Religion Christianity

The Italians had a profound effect on religion. Christianity, for example, gained momentum from the Roman Empire. In Neil s opinion, without the Italian peninsula, we would not have Christianity. Because Islam was an early offshoot of Christianity, there also would be no Islam. Neil speculates, however, that monotheism has been an important factor in modem cultural development, so some kind of Jewish offshoot similar to Christianity would have developed, but this would have depended heavily on the political scene of the Mediterranean at the time. In Neil s opinion, the Italian peninsula has had a greater effect on today s civilization than the Greek peninsula. 

Ronca, Italo. "Religious Symbolism in Medieval Islamic and Christian Alchemy." In Western esotericism and the science of religion, eds. Antoine Faivre and Wouter J. Hanegraaff Leuven Peeters, 1998. 

Neagu, Cristina. The Processus sub forma missae Christian alchemy, identity and identification. Archaeus. Etudes d histoire des Religions 4, no. 1-2 (2000) 105-117. 

Theosophia traces the long-hidden esoteric stream of Christian gnostic theosophy, revealing a "chivalric" religion of the Holy Spirit at the heart of Christianity. It shows that all three major branches of Christianity bear within them interrelated esoteric traditions. 

The esoteric books of Judaism speak of the Lamed-Vav, the thirty-six Just Ones on whose shoulders the world rests, and of the Seven Pillars of wisdom and righteousness, seven saints whose successive lives extend over the entire history of humanity. Tradition lists these seven as Adam, Methuselah, Shem, Jacob, Serah (the daughter of Asher), Ahijah of Shiloh (who was the Maggid, or Inner Teacher, of the Ba al Shem Tov), and the prophet Elijah himself. In fact, all three Religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, teach the resurrection of the dead, when all humanity, at the end of days, will rise in incorruptible physical bodies and reap the everlasting harvest of what they have sown. 

In exoteric religion, there is an ideological conflict between religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that portray God as a being and religions like Buddhism and Taoism which are God-free, and conceive of... 

During this period, sometime between 2000 and 1825 b.c.e., the patriarch of the Hebrew people, Abraham, left the Babylonian city of Ur and brought his people to the other end of the Fertile Crescent, to what is now Israel. There they founded a religion that focused on their one tribal god to the exclusion of all others. This was the beginning of the monotheistic biblical tradition that led to the creation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

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