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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.

-Karen Armstrong

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After A Time I

Karen Armstrong

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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.

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I Remind Myself That My Pain Is Not Unique. Everybody Suffers.

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.

We Can't Say What God Is, And Until The Modern Period, Jewish, Christian, And Muslim Theologians In The Three God Religions All Knew That. They Insisted That We Have No Idea What We Meant When We Said That God Was Good, Or Wise, Or Intelligent.

We Constantly Have Ideas And Experiences That Go Beyond What We Can Say Or Know. Most Often These Are Expressed In Art, In Painting, In Music. Music, Everyday Confronts Us With A Form Of Knowing That Doesn't Depend On Words.

Yet A Personal God Can Become A Grave Liability. He Can Be A Mere Idol Carved In Our Own Image, A Projection Of Our Limited Needs, Fears And Desires. We Can Assume That He Loves What We Love And Hates What We Hate, Endorsing Our Prejudices Instead Of Compelling Us To Transcend Them.

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.

I Used To Hate Religion, I Loathed It In My Angry Days.

All Religions Are Designed To Teach Us How To Live, Joyfully, Serenely, And Kindly, In The Midst Of Suffering.

Today We Often Think That Before We Start Living A Religious Life We Have First To Accept The Creedal Doctrines And That Before One Can Have Any Comprehension Of The Loyalty And Trust Of Faith, One Must First Force One's Mind To Accept A Host Of Incomprehensible Doctrines. But This Is To Put The Cart Before The Horse.

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.

My Study Of Religion, Which I Regard In Many Ways As An Art Form, Is A Search For Meaning.

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.

Intelligence Doesn't Just Mean Tracking Down Terrorists; It Means Finding Out What Is In People's Hearts And Minds And Discovering The Complexity Of Most Issues.

The Constant Reprimands Made Me Hyperconscious Of My Own Performance, And So Instead Of Getting Rid Of Self, I Had Become Embedded In The Egoism I Was Supposed To Transcend. Now I Was Beginning To Understand That A Silence That Is Not Clamorous With Vexation And Worried Self-regard Can Become Part Of The Texture Of Your Mind, Can Seep Into You, Moment By Moment, And Gradually Change You.

The First Person To Promulgate The Golden Rule, Which Was The Bedrock Of This Empathic Spirituality, Was Confucius 500 Years Before Christ.

I Am Not Interested In The Afterlife. Religion Is Supposed To Be About Losing Your Ego, Not Preserving It Eternally In Optimum Conditions.

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.

Religion Is Not About Accepting Twenty Impossible Propositions Before Breakfast, But About Doing Things That Change You. It Is A Moral Aesthetic, An Ethical Alchemy. If You Behave In A Certain Way, You Will Be Transformed.

Religion Starts With The Perception That Something Is Wrong.

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.

The Values Of Islam Are Expressed By Muslims Clearly. September 11 Changed The World, And Put Muslims On The Spotlight.

If Your Child Dies, Or You Witness A Terrible Natural Disaster, Yes, You Certainly Want A Scientific Explanation As To What's Happened. But Science Can't Help You To Find Meaning, Help You Deal With That Turbulence Of Your Grief, Rage, And Dismay.

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.

Sometimes I Call Myself A Freelance, I Can't See Any One Of The Great Religions As Superior To Others.

Religions Have Found That If You Behave In A Certain Way, If You Sort Of Perform Certain Rituals That Expand Your Mind And Make You Realize That Will Make You Realize And Help You To Seguey Into Transcendence And Perform Certain Acts, Adopt A Certain Lifestyle, You Develop New Capacities Of Mind And Heart, Just Like The Dancer, Or The Athlete That Make You Into A Whole Human Being And Principle After One Of These Disciplines Right Across The Board In All Of The Faiths Is Compassion, The Ability To Feel With The Other Person.

Eventually, With Regret, I Left The Religious Life, And, Once Freed Of The Burden Of Failure And Inadequacy, I Felt My Belief In God Slip Quietly Away. He Had Never Really Impinged Upon My Life, Though I Had Done My Best To Enable Him To Do So. Now That I No Longer Felt So Guilty And Anxious About Him, He Became Too Remote To Be A Reality.

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.

Compassion Is Not Feeling Sorry For Others. It's Not Soft. It Requires An Intellectual Effort.

Here In America, Religious People Often Prefer To Be Right Rather Than Compassionate. They've Lost The Axial Age Vision Of Concern For Everybody.

It's Quite Common For A Sufi Mystic To Cry In Ecstasy That He's Neither A Jew, A Christian, Nor A Muslim. He Is At Home Equally In A Synagogue, A Mosque, A Temple, Or A Church Because When One's Glimpsed The Divine, One's Left These Man-made Distinctions Behind.

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.

We Should Probably All Pause To Confront Our Past From Time To Time, Because It Changes Its Meaning As Our Circumstances Alter.

