3 thoughts on “Prophets , Sages and People of Vision”

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
   Born in 570 in the Arabian city of Mecca,[8] he was orphaned at an early age and brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib. He later worked mostly as a merchant, as well as a shepherd, and was first married by age 25. Discontented with life in Mecca, he retreated to a cave in the surrounding mountains for meditation and reflection.

   Images of the Prophet Mohamed have long been discouraged in Islam. The West has little understanding of why this should be so – nor of the intensity of the feelings aroused by non-believers’ attitudes to the founder of Islam.

   To historians, Mohamed was a prophet and religious reformer who united the scattered Arabian tribes in the 7th century, founding what went on to become one of the world’s five great religions. To Muslims, he was the last in a line of figures which included Abraham, Moses and Jesus, but which found its supreme fulfilment in Mohamed.

   Because Muslims believe that Mohamed was the messenger of Allah, they extrapolate that all his actions were willed by God. A singular love and veneration thus attaches to the person of Mohamed himself. When speaking or writing, his name is always preceded by the title “Prophet” and followed by the phrase: “Peace be upon him”, often abbreviated in English as PBUH.

   Attempts to depict him in illustration were therefore an attempt to depict the sublime – and so forbidden.

   More than that, to reject and criticise Mohamed is to reject and criticise Allah himself. Criticism of the Prophet is therefore equated with blasphemy, which is punishable by death in some Muslim states. When Salman Rushdie, in his novel The Satanic Verses, depicted Mohamed as a cynical schemer and his wives as prostitutes, the outcome was – to those with any understanding of Islam – predictable.

   But understanding of Islam is sorely lacking in the West. The culture gap has its roots in the fact that Christianity – like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – is essentially an iconographic religion. In its early years, the Christian world took the statues of the old gods and goddesses of Greece and morphed them into images of the Virgin Mary and the saints, which were venerated in all the churches. Muslims, like Jews, take a polar opposite view. Islam and Judaism are religions of the word, not the image.

   Islam has traditionally prohibited images of humans and animals altogether – which is why much Islamic art is made up of decorative calligraphy or abstract arabesque patterns.Throughout history Muslims have cast out, destroyed or denounced all images, whether carved or painted, as idolatry. Despite that prohibition, hundreds of images of Mohamed have been created over the centuries. Medieval Christian artists created paintings and illuminated manuscripts depicting Mohamed, usually with his face in full view. Muslim artists from the same era depicted Mohamed too, but usually left his face blank or veiled.

   Sixteenth-century Persian and Ottoman art frequently represented the Prophet, albeit with his face either veiled, or emanating radiance. One 16th-century Turkish painting, in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, shows Mohamed in very long sleeves so as to avoid showing even his hands.

   The ban is not absolute. Today, iconic pictures of Mohamed are sold openly on the street in Iran. The creation, sale or owning of such images is illegal, but the regime turns a blind eye (Muslims in Iran are Shia not Sunni).

   Two things are different today. The cartoons published first in Denmark and now more widely across Europe set out not to depict but to ridicule the Prophet. And they do so in a climate in which Muslims across the globe feel alienated, threatened and routinely despised by the world’s great powers.

   The combination of this with Islam’s traditional unhappiness at depictions of any human form, let alone of their most venerated one, was bound to be explosive. The affair is an example of Western ignorance and arrogance combined. We have lit a fire and the wind could take it a long way.

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2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus
   Who is Jesus Christ? Is Yeshua (Hebrew for “Jesus”) really the promised Messiah of Israel (Hebrew for “Christ”) of the Old Testament?” Is Jesus Christ truly the Son of God … literally God Himself, the Divine living within human flesh? Were Jesus Christ’s claims that of a Liar or Lunatic … or is He really Lord of the universe?

   You may want to take a tour of some of the major highlights of Jesus’ life. Or you may want to preview what people were saying before Christ was born. Of course, you may want to check out Jesus’ claims about himself. Some may be interested in learning about the muscle Jesus exercised and the miracles he performed.

   http://www.whoisjesus-really.com/

   Knowledgeable people will agree that Jesus Christ has made quite an impact on the world. You may even come to learn that Yeshua is indeed the promised Messiah of the Old Testament

