subject, and therefore not grounded in the world independent of human cognition, this participatory conception held that these subjective principles are in fact an expression of the world's own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world's own process of self-revelation. In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it 'objectively' and register it from without. Rather, nature's unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature's reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. - Richard Tarnas, p.433-434, 1991. On the basis of this epistemology, Steiner attempted to develop a qualitative science to complement the quantitative science of Newton, Galileo and Einstein. Steiner claimed that if one practiced various systematic forms of inner discipline, it would be possible to create an increasingly objective, testable knowledge of a noumenal or spiritual world. While small groups of scientists find brilliant originality in Steiner's scientific work and seek to carry it forward (see, for example, The Wholeness of Nature by physicist Henri Bortoft), the majority of scientists have never heard of Steiner, and of the minority who have, most probably take his work to be unscientific. Scientists developing Steiner's work argue that it sometimes doesn't receive a fair hearing because of prejudice against even the possibility of a qualitative science of non-physical worlds.

Selected bibliography

The style and content of Steiner's works can vary greatly. Therefore, while it might be stimulating to read a single lecture or book by Steiner, it would probably be a mistake, having read even four or five of his books, to suppose one has a representative picture of the whole body of his work. Out of the 350 volumes of his collected works (including roughly forty written books, and over 6000 published lectures), some of the more significant works include
- The Philosophy of Freedom (1894)
- How to Know Higher Worlds (1904-5)
- Anthroposophy and the Inner Life (1924)
- Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886)
- Theosophy (1904)
- Study of Man (1919) (Waldorf Education)
- Practical Advice To Teachers (1919)
- The Education of the Child (1907)
- Toward Social Renewal (1919)
- An Outline of Esoteric Science (1913)
- Four Mystery Dramas - The Soul's Awakening (1913)
- Truth and Science (doctoral thesis)
- Man as Symphony of the Creative Word (1923)

External links

- [http://www.tzm.hr/main.php?g=5/ Rudolf Steiner's home]
- [http://www.goetheanum.ch/ Goetheanum]
- [http://www.RudolfSteinerWeb.com/ Rudolf Steiner Overview]
- [http://www.halloran.com/rsteiner.gif Birth chart from astrology software]
- [http://www.defendingsteiner.com/ Rudolf Steiner and Criticism]
- [http://www.anthroposophy.net/ The Anthroposophy Network]
- [http://www.calendarofthesoul.net Calendar of the Soul]
- [http://www.rsarchive.com/Steiner/ The Rudolf Steiner On-Line Archive]
- [http://www.anthropress.org/ Steiner Books]
- [http://www.rsfoundation.org/ Rudolf Steiner Foundation]
- [http://camphillassociation.org/ Camphill Association]
- [http://usa.weleda.com/ Weleda]
- [http://www.thechristiancommunity.org/ The Christian Community]
- [http://www.steiner.org.au/ Steiner pre-school facing closure]
- [http://mysite.verizon.net/res2216j/wonder/ Wonder Ranch Waldorf Homeschool]
- [http://themysticlight.tripod.com/cosmoconception.htm/ Heindel-Steiner connection ] Steiner, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf ja:ルドルフ・シュタイナー

Religion

)]] Religion (see etymology below) —sometimes used interchangeably with faith or belief system—is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine; and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions and rituals associated with such belief. In its broadest sense some have defined it as the sum total of answers given to explain humankind's relationship with the universe. In the course of the development of religion, it has taken many forms in various cultures and individuals. Occasionally, the word "religion" is used to designate what should be more properly described as "organized religion" – that is, an organization of people supporting the exercise of some religion, often taking the form of a legal entity (see religion-supporting organization). There are many different religions in the world today.

Etymology

religion-supporting organization] The origins of the word "religion" have been debated for centuries. Some explanations for the origin of the word are:
- re-reading--from Latin re (again) + legio (read), referring to the repetition of scripture.
- treating carefully--from Latin relegere (Cicero's interpretation)
- re-connection to the divine--from Latin re (again) + ligare (to connect, as in English ligament). This interpretation is favoured by modern scholars such as Tom Harpur, but probably originated with St. Augustine.
- to bind or return to bondage--an alternate interpretation of the "reconnection" etymology, possibly also originating with Augustine but emphasising a sense of servitude to God. However, the bondage interpretation, while popular with critics of religion, is often considered imprecise and possibly offensive in many modern religious contexts.
- concerning a gathering--from Latin ablative res (with regard to) + legere (to gather). More emphatically, religion concerns an organization. What is clear about the word "religion" is that the religious connotations (in the sense of gods, morality, afterlife, etc.) were not a part of the term's Latin precursors.

