All, The following is an short excerpt from Moscati's "The Face of the Ancient Orient", which you can read most of on Google Books. Just do a search if you are interested.
Here is exhibit A making the case for the uniqueness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This brief quote explains a crucial difference between Judaeo-Christianity and all the other religious traditions in the Ancient world. After this I will send a quote that is a bit longer from "The End of the Modern World", by Guirdani. Together these two quotes begin to show why this religion, and the philosopy and culture, that flowed from them, are unique in the history of the world. Thanks, Jon "The 102nd Psalm praises the Lord in the following terms: Of old thou laid the foundations of the earth, And the heavens are the work of thy hands, They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; As a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed; But thou art the same, And thy years shall have no end. These words express a fundamentally new idea. We recall the conception of the universe shared by the other peoples of the ancient Orient: all without exception regard the earth as a divinity, and the sky as a divinity; the gods are immanent in nature and render it divine. The psalmist’s conception is diametrically contrary: there is only one God, and this God is outside and above all nature, which He himself created. Nature is subordinate and of short life in relation to its Creator. If it has any function of its own, it is to express the glory of God. The position of man is completely analogous: he draws his origin and destiny from God. Thus we are faced with a change in the old values and the advent of a new conception of the universe. Here we have a crisis in the forces of nature, the divine is withdrawn from them and retires into transcendence. But the God of Israel is not only transcendent rather than immanent: he is one instead of many, so the cosmos is under a single direction. And he is just and merciful rather than animated by the human type of passions; and so there is no doubt as to the morality of that direction, there is freedom from fear, and the genesis of a confident submission. Although it is God who created the cosmic order, this does not imply that he does not alter it and renew it in accordance with his inscrutable judgement. God alone is active force: the rest, nature and man, have their existence only as a reflection of him. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