My Greatest Solace Is My Study. If I Am Deprived Of My Study, I Can Become Lost, Unhappy And Unhinged.

Compassion Is A Practically Acquired Knowledge, Like Dancing. You Must Do It And Practice Diligently Day By Day.

The Study Of The Traditions Doesn't Necessarily Make You Want To Convert To Another Tradition, But It Helps You To See Your Own Differently And Expands Your Outlook.

Religious Ideas And Practices Take Root Not Because They Are Promoted By Forceful Theologians, Nor Because They Can Be Shown To Have A Sound Historical Or Rational Basis, But Because They Are Found In Practice To Give The Faithful A Sense Of Sacred Transcendence.

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?

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 Want To Create, Never Mind The Leaders Or The Bishops Or Chief Rabbis Or Imams, Or Popes. We Want To Create A Grassroots Movement Where People Will Become Attuned To Uncompassionate Discourse In The Same Way As We Are Now Attuned To Sort Of Gender Imbalance In Our Speech.

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.

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.

Deeds That Seemed Unimportant At The Time Would Prove To Have Been Momentous; A Tiny Act Of Selfishness And Unkindness Or, Conversely, An Unconsidered Act Of Generosity Would Become The Measure Of A Human Life.

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.

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.

I'm Seeking To Make Sense Of Life, Looking For Its Meaning And How We Can Have A Better Humanity.

Religions Don't Own Compassion; It Is A Human Virtue.

If It Is Not Tempered By Compassion, And Empathy, Reason Can Lead Men And Women Into A Moral Void.

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.

Surely It's Better To Love Others, However Messy And Imperfect The Involvement, Than To Allow One's Capacity For Love To Harden.

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.

Compassion Is Not An Option. It's The Key To Our Survival.

If We Want To Create A Viable, Peaceful World, We've Got To Integrate Compassion Into The Gritty Realities Of 21st Century Life.

I Was A Lousy Nun. I Couldn't Do It. I Couldn't Find God. It Wasn't Suitable For Me. It Is Suitable For Very Few People.

Compassion Is The Key In Islam And Buddhism And Judaism And Christianity. They Are Profoundly Similar.

Like Art, Religion Is An Imaginative And Creative Effort To Find A Meaning And Value In Human Life.

Compassion Has Been Advocated By All The Great Faiths Because It Has Been Found To Be The Safest And Surest Means Of Attaining Enlightenment. It Dethrones The Ego From The Center Of Our Lives And Puts Others There, Breaking Down The Carapace Of The Selfishness That Holds Us Back From An Experience Of The Sacred. And It Gives Us Ecstasy, Broadening Our Perspectives And Giving Us A Larger, Enhanced Vision.

In Order To Always Treat Others, As We Would Wish To Be Treated Ourselves, We Have To Learn About Each Other. Not Just Relying On An Op-ed Piece We May Have Read Here, Or A Half-remembered Interview On The Television Program There That Happens To Chime With Our Own Views.

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.

Jewish, Christian, And Muslim Theologians Have Insisted For Centuries That God Does Not Exist And That There Is 'nothing' Out There; In Making These Assertions, Their Aim Was Not To Deny The Reality Of God But To Safeguard God's Transcendence.

Geniuses Are Not Always Pleasant People.

For Centuries, The Muslims Were Able To Co-exist Perfectly Well With Jews And Christians In The Middle East.

Even Though The Discples Were Not Aware Of It, The Presence Was With Them While They Were Reviewing The Scriptures Together On The Road. Henceforth, We Will Catch Only A Fleeting Glimpse Of It -- In The Study Of Sacred Writings, In Other Human Beings, In Liturgy, And In Communion With Strangers. But These Moments Remain Us That Our Fellow Men And Women Are Themselves Sacred; There Is Something About Them Taht Is Worthy Of Absolute Reverence, Is In The Last Resort Mysterious, And We Will Always Elude Us.

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.

I Left The Convent And That Was Because I Wasn't A Very Good Nun. I Could See That I Wasn't Going To Make It. It's Very Difficult To Be A Nun, Or To Live A Religious Life. It's Very Difficult To Live A Life Of Total Celibacy Or A Life Without Any Possessions Or Material Responsibilities At All, Or In Total Obedience To Somebody Else, And Remain A Mature Whole Human Being, And I Knew That I Wasn't Going To Be One Of Those.

There Is No Ascent To The Heights Without Prior Descent Into Darkness, No New Life Without Some Form Of Death.

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.

The More Aggressive Our Ideologies Become, The More Aggressive Our Discourse Whether It's In The United States, From Washington D.c., Or Whether It's From Tehran, Or From Some Underground Al-qaeda Cell. The More Aggressive That Discourse Is, The More People Of Moderate Persuasion Have To Organize And Speak A Voice Of Compassion. That Means To Feel With The Other.

