define, because compared to others it is both unique and contentious. Although the movement is relatively new it only became known in the West in 1970s it is firmly rooted in some of the world's oldest religions, philosophies and practices, including Hinduism, Wicca, Druidism, the worship of goddesses and nature, spiritism, spiritualism, Gnosticism, humanism, ancient Egyptian and Babylonian rel...

The concept of worship in Islam differs from that found in other religions, and is therefore subject to misunderstanding. In general, worship is understood to mean the observance of certain rituals: praying, fasting, giving charity, and other "good" works. In Islam, however, worship is much more-it is one's entire life. As many Muslim scholars have said: "Worship is an all-inclusive term for th...

We formulate quenched chiral perturbation theory for heavy-light mesons coupled to pions, and calculate the one-loop chiral logarithmic corrections to fB, fBs , BB and BBs . We also calculate these corrections for “partially quenched” theories. In both theories, the chiral logarithms diverge in the chiral limit, indicating that (partially) quenched theories should not be used to study this limi...

Over centuries, mankind had to deal with a steadily changing food supply. Depending on seasonal fluctuations or greater natural disasters, either plenty or little food was available. As a consequence, people in different areas of the world developed sophisticated strategies, e.g., seasonal fasting, to handle and overcome these problems. Possibly, in these early days, people discovered also the ...

purpose: to compare the effect of religious fasting on basal tear secretion (bts), tear break up time (tbt) and intraocular pressure (iop) in ramadan 2005. methods: one-hundred fifty-six healthy male volunteers less than 40 years of age from tehran, zahedan, ahvaz, mashhad and tabriz with no ocular and systemic disease participated in this study. weight, urine specific gravity, bts, tbt and iop...

The word spirit with a small "s", has many meanings. It may mean 1) one of the elements in man which is considered as separable from the flesh and animating the body; or, 2)a person, from the moral, emotional or-intellectual point of view; or, 3) a person's disposition, permanent or temporary mental attitude, or, predominance of the spirit over the flesh especially as manifested in courage, ene...

Research into human development involves the use of human embryos and their derivative cells and tissues. How religions view the human embryo depends on beliefs about ensoulment and the inception of personhood, and science can neither prove nor refute the teaching of those religions that consider the zygote to be a human person with an immortal soul. This Spotlight article discusses some of the...

One of the central claims of Norenzayan et al.'s article is that supernatural monitoring and intergroup competition have facilitated the rise of large-scale prosocial religions. Although the authors outline in detail how social instincts that govern supernatural monitoring are honed by cultural evolution and have given rise to Big Gods, they do not provide a clear explanation for the success of...

Introduction There is a sense in which all intellectual work on religion has a reifying effect. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences necessarily construct religions as particular kinds of object. That is, they take some human emotions, ideas, artefacts and activities and frame them as things called „religions‟. Accounts of these religions provide the basis for inferring something call...

In the process of studying religions, we often overlook the secular aspects of religious organizations. This paper examines the basic flows of money in different spiritual organizations, and attempts to correlate the types of income with the structure of the priestly hierarchy. This analysis is by no means comprehensive. In the end, more questions are raised than are answered. Patrick Cody Reli...