Religion and science

According to the religious, knowledge can be gained from a religious leader, a sacred text, or personal revelation. It is not limited in scope and can try to answer any question. Some religious people maintain that knowledge obtained in this way is absolute and infallible (religious cosmology). Religious knowledge tends to vary from religion to religion, from sect to sect, and from individual to individual. In contrast, the scientific method gains knowledge by interaction with the world, and can only answer cosmological questions about the physical universe. It tries to give theories of the world which best fit the observed evidence. All scientific knowledge is tentative, and subject to later improvement or revision in the face of better evidence. It should be noted that science can not only describe the world physically, but can also state facts that aren't physical, e.g. facts of economics, linguistics or much of psychology. Many early scientists held strong religious beliefs (see Scientists of Faith) and strove to reconcile science and religion. Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the sun, but credited God with the design. In the concluding General Scholium to the Principia Mathematica he wrote "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Nevertheless, conflict arose between religious organisations and individuals who propogated scientific theories which they deemed unaccaptable. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has reserved to itself the right to decide which scientific discoveries are acceptable and which are unacceptable. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for unacceptable scientific theories, while Galileo was tried and forced to recant the theory that the earth goes around the sun. The modern Roman Catholic Church accepts most current scientific theories, but still reserves the right to make the final judgment. Here are a few of the areas in which some scientists and the organized Church have come into conflict from time to time.
- Does the earth move around the sun or does the sun move around the earth?
- Is the earth a few thousand years old or more than a billion years old?
- Was there a flood that covered all the earth?
- Did the various species evolve or were they individually created by God? (see Evolution)
- Did the universe have a beginning or is it infinite?
- Is the speed of light constant and is Einstein's Theory of Relativity correct?
- Does radioactive decay occur at a predictable rate? (see Age of the Earth)

Philosophy and metaphysics

In between the doctrines of religion and science, stands the philosophical perspective of metaphysical cosmology. This ancient field of study seeks to draw logical conclusions about the nature of the universe, humanity, and god. One important philosophical tool that attempts to resolve the conflict between religion and science is Occam's razor, which was originally developed by William of Occam to support religion but is now often used in the philosophy of science to support science. Occam's razor cuts both ways. One should also take note of the related philosophic field of epistemology which questions the very nature of how we come to understand and accept that a belief is true or false, such as belief in Darwinian evolution as compared to Christian young earth creationism and vice versa. young earth creationism]

Esotericism and mysticism

:young earth creationism] Mysticism, in contrast with philosophy and metaphysics, denies that logic is the most important method of gaining enlightenment. Rather physical disciplines such as yoga, starvation, self-strangulation, or whirling (in the case of the Sufi dervishes) or the use of drugs such as LSD, lead to higher states of consciousness that logic can never hope to grasp. Mysticism ("to conceal") is the pursuit of communion with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct, personal experience (intuition or insight) rather than rational thought. Mystics believe in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible through personal experience. They believe that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge. Esotericism claims to be more sophisticated than religion, to rely on intellectual understanding rather than faith, and to improve on philosophy in its emphasis on techniques of psycho-spiritual transformation (esoteric cosmology). Esotericism refers to "hidden" knowledge available only to the advanced, privileged, or initiated, as opposed to exoteric knowledge, which is public. It applies especially to spiritual practices. The mystery religions of ancient Greece and the modern religion of Scientology are examples of Esotericism. Esotericism

Spirituality

Members of an organized religion may not see any significant difference between religion and spirituality. Or they may see a distinction between the mundane, earthly aspects of their religion and its spiritual dimension. Some individuals draw a strong distinction between religion and spirituality. They may see spirituality as a belief in ideas of religious significance (such as God, the Soul, or Heaven), but not feel bound to the bureaucratic structure and creeds of a particular organized religion. They choose the term spirituality rather than religion to describe their form of belief, perhaps reflecting a disillusionment with organized religion (see Religion in modernity), and a movement towards a more "modern" — more tolerant, and more intuitive — form of religion. These individuals may reject organized religion because of historical acts by religious organizations, such as Islamic terrorism or the Spanish Inquisition. Mahatma Gandhi who was born a Hindu wrote the following about religion in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth :"Thus if I could not accept Christianity either as a perfect, or the greatest religion, neither was I then convinced of Hinduism being such. Hindu defects were pressingly visible to me. If untouchability could be a part of Hinduism, it could but be a rotten part or an excrescence. I could not understand the raison d'etre of a multitude of sects and castes. What was the meaning of saying that the Vedas were the inspired Word of God? If they were inspired, why not also the Bible and the Koran? As Christian friends were endeavouring to convert me, so were Muslim friends. Abdullah Sheth had kept on inducing me to study Islam, and of course he had always something to say regarding its beauty." He then went on to say: :"As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side." He also said the following about Hinduism: :"Hinduism as I know it entirely satisfies my soul, fills my whole being ... When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and when I see not one ray of light on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. My life has been full of tragedies and if they have not left any visible and indelible effect on me, I owe it to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita." Later in his life when he was asked whether he was a Hindu, he replied: :"Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew."

