pdf Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions مجانا للكاتب هوستن سميث
People have a profound need to believe that the truth they perceive is rooted in the unchanging depths of the universe; for were it not, could the truth be really important? Yet how can we so believe when others see truth differently? Archaic peoples, wrapped like cocoons in their tribal beliefs, did not face this dilemma. Even civilizations on the whole have been spared it, for until recently they were largely self-contained. It is we- we moderns, we worldly wise-who experience the problem This book addresses that problem. Twenty years before it was acutely. published in 1976, I wrote The Worlds Religions (originally titled The Religions of Man), which presented the major traditions in their individuality and variety. It took me two decades to see how they converge. The outlooks of individual men and women (the militant atheist, the pious believer, the cagey skepticY"are too varied to classify, but when they gather in collectivities-the outlooks of tribes, societies, civilizations, and at deepest level the world's enduring religions-a pattern emerges. One finds a remarkable unity underlying the surface differences. When we look at human bodies we normally notice their external fea-tures, which differ markedly. Meanwhile the spines that support this variety are structurally much alike. It is the same with col-lective outlooks. Outwardly they too differ, but inwardly it is as if an "invisible geometry" has everywhere been working to shape them to a single truth.