Religiously the Empire was pluralistic and marked by a search for a faith which would be satisfying intellectually and ethically and would give assurance of immortality.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Organized Christianity has always represented immortality as a sort of common heritage; but I never could see why spiritual life should not be conditioned on the same terms as all life, i. e., correspondence with environment.
I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.
There's no longer a monolithic evil empire somewhere, spreading a different philosophy of life. That doesn't exist.
Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.
Empires came and went while we, the Jewish people, persecuted relentlessly, facing expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust, survived. We survived thanks to the Torah and faith in the Lord.
Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
Religion is one dimension of culture, a transcendent element of it.
In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well.
No opposing quotes found.