Myth

Hindu, Israel]] The word "myth" has two main meanings, according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: # a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon # a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence Ancient polytheistic religions, such as those of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, are categorized under the heading of mythology. Religions of pre-industrial peoples, or cultures in development, are similarly called myths in the anthropology of religion. Mythology can be a term used pejoratively by both religious and non-religious people. But by defining another person's religious stories and beliefs as mythology, one implies that they are less real than one's own religious stories and beliefs. The term "myth" in sociology, however, has a non-pejorative meaning. There "myth" is defined as stories that are important for the group and not necessarily untrue. Examples include the death and resurrection of Jesus, which, to Christians, explains the means by which they are freed from sin, as well as being ostensibly a historical event.

Approaches to the study of individual religions

Methods of studying religion subjectively (in relation to one's own beliefs)

These include efforts to determine the meaning and application of "sacred" texts and beliefs in the context of the student's personal worldview. This generally takes one of three forms:
- one's own — efforts by believers to ascertain the meaning of their own sacred text or other traditions, and to conform their thoughts and actions to the principles enunciated in those traditions. For most believers, this involves a lifetime process of study, analysis, and practice. Some faiths, such as Hasidic Judaism, emphasize adherence to a set of rules and rituals. Other faiths, such as Christianity, emphasize the internalization and application of a set of abstract principles, such as Love, Justice, or Faith. Some believers interpret their scriptures literally, and apply the text exactly as it is written. Other believers try to interpret scripture and other tradition through its context, to derive abstract principles which they may apply more directly to their lives and contexts. Jesus
- another's compared to one's own — efforts by believers of one belief system attempt to describe a different belief system in terms of their own beliefs. One example of this method is in David Strauss's 1835 The Life of Jesus. Strauss's theological approach strikes from the Biblical text the descriptions of angels and miracles which, due to his presupposition that supernatural events do not occur, he does not believe could have occurred. He then concludes that the stories must have been inserted by a "supernaturalist" merely trying to make an important story more convincing. In this course of his argument, Strauss argues that the supernaturalist who inserted the angels into the story of the birth of Christ borrowed the heathen doctrine of angels from the Babylonians who had held the Jews in captivity. That is, the New Testament's fabulous role for angels "is evidently a product of the influence of the Zend religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind." Due to his presumption that supernatural events do not occur, he dismisses the possibility that both cultures came to believe in angels independently, as a result of their own experiences and context.
- another's as defined by itself — efforts by believers of one belief system to understand the heart and meaning of another faith on its own terms. This very challenging approach to understanding religion presumes that each religion is a self-consistent system whereby a set of beliefs and actions depend upon each other for coherence, and can only be understood in relation to each other. This method requires the student to investigate the philosophical, emotional, religious, and social presuppositions that adherents of another religion develop and apply in their religious life, before applying their own biases, and evaluating the other faith. For instance, an individual who personally does not believe in miracles may attempt to understand why adherents of another religion believe in miracles, and then attempt to understand how the individual's belief in miracles affects their daily life. While the individual may still himself not believe in miracles, he may begin to develop an understanding of why people of other faiths choose to believe in them.

Methods of studying religion objectively (in a scientific and religiously neutral fashion)

