Karen Armstrong Quotes - Page 2

Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue.

Compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.

Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.

From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths.

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death. The cross, crucified, and that turned into victory. Mohammad was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant.

We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.

Let us bring something new to the table. Let us use our pain always to remember the others, bring them into the conversation, and get beyond the stereotypes and prejudices that create injustice all over the world.

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

We talk about God as though he was like a somebody. We ask him to bless our nation, or save our Queen, or give us a fine day for the picnic. And we actually expect him to be on our side in an election or war even though our opponents are also God's children.

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating.

Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.

Golden Rule lies at the heart of every religious and of every ethical system of morality, it what makes us look at one another. The religions have all adopted it independently, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, because they find it works and because it says something very deep about the structure of our humanity.

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

The great task of our time is to build a global society, where people can live together in peace

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

The awful atrocities of religion happened when people assume that God shares your likes and dislikes. The Crusaders when into battle to kill Muslims and Jews and cried, "God will's it." That was their battle cry. Obviously God willed no such thing. The Crusaders were simply projecting onto a deity they'd created on their own image and likeness, all their hatred and loathing of these faiths and made it endorse some of their most awful prejudices and lethal prejudices.