Abstract Līlā , as a concept and term, has long complex history in Sanskritic Hinduism, yet, irrespective of context, it routinely been translated by words signifying “play,” “sport,” “game” English other languages. Focusing mainly on the term’s philosophical theological connotations this article challenges these facile often misleading renderings. It analyzes semantic functions nuances decepti...

Recent advances in our knowledge of mental illness have not lr*ade it any easier to reconcile this suffering with a belief in Cod. As long as all mental illness could be ascribed to evil spirits the Question of God's responsibility was not so great. The dichotomy of ^?d and the devil did give, as it were, a working solution to the problem although it did not give any final answer. The very idea of

OBJECTIVE The present study explored the role of the emotional experience of God (i.e., positive and negative God images) in the happiness of chronic pain (CP) patients. Framed in the transactional model of stress, we tested a model in which God images would influence happiness partially through its influence on disease interpretation as a mediating mechanism. We expected God images to have bot...

PHILOSOPHY Ever since the time of Pascal men have feared that the 'God' worshipped by believers and the 'God' contemplated by philosophers were somehow different. The former was personal, historically active, slow to anger and plentiful in mercy: the latter was dubiously able to be described in personal terms at all, and infinite in such a way as to baffle the imagination. The 'God' of the form...

Anthropomorphism is a default strategy for making the unfamiliar familiar, but is it a uniform strategy? Do all dimensions of anthropomorphism “hang together”? We explored this question by involving adults (n = 99) in a speeded property-attribution task in which they decided, as quickly as possible, whether properties of two types— psychological and physiological—could be attributed to God. Par...

Associating certain forms and designs in Islamic Arts with the promised Heaven may be widely observed in the works of many historians and critics of the field. It is believed that Islamic Art has been derived from the imagination of the Paradise as depicted in Holy Quran. To express this meaning in technical words it should be said that the main concept in Islamic Arts has been the gardens of h...