Wikipedia Position on Religion
“Religion is a modern Western concept. Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages.”
Mircea Eliade
While Wikipedia has a page dedicated to Mircea Eliade, he is only briefly mentioned on Wikipedia “Religion” and “History of Religion” pages for reference readings.
Encyclopedia Britannica:
“Eliade was one of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and one of the world’s foremost interpreters of religious symbolism and myth.”
In the decade after the war Eliade lived in Paris, where he established his international reputation as a historian, morphologist, and phenomenologist of religion. In 1956–57 he was appointed visiting professor and then professor and chairman of the history of religions department at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his retirement in 1983.
Eliade was often described in the popular press and by scholars as the world’s most influential historian of religion.
Noted for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit).
An endowed chair in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School was named after Eliade in recognition of his wide contribution to the research on this subject.
Gautama Buddha
Gautama Buddha, also known as Siddhartha Gautama in Sanskrit or Siddhattha Gotama in Pali, Shakyamuni Buddha, or simply the Buddha, after the title of Buddha, was a monk, mendicant, and sage, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded. He is believed to have lived and taught mostly in the northeastern part of ancient India sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.
The Problem of Evil
How you reconcile the the belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God, with the existence of evil and suffering in the world?
“The sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time are apparently irreconcilable with the existence of a creator of ‘unbounded’ goodness.
Charles Darwin