I find your statement regarding the French Patriot outrageous.
It's perfectly in keeping with the earliest identifiable theological stuff that degenerated into modern christianism. The burning lake is home, where we come from, the one sun. The fire whence our little sparks of life originate.
The problem with theology is that every denomination has its own theology. My studies have been about the bible in general and its history in particular. I've also done studies in comparative religions and theologies. My conclusions, in a nut shell, says that faith and belief are two different things that most religious and non-religious people get confused about. They are not compatible.
The early teachers stressed reason above all else. Like I've said before the roots of religion are very sound natural science. You have read that philosophy is the first science and the farther you go back the more informative it is. Today it is a jumble of hocus pocus ( not the focus tune) but the tower of babble scene, just like it always ends up before the crash which always comes around at the end of every day. I like the old stuff BC, before crap. The old root of theology is sound practical wisdom derived from scientific investigation, all can fathom the meaning to more or lesser degrees, it was always that way till the christians imposed one size fits all. I don't argue the bible to much cus it really is a mess cobbled together by very devious materialistic scribes.
By the way Mr Chopra is wrong religion means ones personal philosophy period, therefore religion is having ones own experiance. Check out the dictionary I ain't makin it up.
That which is known as the Christian religion existed
among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the very
beginning of the human race [perhaps this explains the
equal-arm crucifix intaglios of Neolithic times] until the
time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true
religion which already existed, began to be called Christi-
anity.--Retractt. I, xiii.
Hell, Hades, The Underworld: Hades of the Greeks,
Amenta of the Egyptians, the underworld of the ancients,
and hell of the New Testament (hell as the descendant idea
of Hades, etc.) signify, according to Kuhn, earthly exis-
tence. Hell is a glyph for the heat born of the vicissitudes of
earthly life which is necessary for a soul's development,
growth, and return to the Pleroma. Kuhn further asserts that
the ancients were not so mentally benighted as to believe
hell to be an other-worldly literal phenomenon, nor so
naive as to worship their idols (as orthodoxy would have us
believe) but merely used them to symbolize the operations
of God and his relationship to man and the universe. For
example, Kuhn avers that the Ophite Gnostics were not ser-
pent-worshippers, but merely serpent-symbolizers.
