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" Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings. "

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" 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. "

Karen Armstrong

God

Yes

Stage

" 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. "

" Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness. "

Karen Armstrong

Solitude

Lose

" Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle. "

" 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. "

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

Karen Armstrong

Poetry

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

Karen Armstrong

Religions

Teach

" Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it. "

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

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

" When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too. "

" 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. "

" In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do. "

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

" 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

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way. "