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3. The Celtic Druids

   The question of who invaded Britain in prehistoric times, and when these incursions took place, was much debated by earlier generations of scholars. Bloody battles were imagined, in which one race virtually exterminated another and populated the country anew. Mysterious “Beaker folk” were said to have arrived in the third millennium B.C. introducing metalwork and burying their chiefs in barrow tombs along with their favorite beakers. After them came the Celts; around 600 B.C. was the accepted date for their appearance in Britain.
   The nature of these invasions and their supposed dates are all now disputed. Archaeological science earlier in this century was much concerned with racial types, and it was fashionable to argue that successive invaders prevailed because they were of superior stock to the natives. At the root of these theories was Darwin’s theory of evolution and belief in progress. The influence of such theories has now waned, and scholars are more inclined to regard social changes as being produced by migrations of culture at least as much as by warfare. In ancient times, as today, new ideas spread quickly enough around the world without violence. Nor is there any more certainty about the date of the Celts’ arrival. One can speak of Celtic culture and languages, but there is no single Celtic race; Celtic speakers vary in appearance from short and swarthy to tall and fair. Evidence of Celtic culture appears in Britain from the second millennium B.C., and it is now suggested that the Celtic priesthood could have been responsible for the Stone- Henge temple, built in about 2000 B.C.
   Celtic society in Britain preserved many features from the previous order, including shrines and feast days. Its calendar combined lunar and solar cycles, as in megalithic times. The social structure was similar to that advocated by Plato, based on a religious cosmology and democratic idealism. Each tribe had its own territory with fixed borders, and that land, held by the tribe as a whole, consisted of forest and wilderness, common lands and agricultural holdings.
   Under a complicated system of land tenure, everyone’s rights and obligations were carefully defined. Some of the land was worked in common for the chieftain, the priests, and the old, poor, and sick tribes-folk; the rest was apportioned as family farms. Grazing and foraging rights were shared on the common lands. Much of the tribal business was conducted at annual assemblies where land disputes were decided, petty offenders were tried, and chiefs and officials, both male and female, were appointed by popular vote.
   A great many old farmsteads in Britain, today, are on Celtic sites. During his raid on Celtic Britain in 55 B.C., Julius Caesar commented on its high population and numerous farms and cattle. The unifying bond between all the Celtic tribes was their common priesthood, the Druids. Their efforts preserved common culture, religion, history, laws, scholarship, and science. They had paramount authority over every tribal chief and, since their office was sacred, they could move where they wanted. Settling disputes and stopping battles by compelling the rival parties to arbitration.
   They managed the higher legal system and the courts of appeal, and their colleges in Britain were famous throughout the Continent. Up to twenty years of oral instruction and memorizing was required of a pupil before being admitted into their order. Minstrels and bards were educated by the Druids for similar periods.
   Knowledge of the Druids comes directly from classical writers of their time. They were compared to the learned priesthoods of antiquity, the Indian Brahmins, the Pythagoreans, and the Chaldean astronomers of Babylon. Caesar wrote that they know much about the stars and celestial motions, and about the size of the earth and universe, and about the essential nature of things, and about the powers and authority of’ the immortal gods; and these things they teach to their pupils.”
   They also taught the traditional doctrine of the soul’s immortality. They must have professed detailed knowledge of the workings of reincarnation, for one writer said that they allowed debts incurred in one lifetime to be repaid in the next.
   A significant remark of Caesar’s was that Druidism originated in Britain, which was its stronghold. Indeed, it has all the appearance of a native religion, being deeply rooted in the primeval native culture. Its myths and heroic legends are related to the ancient holy places of Britain, and they may largely have been adapted from much earlier traditions. In Celtic, as in all previous times, the same holy wells and nature shrines were visited on certain days for their spiritual virtues. The overall pattern of life was scarcely changed. In the course of time, society became more structured and elaborate and the Druid laws more rigid, but the beginning of the Celtic period in Britain was evidently not marked by any major break in tradition.
   Nor was there any great shift in population; the British today, even in the so-called Celtic lands, are predominantly of native Mesolithic ancestry. The Druids’ religion and science also have the appearance of belonging to an earlier Britain. Their knowledge of astronomy may have descended from the priests of megalithic times, together with the spiritual secrets of the landscape.
   Yet there is an obvious difference between the Celtic Druids and the megalithic priests before them. The Druids abandoned the great stone temples and reverted to the old natural shrines, the springs and groves where they held their rituals. A religious reformation is here implied. It is characteristic of state priesthoods that their spiritual powers wane as their temporal authority grows; and the less confidence they inspire, the more tributes and sacrifices they demand of the people In its latter days the rule of the megalithic priesthood probably became so onerous that it was overthrown.
   Whether as a native development or prompted by outside influences, a spiritual revival seems to have occurred in Britain in about 2000 B.C. with the building of the cosmic temple of Stonehenge and the first evidences of Celtic culture. Stonehenge is a unique monument, a symbol of a new revelation. The tendency in modern scholarship is to see it once more as the temple of the Druids, if so, it proclaims the high ideals on which Druidism in Britain was founded.
   The problem we have now is little was recorded by the Druids and most of today’s myths and practices by the so called Druid Order today is new age dreamed up by one man. The Druid Holy Men passed the history and rituals from father to son and the Romans wiped them out so little is really know about our ancient Celtic Heritage
   http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/beresiner7.html
   Churchill’s Druids
   It is a relatively little know fact that one of Britain’s most celebrated, though far from uncontroversial, statesmen, Winston Churchill, was a Druid. In the first decade of the twentieth century the still relatively obscure Churchill dabbled with a number of esoteric organizations most notably the Freemasons and his initiation into Druidic rites appears to have been an outgrowth of this.
   Churchill was born in 1874 and his father, Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, had been a Freemason and this may well have provided Winston with his first introduction to the fraternity. However Winston Churchill did not actually join the Masons until after his father’s death in 1895. Although there are different accounts of exactly when and where Churchill became a Mason it seems that he was initiated into the Entered Apprentice degree in 1901 in Studholme Lodge (no. 1591) in London. Churchill subsequently advanced through the Fellow Craft degree and was raised to a Master Mason in March 1902 in Rosemary Lodge (no. 2851). Another version has him being initiated into a lodge in South Africa in 1903. Churchill remained a Mason until 1912

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