Religious View: A heretical take on Holy Scripture dailyrepublic.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailyrepublic.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Bethany Verrett 21 Jan
It seems that ever since God expelled humanity from the Garden of Eden, mankind has tried to find its way back. Whether they build a personal paradise like the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon, or they seek a land too good to be true like the golden city of El Dorado, people seek perfection. Even today, theories about going to Mars to build utopia in biodomes abound.
In the Bible, there are mentions of a promised land, which have bled into Christian culture as songs and as powerful imagery. Sometimes, centuries, even millennia, of use in culture distorts the meaning of a word or concept. Let s first discuss where the promised land is. In the Old Testament, the promised land referred to a place in the Middle East promised to Abraham’s descendants, known as Israel; in the United States, enslaved people used it to refer to states where they would be free. In recent times, it refers to Heaven, the land promised for those w