Category: History of religion

How did a small Jewish faith group become the largest world religion? I have already asked myself several times what might have induced people to profess Christianity in the first few centuries. It is true that the Greek and Roman cults of gods had lost much of their prestige, but in Neoplatonism or Gnosis there were more interesting and intellectually more demanding ideologies [...]

Published in GralsWelt 45/2007 If you ask someone about something they don't know, or perhaps can't know at all, their response is sometimes a cheeky counter-question: “Am I Jesus?” This return coach implies that Jesus is the Son of God would have been all-knowing. Was that really him? Sadducee questions To be honest, sometimes I also ask a [...]

(Published in GralsWelt 48/2008) The Bible is the most printed (and probably also the most widely read) book in world literature. Its significance for the Jewish and Christian religions is fundamental and its influence on world culture cannot be assessed. After the Bible had been considered an unassailable source of truth in the West for centuries, especially since the [...]

(Published in GW 46/2007) Was there a religious cult around the “great mother”, a supreme female deity, long before the patriarchal monotheism (belief in one god)? And did the culture that developed under it guarantee a harmonious, peaceful coexistence in a "golden age"? Here we summarize the research on this question and also describe the meaning [...]

(Published in GralsWelt 51/2008) An exciting thriller became a world bestseller and sparked discussions about the history of religion: Dan Brown's “Da Vinci Code”. The adventurous thriller was soon followed by theological works in several languages that denounce historical inaccuracies in Brown's thriller. Various claims of the bestseller are discussed, commented on and refuted. One would almost think that it would not work [...]

(Published in GralsWelt 43/2007) The 20th century has been called the century of demagogues and dictators: Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, SAlazar, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot. As different as these oppressors were in their personalities or their political profiles, they all sparked a pseudo-religious "enthusiasm" - in fact it was hysteria - that has continued to [...]

(Published in GralsWelt 14/1999) Among the three great Asian founders of religion - Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse - one has received special attention in the Occident: Lao-Tse (Lao-zi, Lao Tan). The Taoteking (Dao-de-jing) attributed to him has been translated several times into European languages. No less a person than Martin Heidegger (1889- 1976) worked out a translation together with a Chinese, and Carl Gustav Jung [...]

(Published in Grail World 12/99) Hell and devil belong together in the popular understanding. Who (like the majority today, including theologians) no longer believes in the devil, there will probably be no hell for him either. In issue 11, GrailWelt editor Siegfried HAGL investigated the question of whether the idea of an "adversary of God" *) is really just [...]

(Published in GralsWelt 11/99) In our time, many people struggle with religions, with "religious truths" in particular. Too much abuse has been committed to religious sentiment. Large religious communities put themselves at the service of earthly rule ideologies and were not ashamed to tolerate blatant injustice and violations of self-taught values for the purpose of exercising their own power [...]

(Published in GralsWelt 8/1998) In East Asia, Christianity, Christian ethics, and Christian thinking are a comparatively new phenomenon. Old, very old, on the other hand, are the "classic attitudes towards life". In our series on “Wisdom of Asia”, Siegfried Hagl deals with the legacy of Confucius. "In a Confucian society, every individual must strive to show their loyalty to the society to which they belong [...]