There are a variety of methods employed to study religion which seek to be religiously neutral. One's interpretation of these methods depends on one's approach to the relationship between religion and science, as discussed above.
- Epistemological and ontological approaches to religion deal with the very nature of how one comes to accept any belief or assumption as true on its own terms and questions such matters of the nature of reality and existence of the universe and humanity. Such an approach may begin from philosophic first principles of epistemology and philosophic logic such as the law of non-contradiction, the law of excluded middle and others. This is perhaps one of the strongest approaches as one's assumptions here will underline one's assumptions and subsequent approaches to analysis of all of the history, people, sciences (or pseudosciences), humanities and social sciences, texts, ideologies, literatures, emotions and experiences associated with religions.
- Historical, archeological, and literary approaches to religion include attempts to discover the sacred writings at the "dawn of humanity." For example, Max Müller in 1879 launched a project to translate the earliest sacred texts of Hinduism into English in the Sacred Books of the East. Müller's intent was to translate for the first time the "bright" as well as the "dark sides" of non-Christian religions into English. [http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe01/sbe01002.htm]
- Anthropological approaches include attempts to lay out the principles of native tribes that have had little contact with modern technology as in John Lubbock's The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man. [http://darwin.lib.cam.ac.uk/perl/nav?pclass=calent&pkey=7286] :The term "religion" is problematic for anthropologists, and their approaches to the subject are quite varied. Some take the view that religion, particularly in less technically complex cultures, is a form of proto-science--a primitive attempt to explain and predict phenomena in the natural world, similar to modern science but less advanced. :However, most modern anthropologists reject this view as antiquated, ethnically and intellectually chauvinistic, and unsupported by cross-cultural evidence. Science has very specific methods and aims, while the term "religion" encompasses a huge spectrum of practices, goals, and social functions. In addition to explaining the world (natural or otherwise), religions may also provide mechanisms for maintaining social and psychological well-being, and the foundations of moral/ethical, economic, and political reasoning. :While many early anthropologists attempted to catalogue and universalize these functions and their origins, modern researchers have tended to back away from such speculation, preferring a more holistic approach: The object of study is the meaning of religious traditions and practices for the practitioners themselves--religion in context--rather than formalized theories about religion in general.
- Sociological approaches include attempts to explain the development of the ideas of morality and law, as in for example, Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive hypothesizing in 1842 that people go through stages of evolution 1) obeying supernatural beings, then 2) manipulating abstract unseen forces, and finally 3) exploring more or less scientifically the social laws and practical governmental structures that work in practice. Within a sociological approach, religion is but the earliest primitive stage of discovering what is morally right and wrong in a civilized society. It is the duty of intelligent men and women everywhere to take responsibility for shaping the society without appealing to a non-existent Divinity to discover empirically what moral concepts actually work in practice, and in the process, the shapers of society must take into account that there is no Divine authority to adjudicate between what are only the opinions of men and women. Comte wrote, in translation, "It can not be necessary to prove to anybody who reads this work that Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos; in other words, that all social mechanism rests upon Opinions. The great political and moral crisis that societies are now undergoing is shown by a rigid analysis to arise out of intellectual anarchy." The intellectual anarchy includes the warring oppositions among the world's religions. [http://www.forum-global.de/soc/bibliot/comte/comtepositivephilosophy.htm]
- Psychological approaches. The Psychology of religion involves the gathering and classification of data (usually wide ranging) and the building of the explanations of the psychological processes underlying the religious experiences and beliefs. It includes a wide variety of researches (psychoanalytical and others) : Sigmund Freud (Oedipus Complex, Illusion), Carl Jung (Universal archetypes), Erich Fromm (Desire, Need for stable frame), William James (Personal religious experience, Pragmatism), Alfred Adler (Feeling of inferiority, Perfection), Ludwig Feuerbach (Imagination, Wishes, Fear of Death), Gordon Alport (Mature religion and Immature religion), Erik Erikson (Influence on personality development), Rudolf Otto (Non-rational experience), James Leuba (Mystical experiences and drugs).
- Philosophical approaches include attempts to derive rational classifications of the views of the world that religions preach as in Immanuel Kant's 1788 Critique of Practical Reason. Within a philosophical approach, the reason for a religious belief should be more important than the emotional attachment to the belief. [http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/etext04/ikcpr10.txt] And in attempting to provide a reasonable basis for morality, Kant proposed the categorical imperative: "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." [http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/etext04/ikfpm10.txt]
- Neuroscientific approaches seek to explore the apparent similarities among religious views dominant in diverse cultures that have had little or no contact, why religion is found in almost every human group, and why humans accept counterintuitive statements in the name of religion. In neuroscience, work by scientists such as Ramachandran and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego [http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web2/Eguae.html] suggests evidence of brain circuitry in the temporal lobe associated with intense religious experiences. See also neurotheology, the scientific study of the biological basis of spiritual experience.
- Sociological approaches include the work of Rodney Stark who has looked at the social forces that have caused religions to grow and the features of religions that have been most successful. For example, Stark, who claims to be an agnostic, hypothesizes that, before Christianity became established as the state religion of Constantinople, Christianity grew rapidly because it provided a practical framework within which non-family members would provide help to other people in the community in a barter system of mutual assistance. Similarly, evolutionary psychology approaches consider the survival advantages that religion might have given to a community of hunter-gatherers, such as unifying them within a coherent social group. : Critics assert that this approach is inadequate insofar as it asserts that people subscribe to religions merely because of practical advantages.
- Cognitive psychological approaches take a completely different approach to explaining religion. Foremost among them is Pascal Boyer, whose book, Religion Explained, lays out the basics of his theory, and attempts to refute several previous and more direct explanations for the phenomenon of religion. Religion is taken in its widest sense (from holy mountains over ancestral spirits to monotheistic deities). An explanation is offered for human religious behaviour without making a presumption, to the positive or the negative, about the actual subject matter of the religious beliefs. Essentially, the reasoning goes that religion is a side effect to the normal functioning of certain subconscious intuitive mental faculties which normally apply to physics (enabling prediction of the arc a football will take only seconds after its release, for example), and social networks (to keep track of other people's identity, history, loyalty, etc.), and a variety of others. For instance, the same mechanism that serves to link, without explaining, an event (e.g. rustling of tall grass) with a cause (the possible presence of a predator) will help to form or sustain a belief that two random events are linked, or that an unexplained event is linked to supernatural causes. The reasoning would imply that there is no direct causal link between the subject matter of a belief (e.g. whether the ancestors watch over us) and the fact that there is such a belief. :Critics assert that cognitive psychological approaches are unfalsifiable and hence are unscientific speculation. For a discussion of the struggle to attain objectivity in the scientific study of religion, see Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey (ISBN 1581344589), who argues that some studies performed pursuant to these methods make claims beyond the realm of observable and verifiable phenomena, and are therefore neither scientific nor religiously neutral.

