Religious Cosmology

Religious Cosmology PDF Author: Paul F. Kisak
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781533205742
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A religious cosmology (also mythological cosmology) is a way of explaining the origin, the history and the evolution of the cosmos or universe based on the religious mythology of a specific tradition. Religious cosmologies usually include an act or process of creation by a creator deity or a larger pantheon. The universe of the ancient Israelites was made up of a flat disc-shaped earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Humans inhabited earth during life and the underworld after death, and the underworld was morally neutral; only in Hellenistic times (after c.330 BC) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven. In this period too the older three-level cosmology was widely replaced by the Greek concept of a spherical earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens. Around the time of Jesus or a little earlier, the Greek idea that God had actually created matter replaced the older idea that matter had always existed, but in a chaotic state. This concept, called creatio ex nihilo, is now the accepted orthodoxy of most denominations of Judaism and Christianity. Most denominations of Christianity and Judaism claim that a single, uncreated God was responsible for the creation of the cosmos. This book gives an overview of the religious cosmologies, creationism or creation myths that are associated with Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Jainism, Islam, Zoroastrianism and numerous others.

Religious Cosmology

Religious Cosmology PDF Author: Paul F. Kisak
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781533205742
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
A religious cosmology (also mythological cosmology) is a way of explaining the origin, the history and the evolution of the cosmos or universe based on the religious mythology of a specific tradition. Religious cosmologies usually include an act or process of creation by a creator deity or a larger pantheon. The universe of the ancient Israelites was made up of a flat disc-shaped earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Humans inhabited earth during life and the underworld after death, and the underworld was morally neutral; only in Hellenistic times (after c.330 BC) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven. In this period too the older three-level cosmology was widely replaced by the Greek concept of a spherical earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens. Around the time of Jesus or a little earlier, the Greek idea that God had actually created matter replaced the older idea that matter had always existed, but in a chaotic state. This concept, called creatio ex nihilo, is now the accepted orthodoxy of most denominations of Judaism and Christianity. Most denominations of Christianity and Judaism claim that a single, uncreated God was responsible for the creation of the cosmos. This book gives an overview of the religious cosmologies, creationism or creation myths that are associated with Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Jainism, Islam, Zoroastrianism and numerous others.

Entropic Creation

Entropic Creation PDF Author: Helge S. Kragh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317142489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the universe can have existed only for a finite period of time. According to the 'entropic creation argument', thermodynamics warrants the conclusion that the world once begun or was created. It is these two scenarios, allegedly consequences of the science of thermodynamics, which form the core of this book. The heat death and the claim of cosmic creation were widely discussed in the period 1870 to 1920, with participants in the debate including European scientists, intellectuals and social critics, among them the physicist William Thomson and the communist thinker Friedrich Engels. One reason for the passion of the debate was that some authors used the law of entropy increase to argue for a divine creation of the world. Consequently, the second law of thermodynamics became highly controversial. In Germany in particular, materialists and positivists engaged in battle with Christian - mostly Catholic - scholars over the cosmological consequences of thermodynamics. This heated debate, which is today largely forgotten, is reconstructed and examined in detail in this book, bringing into focus key themes on the interactions between cosmology, physics, religion and ideology, and the public way in which these topics were discussed in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century.

PaGaian Cosmology

PaGaian Cosmology PDF Author: Glenys Livingstone
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595349900
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
PaGaian Cosmology brings together a religious practice of seasonal ritual based in a contemporary scientific sense of the cosmos and female imagery for the Sacred. The author situates this original synthesis in her context of being female and white European transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. Her sense of alienation from her place, which is personal, cultural and cosmic, fires a cosmology that re-stories Goddess metaphor of Virgin-Mother-Crone as a pattern of Creativity, which unfolds the cosmos, manifests in Earth's life, and may be known intimately. PaGaian Cosmology is an ecospirituality grounded in indigenous Western religious celebration of the Earth-Sun annual cycle. By linking to story of the unfolding universe this practice can be deepened, and a sense of the Triple Goddess-central to the cycle and known in ancient cultures-developed as a dynamic innate to all being. The ritual scripts and the process of ritual events presented here, may be a journey into self-knowledge through personal, communal and ecological story: the self to be known is one that is integral with place. PaGaian Cosmology may be used as a resource for individuals or groups seeking new forms of devotional expression and an Earth-based pathway to wisdom within.

Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology

Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology PDF Author: Erich Robert Paul
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252018954
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Merrill, who urged a unique vision of reality that shaped a Mormon eschatology. He shows how authorities eventually retreated from the perception of reality as "true" and adopted a scientifically less secure position in order to protect their theology, an eventuality which ultimately resulted in a reactionary response to science within Mormonism.

Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions

Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions PDF Author: Nicholas Campion
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814708420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
When you think of astrology, you may think of the horoscope section in your local paper, or of Nancy Reagan's consultations with an astrologer in the White House in the 1980s. Yet almost every religion uses some form of astrology: some way of thinking about the sun, moon, stars, and planets and how they hold significance for human lives on earth. Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions offers an accessible overview of the astrologies of the world's religions, placing them into context within theories of how the wider universe came into being and operates. Campion traces beliefs about the heavens among peoples ranging from ancient Egypt and China, to Australia and Polynesia, and India and the Islamic world. Addressing each religion in a separate chapter, Campion outlines how, by observing the celestial bodies, people have engaged with the divine, managed the future, and attempted to understand events here on earth. This fascinating text offers a unique way to delve into comparative religions and will also appeal to those intrigued by New Age topics.

God's Two Books

God's Two Books PDF Author: Kenneth James Howell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This is an analysis of how 16th- and 17th-century astronomers and theologians in Northern Protestant Europe used science and religion to challenge and support one another. It argues that these schemes can solve the enduring problem of how theological interpretation and investigation interact.

Cosmology, History, and Theology

Cosmology, History, and Theology PDF Author: Wolfgang Yourgrau
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461587808
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
It is difficult to doubt that we suffer at present from the manifold aspects of an economic crisis which affects all walks of life. Well, men in almost every epoch in history have maintained that they were going through a crisis which was sup posed to be always more grave than any preceding critical phase. Very often those crises were not of an economic nature, but concerned either health, the political structure, the opportunity of acquiring knowledge, and so on. I think that we would consider today that some of those claims that were made in various historical epochs were often exaggerated if viewed from a historical point of view. However, it seems undeniable that we at present are in the middle of a universal economic crisis which has affected almost every facet of our daily life. And yet, the fact that despite these adverse conditions it is still possible to gather scholars from all corners of the world to deal with often sheer theo retical and sometimes abstract pursuits is a refutation of any facile pessimism it is reassuring to all who wonder where political and social events are taking us. Our salvation may well come from those acts of the mind so character istic of the pure scientist and scholar.

Religion

Religion PDF Author:
Publisher: PediaPress
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description


Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld

Celtic Cosmology and the Otherworld PDF Author: Sharon Paice MacLeod
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476630291
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The early medieval manuscripts of Ireland and Britain contain tantalizing clues about the cosmology, religion and mythology of native Celtic cultures, despite censorship and revision by Christian redactors. Focusing on the latest research and translations, the author provides fresh insight into the beliefs and practices of the Iron Age inhabitants of Ireland, Britain and Gaul. Chapters cover creation and cosmogony, the deities of the Gaels, feminine power in narrative sources, druidic belief, priestesses and magical rites.

Creating the Universe

Creating the Universe PDF Author: Eric Huntington
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295744073
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Winner, 2018 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities Buddhist representations of the cosmos across nearly two thousand years of history in Tibet, Nepal, and India show that cosmology is a rich language for the expression of diverse religious ideas, with cosmological thinking at the center of Buddhist thought, art, and practice. In Creating the Universe, Eric Huntington presents examples of visual art and architecture, primary texts, ritual ideologies, and material practices—accompanied by extensive explanatory diagrams—to reveal the immense complexity of cosmological thinking in Himalayan Buddhism. Employing comparisons across function, medium, culture, and history, he exposes cosmology as a fundamental mode of engagement with numerous aspects of religion, from preliminary lessons to the highest rituals for enlightenment. This wide-ranging work will interest scholars and students of many fields, including Buddhist studies, religious studies, art history, and area studies. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/creating-the-universe