A Muslim friend and I sometimes shake our heads ruefully at a pattern that seems to occur regularly among the great religions of the world.  First, an extraordinary messenger appears among us, offering compelling new insights into who we are and how we can relate better to one another and the world in general.  These ideas differ radically from the conventional beliefs of their time, but they ring so true, and are conveyed in such a compelling manner, that literally anyone can grasp them.  As a result, they spread widely and quickly.

Eventually, though, the original messenger either dies, or is removed from us in some other manner.  The people who aspire to carry on his work typically don’t have quite the same grasp of the key principles that he did;  and as public speakers or writers, they’re usually nowhere near as talented.  As a result, when they try to explain the startling new insights to other people, they link them back to earlier, more limited ways of understanding.  Over time, the original message then becomes increasingly muddied and garbled, and the people who believe themselves to be devoted followers of the messenger can eventually end up espousing things that are far out of line with what the messenger actually intended.