Karen Armstrong Quotes - Page 3

If we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of the greatest geniuses the world has known.

Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

There must be no coercion in matters of faith!

All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.

Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.

There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine.

A science can diagnose a cancer and can even find a cure for it, but it can't, and a scientist will be the first to say, it's can't help you to deal with the stress and disappointment and terror that comes with a diagnosis, and nor can it help you to die well, like Socrates, kindly, not railing against faith, but in possession of your own death. For these imponderable questions people have turned to mythos.

We have to make a disciplined effort to find out what our governments are doing in these various parts of the world and what is actually happening. We have to learn to listen to each other's stories. Something we are not very good at.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.

Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.

Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.

Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause.

After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.

Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

Far from being the father of jihad, [Prophet] Mohammad was a peacemaker, who risked his life and nearly lost the loyalty of his closest companions because he was determined to effect a reconciliation with Mecca

It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas.

There is nothing in Islam that is more violent than Christianity.

You are your best self when you give yourself away.

Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.

I have become convinced, through my studies, that the only way to achieve a safe, just and viable world is to live by the Golden Rule. This is what drives my writing. I want to point out this interconnectedness, point out the beauty of the faith in all traditions without exception, show the complexity of the atrocities that we have experienced, and our shared culpability as a species.

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.