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" Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion. "

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" The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight. "

Karen Armstrong

Islam

Changed

World

" 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. "

Karen Armstrong

Change

God

" I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it. "

" Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. "

Karen Armstrong

Religion

External

" Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar. "

" I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions. "

" Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition. "

" 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. "

" After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful. "

" Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. "

" I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time. "

" Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity. "

" But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value. "

" Well, logos is science or reason, something that helps us to function practically and effectively in the world, and it must therefore be closely in tune and reflect accurately the realities of the world around us. "

Karen Armstrong

World

Reason

" Compassion is not a popular virtue. "

" 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? "

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

" A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do. "

Karen Armstrong

Poetry

" Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage. "

" In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living. "

" Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God. "

" 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. "

" If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life. "

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

Karen Armstrong

Religions

Teach

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

" Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past. "

Karen Armstrong

Past

Fact