Religious Buildings
The Beirut City Center is one of the most religiously diverse areas in the world. Mosques and churches lie side by side on the BCD's streets. Several of these churches and mosques are hundreds of years old and are of high archaeological significance. In total, the BCD is home to ten churches, six mosques, and one synagogue located in the Wadi Abu Jamil neighborhood. Despite the severe destruction incurred on these buildings during the Civil War, they have been restored to their prior shape and are all currently in use. During religious holidays and occasions, the churches and mosques host social gatherings, charity events, religious competitions, chorus recitals of religious verses, and mass prayers attended by Lebanon's top political figures.
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Famous quotes containing the words religious and/or buildings:
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)