Development of religion

subconscious and Islam]] Islam, India.]] There are several models for understanding how religions develop.
- Models which view religion as untrue include:
- The "Dogma Selection Model," which holds that religions, although untrue in themselves, encode instructions or habits useful for survival, that these ideas "mutate" periodically as they are passed on, and they spread or die out in accord with their effectiveness at improving chances for survival.
- The "Opium of the Masses Model," in which "Religion in any shape or form is regarded as pernicious and deliberate falsehood, spread and encouraged by rulers and clerics in their own interests, since it is easier to control over the ignorant." -- Bertrand Russell Wisdom of the West (ISBN 0517690411)
- The "Theory of Religion Model," in which religion is viewed as arising from some psychological or moral pathology in religious leaders and believers.
- Models which view religion as progressively true include:
- The "Bahá'í Prophecy Model," which holds that God has sent a series of prophets to Earth, each of which brought teachings appropriate for his culture and context, but all originating from the same God, and therefore teachings the same essential message.
- The "Great Awakening Model," which holds that religion proceeds along a Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, in cycles of approximately 80 years as a result of the interaction between four archetypal generations, by which old religious beliefs (the thesis) face new challenges for which they are unprepared (the antithesis) and adapt to create new and more sophisticated beliefs (the synthesis).
- The "A Study of History Model," which holds that prophets are given to extraordinary spiritual insight during periods of social decay and act as "surveyors of the course of secular civilization who report breaks in the road and breakdowns in the traffic, and plot a new spiritual course which will avoid those pitfalls."
- Models which view a particular religion as absolutely true include:
- The "Jewish Model", which holds that God relates to humanity through covenants; that he established a covenant with all humanity at the time of Noah called the Noahide Laws, and that he established a covenant with Israel through the Ten Commandments.
- The "Ayyavazhi Model", which states that, "All religions had their own truth on their own point and the one and same God himself incarnates in different parts and by destroying the evil forces, saved the people and thereby formed different scriptures. But as Kaliyan in Kali Yukam brought cruel boons, and proceed to the world, for the first the Ekam, 'the ultimate oneness' (the supreme God) came to the world as Vaikundar and so all the previous religious texts had lost their substance." By this it states that at present Vaikundar the only worshippable God and Akilattirattu Ammanai (scripture of Ayyavazhi) alone is living and all others were dead.
- The "Exclusivist Models," which hold that one particular is the "One True Religion," and all others are false, so that the development of the True Religion is tied inexorably to one prophet or holy book. All other religions are seen as either distortions of the original truth or original fabrications resulting from either human ignorance or imagination, or a more devious influence, such as false prophets or Satan himself.

Religion today

In the late 19th century and throughout most of the 20th century, the demographics of religion has changed a great deal. Some historically Christian countries, particularly those in Europe, have experienced a significant decline in Christian religion, shown by declining recruitment for priesthoods and monasteries, fast-diminishing attendance at churches, synagogues, etc. Explanations for this effect include disillusionment with ideology following the ravages of World War II, the materialistic philosophical influence of science, Marxism and Humanism, and a reaction against the exclusivist claims and religious wars waged by many religious groups. This decline is apparently in parallel with increased prosperity and social well-being. It appears increasingly common for people to engage in far-ranging explorations, with many finding spiritual satisfaction outside of organized churches. This is a demographic group whose numbers are growing and whose future impact cannot be predicted. In the United States, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, studies show that Christianity is strong and growing stronger, and many believe those areas to have become the new "heart" of Christianity. Islam is currently the fastest growing religion, and is nearly universal in many states stretching from West Africa to Indonesia, and has grown in world influence in the West. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism remain nearly universal in the Far East, and have greatly influenced spirituality, particularly in the United States. Explanations for the growth of religion in these areas include disillusionment with the perceived failures of secular western ideologies to provide an ethical and moral framework. Believers point to perceived terrors such as Nazism, Communism, Colonialism, Secular Humanism, and Materialism, and the havoc wreaked by such movements around the world. Particularly vehement in this regard are Islamic fundamentalists, who view Western secularism as a serious threat to morality itself. They point to perceived decadence, high rates of divorce, crime, depression, and suicide as evidence of Western social decline, which they believe is caused by the abandonment of Faith by the West.

