What is your response to this quote?

Question

"Religion is a candle inside a multicolored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there."
-Mohammed Neguib

Good question Cosmicbodhiboy.

I think the origin of this statement was to help allay the tensions between Egyptians of different faiths under Neguib's presidency.

For the more spiritual, less religious, of you, what does the light represent?

This quote helped me to think outside of my own Southern Baptist/Evangelical upbringing. Also, marrying a Sunni Muslim helped me to have a more personal experience of different religions.

Answer 1

Knowledge is light.
By Practise of that Knowledge, the glass will be colourless.

Answer 2

It's an interesting perspective, and some great answers, but I have to confess myself a little jaded with the whole business ( and by and large it has been just that, a business ) of religion.

A candle puts me in mind, not inappropriately one might think, of a Roman Candle. Flares up instantly, spouts out it's load of sulphurous smoke and flame and then .... just dies on you when it starts to get interesting.

I believe that religions as we know them are a pale shadow of the true understandings and wisdom that abounded in this place in the 'time' before the Rishis, the 'Time of the Neteru', and the 'Naaga'. The same time of the ancestors of the Maya, a people so ancient, and whose story was so nearly obliterated by the Conquistadores, that we don't even know their own name for themselves.

In those times we humans 'knew' the relationships between all of 'Life', and our part in it. These times will be restored, and if I am not very mistaken in the not too distant 'future'.

Religion has tried, with very mixed results, to fill the immense void of understanding. A 'Light' unto the world ?

I hope that some have lit the way for some of the people, but for the most part it was frequently the people that got 'lit'.

True Understanding is not a mere candle, it is a blindingly brilliant beacon, whose purity and clarity is beyond equivocation.

{{{{{{{{{{{{Cosmic Light}}}}}}}}}}}}

Answer 3

I think it's vainly profound; it intends to be clever and deep but in fact it's just an attempt to 'weave sand' - sophistic rhetoric designed to fool the gullible with colourful, 'poetic' words.
If you've ever trawled through any number of My Spaces et al. you'll see a million of these so-called profound quotes that appeal to the naive and ignorant. It's a fashion to have one or two, but, as with all art forms, there are more far pretenders and 'wannabes' than there are 'real deals'. I bet Oscar Wilde would spin in his grave to see what passes for deep and meaningful to some these days!

*We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.* - H.L.Menchen.

Answer 4

It is a shame the candle must dwell within the lantern. I must get within the lantern as well to study the beauty and pureness of this source of light without distortion. No, I must join within the flame to see it's true nature.

Answer 5

What's inside the candle?
.

Answer 6

Candles melt?

Answer 7

Clear Light shines clear through,
naked it knows it's self,
seen by it's self,
all things point to this.
*sip*

Answer 8

Yep!
And mystics set about seeing the naked flame.

Answer 9

That God is all one in the same. We all see with our own perspective but its all just Him...Or Her

Answer 10

The candle may be there, but it was never lit.

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