The Portable World Bible

This volume is a timely and comprehensive overview of major philosophical and religious systems now shaping our world.

A very noble project, I think - to bring the essentials of all the world's holy books together in one compact volume and to try to promote religious tolerance and understanding. Even in this advanced day and age, there is a lot of bigotry out there with regard to religion. This book was written at least 50 years ago, and yet it promotes one of the most sensible views on religion/comparative religion of anything I've ever read - has commentary as well as the scriptures themselves. I'd rank this right up there with Joseph Campbell's work - and that's saying something.

This book was really difficult to read at times, but please don't take that the wrong way. When I say difficult, I mean it challenged me and I feel any book on spirituality should do that. After all, what good is a book if its just teaching you what you already know? "The Portable Wold Bible" takes seven of the worlds most influential religions and summarizes them and also compares and contrasts them. The religions compared are Hindu, Confucianist, Taoist, Mohammedan, Buddhist, Judeo-Christian, and Zoroastrian. By learning a little of each religion, an open-minded person can learn much about there own religion, whether it is something listed above or not. I'm a Catholic, but found the writings of Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucianist very enlightening. What was written there has got me thinking about many things. It will probably be something for me to digest for several months. It's very interesting to also learn that most of our major religions sprang to life about the same time in history. I definitely recommend this book to anyone questing to learn more about the god they worship or pay respect to.