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unity  QUOTES

62 " It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Christ. Unity – interpretive agreement and mutual understanding – is, it would appear, something that only God can accomplish. And accomplish it he does, but not in the way we might have expected. Although onlookers thought that the believers who received the Spirit at Pentecost were babbling (Acts 2:13), in fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages (Acts 2:8-11). Note well: they were all saying the same thing (testifying about Jesus) in different languages. It takes a thousand tongues to say and sing our great Redeemer’s praise.

Protestant evangelicalism evidences a Pentecostal plurality: the various Protestant streams testify to Jesus in their own vocabularies, and it takes many languages (i.e. interpretive traditions) to minister the meaning of God’s Word and the fullness of Christ. As the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body of the biblical text. Why else are there four Gospels, but that the one story of Jesus was too rich to be told from one perspective only? Could it be that the various Protestant traditions function similarly as witnesses who testify to the same Jesus from different situations and perspectives? "

Kevin J. Vanhoozer , Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity

63 " Quotes By Transcendologist Kurt Kawohl 1941 -
If the medieval practices and the medieval beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that are based on superstitions were eliminated, then we could start building a rational and logical belief system that is based on truth and an understanding of spirituality. This is the value of truthfulness and rationality.

The goals of ALL religions are the same; a deserved, appropriate, just finale.

God is the rational Purity that does not require servitude, ritualistic prayers or a forced slavery in order for the soul to be a part of that Purity for eternity.

God is spiritual, the progressive and accumulative spiritual intelligence of all the righteous souls who have passed into the spiritual realm.

God does not and never has meddled in the tangible universe.

It is of no importance during our physical life whether God exists or not if one so chooses. Whether or not one believes in a spirit or God really makes no difference to God. Righteous living will determine the continuance and destiny of our spirit/soul.

Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Krishna, Bahá'u'lláh, Zoroaster, Ahmad, Nanak and many others of various faiths are believed to have achieved spiritual enlightenment by mastering the art of spiritual transcendence.
Everything in the universe follows the universal laws which separate the physical and the spiritual existence. Energy is power, vigor, liveliness, intensity. It is a measurable quantity, without reference to its nature or source. Energy, or life is a fundamental attribute and function of the universe. Our bodies build up and harness a minute amount of spiritual energy that is transferred into the spiritual dimension upon our death. Then this spiritual energy is limitless because it lacks resistance and this energy can assimilate as a unity or be separate and individual. It is this spiritual energy that is God. It is a composition of the spiritual intellect of the universe, of every soul that has passed from the physical universe into the spiritual universe. It can create a spiritual existence of beauty that is beyond the imagination…my spirit has experienced it. "

Kurt Kawohl

65 " As for the negation of the Christian Trinity in the Quran - and this negation is extrinsic and conditional - we must take account of certain shades of meaning. The Trinity can be envisaged according to a " vertical" perspective or according to either of two " horizontal" perspectives, one of them being supreme and the other not. The vertical perspective- Beyond-Being, Being and Existence - envisages the hypostases as " descending" from Unity or from the Absolute - or from the Essence it could be said - which means that it envisages the degrees of Reality. The supreme horizontal perspective corresponds to the Vedantic triad Sat (supraontological Reality), Chit (Absolute Consciousness) and Ananda (Infinite Beatitude), which means that it envisages the Trinity inasmuch as It is hidden in Unity(1). The non-supreme horizontal perspective on the contrary situates Unity as an essence hidden within the Trinity, which is then ontological and represents the three fundamental aspects or modes of Pure Being, whence the triad : Being, Wisdom, Will (Father, Son, Spirit).Now the concept of a Trinity seen as a deployment (tajalli) of Unity or of the Absolute is in no way opposed to the unitary doctrine of Islam ; what is opposed to it is solely the attribution of absoluteness to the Trinity alone, or even to the ontological Trinity alone, as it is envisaged exoterically. This last point of view does not, strictly speaking, attain to the Absolute and this is as much as to say that it attributes an absolute character to what is relative and is ignorant of Maya and the degrees of reality or of illusion ; it does not conceive of the metaphysical - but not pantheistic - identity between manifestation and the Principle; still less, therefore, does it conceive of the consequence this identity implies from the point of view of the intellect and the knowledge which delivers.(1) The Absolute is not the Absolute inasmuch as it contains aspects, but inasmuch as It transcends them; inasmuch as It is Trinity It is therefore not Absolute. "

66 " Whereas Jesus demanded of the Jews the rejection of the tribalist Jahweh whom they identified with Israel, the race, the community the political state as object of worship and desire, the Sufis, born in an atmosphere of pure monotheism, demanded what Jesus of the first century A.D. would demand if he were to relive his early life again in present-day monotheistic Christendom. This does not mean that Jesus did not demand, like the Sufis, the cleansing of the soul from the personal deities it may worship besides God, but it does mean that the main weight of his teaching centered around the Jewish preoccupation with the tribe as God." " The object and deal of Sufism is, therefore, identically the same as that of the radical self-transformation of Jesus. Both aimed at the state of consciousness in which God is the sole subject, the sole determiner and the sole object of love and devotion. The tradition of both later influenced each other and succeeded in developing the same kind of preparatory disciplines leading towards the end. Finally, both referred to the final end of these processes as 'oneness' and their reference was in each case exposed to the same dangers of misunderstanding, indeed to the same misunderstanding. The oneness of Jesus was misunderstood as unity and fusion of being, and thus gave rise to the greatest materialization of an essentially spiritual union history has ever seen. The oneness of the highest Sufi state was likewise misunderstood and gave rise to the worst crime perpetrated on account of a supremely conscious misunderstanding...The destinies of the two misunderstandings, however, were far apart. The Christian misunderstanding came to dominate the Christendom; the Muslim misunderstanding performed its bloody deed and sank away in front of the Sufi tide which overwhelmed the Muslim world. The success of Sufism in Islam was therefore the success of the Jesus' ethic, but devoid of the theological superstructures which this Christian misunderstanding had constructed concerning the oneness of Christ with God, or of men with Christ. In the Middle Ages, the intellectual disciples of Jesus were the sufis of Islam, rather than the theologians of the Council or Pope-monarchs of Christendom. "