Belief

Please see selected recent belief, religion and spiruality-related change below.

See also;

• Halcyon Religion Headlines
• Halcyon Spirituality Headlines

August 2018

• The major religions all make heavy use of ritual to inspire feelings of awe and devotion, but for those  who grew up in secular backgrounds its power is mostly untapped. However, for atheists and agnostics, ritual doesn’t have to be synonymous with a church or mosque: it can be a conscious, creative, purposeful practice that can be woven into people's lives in other ways, and thereby make their experience all the richer for it.

Fascinating In Our Time episode on Gnosticism, The Gnostics divided the universe into two domains: the visible world and the spiritual one. They believed that a special sort of knowledge, or gnosis, would enable them to escape the evils of the physical world and allow them access to the higher spiritual realm. The Gnostics were regarded as heretics by many of the Christian Church Fathers, but their influence was important in defining the course of early Christianity. A major archaeological discovery in Egypt in the 1940s, when a large cache of Gnostic texts were found buried in an earthenware jar at Nag Hammadi, enabled scholars to learn considerably more about their beliefs.