Religion
Many religions have taken on the challenge of establishing a world community through the propagation of their doctrine, faith and practice.
In the Bahá'í Faith, `Abdu'l-Bahá, successor and son of Bahá'u'lláh, produced a series of documents called the Tablets of the Divine Plan. Now in a book form, after their publication in 1917 and their 'unveiling' in New York in 1919, these tablets contained an outline and a plan for the expansion of the Bahá'í community into Asia, Asia minor, Europe and the Americas, indeed, throughout the planet.
The formal implementation of this plan, known as 'Abdu'l-Baha's Divine Plan, began in 1937 in the first of a series of sub-plans, the Seven Year Plan of 1937 to 1944. Shoghi Effendi, the leader of the Baha'i community until 1957 and then the Universal House of Justice from 1963, were instrumental in the organization and design of future sub-plans. All of this and much more was part of the creation and establishment of a world community, now the second most widespread on the earth according to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
In Buddhism "the conventional Sangha of monks has been entrusted by the Buddha with the task of leading all people in creating the ideal world community of noble disciples or truly civilized people."
A Benedictine monk, Friar John Main, inspired the World Community for Christian meditation through the practice of meditation centered around the Maranatha mantra, meaning "Come Lord."
The Lutheran Church in America had issued a social statement - World Community: Ethical Imperatives in an Age of Interdependence Adopted by the Fifth Biennial Convention, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 25-July 2, 1970. Since then The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has formed and retained the statement as a 'historical document'.
Read more about this topic: World Community
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“It’s almost impossible to deal with a crazy man, except that he does have religious beliefs, and the world of Islam will be damaged if a fanatic like him should commit murder in the name of religion against 60 innocent people.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.”
—C.S. (Clive Staples)