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 Since then The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has formed and retained the statement as a 'historical document'.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:
“They live together without king, without government, and each is his own master.... Beyond the fact that they have no church, no religion and are not idolaters, what more can I say? They live according to nature, and may be called Epicureans rather than Stoics.”
—Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512)
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to children by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the philosophers celebrate in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Our religion ... is itself profoundly sad—a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language—so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)