THE GREAT INVENTOR AND GENIUS, NICLA TESLA
I forgot to mention the work of Nicola Tesla--the son of a Serbian Christian Orthodox priest.
http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_TeslaHe was a highly spiritual person, but not being a narrow Orthodox Christian, he struggled with the rather narrow idea of God as taught by his religion.
Keep in mind that polytheism, and later, monotheism, came about when even the wisest people believed the earth was a flat disc with heaven above and hell below. We need not blame them for this, if they really believed in a flat earth, but surely when the Christian monk, Copernicus brought new knowledge to the west he should have been honored, not censored and threatened with death by the knowledge Luddites? For over a hundred years knowledge was held back by the obscurants.
OBSCURANTISM
Ignorance is one thing, but willful ignorance, obscurantism--the active opposition to progress and and the spread of knowledge, is something else. It is, IMHO, a great evil.
COSMOTHEISM
Back to Tesla, interestingly, he finally came to the conclusion that what is needed is a combination of Christianity and Buddhism. Interestingly, Buddhists are non-theists. I think of them as cosmotheists. Yes, new ideas need new words.
BTW, Christianity is already a mixture of Judaism and Christianity. I would even add the positive forms of Islam, Sikhism and Brahmanism to the mix. IMHO, in all this orthopraxy is more important than orthodoxy.
JESUS ADVOCATED ORTHOPRAXY. That is he called us to loving actions, deeds not just creeds--follow me, he said. Perhaps this is why he never wrote a book. Books tend to make us fixed-position thinkers--" IT'S IN THE BOOK!!!! (BTW, I am not opposed to felxible creeds, nor books.)
He told stories, or parables, which are stories of actions. His parable of the Good Samaritan--who, BTW, was not a Jew--in Luke 10 is about orthopraxy. I love the last sentence of his teaching: "GO then, and DO the same!"
THAT ALL MAY BE ONE
The same kind of teaching is found in John 10 and 17:20-26. His basic prayer is that "all may be one"--he called on all humanity to act as one.
The over-all philosophical term for this approach is, pragmatism--the doing of that which is morally valuable and good--which was advocated by the great Christian philosopher/psychologist, William James of Harvard.
One final thought: "The secret of true unity is the love of variety." Does anyone know who said it?