Modern reasons for adherence to religion

Typical reasons for adherence to religion include the following:
- "Experience or emotion": For many, the practice of a religion causes an emotional high that gives pleasure to them. Such emotional highs can come from the singing of traditional hymns to the trance-like states found in the practices of the Whirling Dervishes and Yoga, among others. People continue to associate with those practices that give pleasure and, in so far as it is connected with religion, join in religious organizations that provide those practices. Also, some people simply feel that their faith is true, and may not be able to explain their feelings.
- "Supernatural connection": Most religions postulate a reality which includes both the natural and the supernatural. Most adherents of religion consider this to be of critical importance, since it permits belief in unseen and otherwise potentially unknowable aspects of life, including hope of eternal life.
- "Rational analysis": For some, adherence is based on intellectual evaluation that has led them to the conclusion that the teachings of that religion most closely describe reality. Among Christians this basis for belief is often given by those influenced by C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, as well as some who teach young earth Creationism.
- "Moderation": Many religions have approaches that produce practices that place limitations on the behaviour of their adherents. This is seen by many as a positive influence, potentially protecting adherents from the destructive or even fatal excesses to which they might otherwise be susceptible. Many people from many faiths contend that their faith brings them fulfillment, peace, and joy, apart from worldly interests.
- "Authority": Most religions are authoritarian in nature, and thus provide their adherents with spiritual and moral role models, who they believe can bring highly positive influences both to adherents and society in general.
- "Moral framework": Most religions see early childhood education in religion and spirituality as essential moral and spiritual formation, whereby individuals are given a proper grounding in ethics, instilling and internalizing moral discipline.
- "Majesty and tradition": People can form positive views of religion based on the visible manifestations of religion, e.g., ceremonies which appear majestic and reassuringly constant, and ornate cloth.
- "Community and culture": Organized religions promote a sense of community. The combination of moral and cultural common ground often results in a variety of social and support networks. Some ostensibly "religious" individuals may even have a substantially secular viewpoint, but retain adherence to religious customs and viewpoints for cultural reasons, such as continuation of traditions and family unity. Judaism, for example, has a particularly strong tradition of "secular" adherents.
- "Fulfillment": Most traditional religions require sacrifice of their followers, but, in turn, the followers may gain much from their membership therein. Thus, they come away from experiences with these religions with the feeling that their needs have been filled. In fact, studies have shown that religious adherents tend to be happier and less prone to stress than non-religious people.
- "Spiritual and psychological benefits": Each religion asserts that it is a means by which its adherents may come into closer contact with God, Truth, and Spiritual Power. They all promise to free adherents from spiritual bondage, and bring them into spiritual freedom. It naturally follows that a religion which frees its adherents from deception, sin, and spiritual death will have significant mental health benefits. Abraham Maslow's research after World War II showed that Holocaust survivors tended to be those who held strong religious beliefs (not necessarily temple attendance, etc), suggesting it helped people cope in extreme circumstances. Humanistic psychology went on to investigate how religious or spiritual identity may have correlations with longer lifespan and better health. The study found that humans may particularly need religious ideas to serve various emotional needs such as the need to feel loved, the need to belong to homogeneous groups, the need for understandable explanations and the need for a guarantee of ultimate justice. Other factors may involve sense of purpose, sense of identity, sense of contact with the divine. See also Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl, detailing his experience with the importance of religion in surviving the Holocaust. Critics assert that the very fact that religion was the primary selector for research subjects may have introduced a bias, and that the fact that all subjects were holocaust survivors may also have had an effect. According to [http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p001078.html], "more longitudinal research with better multidimensional measures will help further clarify the roles of these [religious] factors and whether they are beneficial or harmful".
- "Practical benefits": Religions may sometimes provide breadth and scale for visionary inspirations in compassion, practical charity, and moral restraint. Christianity is noted for the founding of many major universities, the creation of early hospitals, the provision of food and medical supplies to the needy, and the creation of orphanages and schools, amongst other charitable acts. Many other religions (and non-religious organisations and individuals, eg: humanistic Oxfam) have also performed equivalent or similar work.

Modern reasons for rejecting religion

Typical reasons for rejection of religion include the following:
- "Logical Contradiction": Many major world religions make the claim that they are the one true religion, and that all other religions are wrong (see Exclusivism). Logically, either one exclusive religion is right and all the others wrong, or else all exclusive religions are wrong. Since the vast majority of people believe in a religion they were taught before they were old enough to make a rational choice, it is more rational to reject all exclusive religions rather than to accept one for no better reason than an arbitrary birth.
- "Logical Irrelevancy": Many people use logic to render religion pointless, regardless of their belief in the existence of God. God, by definition, cannot fail—ergo—God is successful. Therefore we can say and do anything we want without ever being a failure, because we are a reflection of a perfect universe created by God.
- "Guilt and Fear": Many atheists, agnostics, and others see religion as a promoter of fear and conformity, causing people to adhere to it to shake the guilt and fear of either being looked down upon by others, or some form of punishment as outlined in the religious doctrines. In this way, religion can be seen as promotional of people pushing guilt onto others, or becoming fanatical (doing things they otherwise wouldn't if they were 'free' of religion), in order to shed their own guilt and fear ultimately generated by the religion itself. The "others" in this case being non-adherents to said religion. According to people who share this view, this can take forms such as: people looking down on others based on their non-adherence, to people preaching that others need something the religion can provide, all the way to global war.
- "Irrational and unbelievable creeds": Some religions postulate a reality which may be seen as stretching credulity and logic, and even some believers may have difficulty accepting particular religious assertions about nature, the supernatural and the afterlife. Some people believe the body of evidence available to humans to be insufficient to justify certain religious beliefs. They may thus disagree with religious interpretations of ethics and human purpose, and theistic views of creation. This reason has perhaps been aggravated by the protestations of some fundamentalist Christians.
- "Restrictiveness": Many religions have (or have had in the past) an approach that produces, or produced, practices that are considered by some people to be too restrictive, e.g., regulation of dress, and proscriptions on diet and activities on certain days of the week. Some feel that religion is the antithesis of prosperity, fun, enjoyment and pleasure. This causes them to reject it entirely, or to see it as only to be turned to in times of trouble.
- "Self-promotion": Some individuals place themselves in positions of power and privilege through promotion of specific religious views, e.g., the Bhagwan/Osho interlude, Reverend Moon of the Unification Church (sometimes called Moonie movement), and other controversial new religious movements pejoratively called cults. Such self-promotion has tended to reduce public confidence in many things that are called "religion." Similarly, highly publicized cases of abuse by the clergy of several religions have tended to reduce public confidence in the underlying message.
- "Promotion of ignorance": Many atheists, agnostics, and others see early childhood education in religion and spirituality as a form of brainwashing or social conditioning, essentially concurring with the Marxian view that "religion is the opiate of the masses", with addiction to it fostered when people are too young to choose.
- "Dulling of the mind against reality": Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx developed atheist views that reality is sometimes painful, there is no God to assist people in dealing with it, and people must learn to deal with problems themselves in order to survive. Per this view, religion in modern times, while it may decrease pain in the short run by providing hope and optimism, in the long run hinders the ability of people to deal with their problems by providing false hope. Hence in 1844, in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', Marx said of religion, "It is the opiate [most likely in the traditional sense of an opium-like drug] of the masses." [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm]
- "Unsuitable moral systems in mainstream religions": Some argue that simplistic absolutism taught by some religions impairs a child's moral capacity to deal with a world of complex and varied temptations in which, in reality, is different than they have been brought up to think by religion.
- "Unappealing forms of practice": People can form a negative view, based upon the manifestations of religion, e.g., ceremonies which appear boring, pointless and repetitive, arcane clothing, and exclusiveness in membership requirements.
- "Detrimental effect on government": Many atheists, agnostics, and others believe that religion, because it insists that people believe certain claims "on faith" without sufficient evidence, hinders the rational/logical thought processes necessary for effective government. For example, a leader who believes that God will intervene to save humans from environmental disasters may be less likely to attempt to reduce the risk of such disasters through human action. Also, in many countries, religious organizations have tremendous political power, and in some countries can even control government almost completely. Disillusionment with forms of theocratic government, such as practiced in Iran, can lead people to question the legitimacy of any religious beliefs used to justify non-secular government.
- "Detrimental effect on personal responsibility": Many atheists, agnostics, and others believe that many religions, because they state that God will intervene to help individuals who are in trouble, cause people to be less responsible for themselves. For example, a person who believes that God will intervene to save him if he gets into financial difficulties may conclude that it is unnecessary to be financially responsible himself. (Some believers, however, would consider this a misrepresentation of religion: they would say that God only helps people who take initiative themselves first.) This attitude can be taken to extremes: there are instances of believers refusing life-saving medical treatment (or even denying it to their children) because they believe that God will cure them. Many atheists, agnostics, and others also find the assertion that 'circumstances are overpowering because they are the will of God' to be a negation of personal responsibility.
- "Tensions between proselytizing and secularizing": Increasingly secular beliefs have been steadily on the rise in many nations. An increasing acceptance of a secular worldview, combined with efforts to prevent "religious" beliefs from influencing society and government policy, may have led to a corresponding decline in religious belief, especially of more traditional forms.
- "Cause of division and hatred": Some religions state that certain groups (particularly those that do not belong to the religion in question) are "inferior" or "sinful" and deserve contempt, persecution, and even death. For example, some Muslims believe that women are inferior to men. Some Christians share this belief. At the time of the American Civil War, many Southerners used passages from the Bible to justify slavery. The Christian religion has been used as a reason to persecute and to deny the rights of homosexuals, on the basis that God disapproves of homosexuality, and by implication homosexuals [http://www.godhatesfags.com 1]. Many people believe that those who do not share their religion will be punished for their unbelief in an afterlife. There are countless examples of people of one religion or sect using religion as an excuse to murder people with different religious beliefs. To mention just a few, there was the slaughter of the Huguenots by French Catholics in the Sixteenth Century; Hindus and Muslims killing each other when Pakistan separated from India in 1947; the persecution and killing of Shiite Muslims by Sunni Muslims in Iraq and the murder of Protestants by Catholics and vice versa in Ireland, (both of these examples in the late Twentieth Century); and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that continues today. According to some critics of religion, these beliefs can encourage completely unnecessary conflicts and in some cases even wars. Many atheists believe that, because of this, religion is incompatible with world peace, freedom, civil rights, equality, and good government.

Approaches to relating to the beliefs of others

Adherents of particular religions deal with the differing doctrines and practices espoused by other religions in a variety ways. All strains of thought appear in different segments of all major world religions.

Exclusivism

People with exclusivist beliefs sometimes typically explain other religions as either in error, or as corruptions or counterfeits of the true faith. Examples include:
- Christian scripture states that Jesus said: "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me." John 14:6.
- Islamic scripture states: "O you who believe, do not take certain Jews and Christians as allies; these are allies of one another. Those among you who ally themselves with these belong with them. Surely Allah does not guide the unjust people." Qur'an 5:51. and "O you who believe, do not befriend those among the recipients of previous scripture who mock and ridicule your religion, nor shall you befriend the disbelievers. You shall reverence GOD, if you are really believers." Qur'an 5:57
- Hebrew scripture states that God said to Israel through Moses: "You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."
- Ayyavazhi scripture states: "The day at which Narayana incarnated as Vaikundar the Kali started declining; the book of perfection, Vedas and all previous scriptures lost their Substances as the Sathasivam came as Vaikundar." Akilam 12:147-150
- The Buddhist scriptures of the Dhammapada states: "The best of paths is the Eightfold Path. The best of truths are the Four Noble Truths. Non-attachment (viraga or Nirvana) is the best of states. The best of bipeds is the Seeing One. This is the only Way; there is none other for the purity of vision. Do follow this path; it is the bewilderment of Mara". Dhammapada verse 273 & 274 Exclusivist views are more completely explored in chosen people.

Inclusivism

People with inclusivist beliefs recognize some truth in all faith systems, highlighting agreements and minimizing differences, but see their own faith as in some way ultimate. Examples include:
- From Hinduism:
- A well-known Rig Vedic hymn stemming from Hinduism claims that "Truth is One, though the sages know it variously."
- Krishna, incarnation or avatar of Vishnu, the supreme God in Hinduism, said in the Gita: In whatever way men identify with Me, in the same way do I carry out their desires; men pursue My path, O Arjuna, in all ways. ([http://vedabase.net/bg/4/11 Gita: 4:11]); Gita]
- Krishna said: "Whatever deity or form a devotee worships, I make his faith steady. However, their wishes are only granted by Me." ([http://vedabase.net/bg/7/21 Gita: 7:21-22])
- Another quote in the Gita states: "O Arjuna, even those devotees who worship other lesser deities (e.g., Devas, for example) with faith, they also worship Me, but in an improper way because I am the Supreme Being. I alone am the enjoyer of all sacrificial services (Seva, Yajna) and Lord of the universe." ([http://vedabase.net/bg/9/23 Gita: 9:23])
- From Christianity:
- Jesus said, "He who is not against me is for me." Mark 9:40.
- The Apostle Peter wrote of God: "He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." 2 Peter 3:9 (NIV)
- From Islam:
- The Qur'an states: "Only argue with the People of the Book in the kindest way - except in the case of those of them who do wrong - saying, 'We have faith in what has been sent down to us and what was sent down to you. Our God and your God are one and we submit to Him.'" (Holy Qur'an, Surat al-'Ankabut; 29:46)
- "Among the people of the Book there are some who have faith in God and in what has been sent down to you and what was sent down to them, and who are humble before God. They do not sell God's Signs for a paltry price. Such people will have their reward with their Lord. And God is swift at reckoning." (Holy Qur'an, Surat Al 'Imran; 3:199)
- "...You will find the people most affectionate to those who have faith are those who say, 'We are Christians.' That is because some of them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant." (Holy Qur'an, Surat al-Ma'idah; 5:82) Qur'an
- From Ayyavazhi
- In Akilam Narayana said to Vaikundar: "I am the one who as God is worshiped by all sects and races" (Akilam 9:Vinchai)
- Ayya states: "I will come in all scriptures" (Arul Nool)
- From Judaism:
- The Talmud states: "The righteous of all peoples have a place in the World-To-Come" (Tos. to Sanhedrin 13:2, Sifra to Leviticus 19:18), and affirms that the great majority of non-Jewish humanity will be saved, due to God's

Anthroposophy

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Rudolf Steiner

Goethean scholar, philosopher, phenomenologist of spirit and sense perception

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