You Are Your Best Self When You Give Yourself Away.

[t]he Family Is A School Of Compassion Because It Is Here That We Learn To Live With Other People. (68)

...there Is Something Wrong With Any Spirituality That Does Not Inspire Selfless Concern For Others

Concern For Others

We Are Opinionated Society. We're Very Happy To Spout Forth Our Own Views; We're Not Good About Listening. We Have To Listen To Other's Stories. Learn To Listen To The Stories Of The Terrorists Just As We Hope That They Will Listen To Ours Because Very Often These Narratives Express Frustrations, Fears, And Anxieties That Most Societies Can Safely Ignore.

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.

You Have To Get Into The Water And Learn Against What Seems To Be The Law Gravity To Float And Dancing, Or Athletics Takes You Years Before You Develop A Skill. But If You Work At It, Practicing Daily, You Can Enable Your Body To Do Things That Are Utterly Impossible To An Untrained Physic.

If Professional Religious Leaders Can [no Longer] Instruct..., Our Artists And Creative Writers Can Perhaps Step Into This Priestly Role And Bring Fresh Insight To Our Lost And Damaged World.

A Mode Of Knowledge Rooted In Silence And Intuitive Insight Which Gives Meaning To Life But Which Cannot Be Explained In Rational Terms.

When The Horror Recedes And The World Resumes Its Normal Shape, You Cannot Forget It. You Have Seen What Is Really There, The Empty Horror That Exists When The Consoling Illusion Of Our Mundane Experience Is Stripped Away, So You Can Never Respond To The World In Quite The Same Way Again.

He [aristotle] Pointed Out That People Who Had Become Initiates In The Various Mystery Religions Were Not Required To Learn Any Facts 'but To Experience Certain Emotions And To Be Put In A Certain Disposition.' Hence His Famous Literary Theory That Tragedy Effected A Purification (katharsis) Of The Emotions Of Terror And Pity That Amounted To An Experience Of Rebirth.

Literary Theory

People Knew There Were Two Ways Of Coming At Truth. One Was Science, Or What The Greeks Called Logos, Reason, Logic. And That Was Essential That The Discourse Of Science Or Logic Related Directed To The External World. The Other Was Mythos, What The Greeks Called Myth, Which Didn't Mean A Fantasy Story, But It Was A Narrative Associated With Ritual And Ethical Practice But It Helped Us To Address Problems For Which There Were No Easy Answers, Like Mortality, Cruelty, The Sorrow That Overtakes Us All That's Part Of The Human Condition. And These Two Were Not In Opposition, We Needed Both.

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.

I Learned A Lot From Both, Initially Jewish And Muslim Theologians That Had Been Missing, Perhaps From My Rather Parochial Catholic Upbringing.

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.

At The Beginning Of The Twentieth Century, Every Single Leading Muslim Intellectual Was In Love With The West, And Wanted Their Countries To Look Just Like Britain And France.

Respect Only Has Meaning As Respect For Those With Whom I Do Not Agree.

So, We Think About God Far To Easily And That's Because Of A Lot Of Social, Intellectual, And Scientific Changes That Have Taken Place In The Western World And That Has Made God Very Problematic For A Lot Of People.

I Am Continually Trying To Find Meaning In The World. If We Cannot Find Some Ultimate Significance Or Value In Our Lives, We Fall Very Easily Into Despair.

I Had Tried, As I Thought As A Nun, To Open Myself To God And God Seemed Totally Uninterested In Me. The Heavens Remained Closed And Opaque. I Now Realize, Of Course, That I Had A Very, Very Inadequate Idea Of God. I Was Expecting Clouds To Part, A Little Sort Of Whisper In My Ear, And Of Course, That's Not What God Is. God Is Not Another Being; We Are Talking About Something Much More Profound.

Compassion Doesn't, Of Course, Mean Feeling Sorry For People, Or Pity, Which Is How The Word Has Become Emasculated In A Way.

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.

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.

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.

From The Rabbis Of The Early Talmudic Age I Learned That There Is Never A Last Word On God. There's, You Always Continue To Question. Even God Himself Could Be Questioned And You Can Keep Arguing With One Another And There Will Be No End To This Conversation About The Divine Because No Human Expression Of God Can Be Ultimate.

Myth Was Regarded As Primary; It Was Concerned With What Was Thought To Be Timeless And Constant In Our Existence. Myth Looked Back To The Origins Of Life, To The Foundations Of Culture, And To The Deepest Levels Of The Human Mind. Myth Was Not Concerned With Practical Matters, But With Meaning. Unless We Find Some Significance In Our Lives, We Mortal Men And Women Fall Very Easily Into Despair. The Mythos Of A Society Provided People With A Context That Made Sense Of Their Day-to-day Lives; It Directed Their Attention To The Eternal And The Universal.

And Sometimes It's The Very Otherness Of A Stranger, Someone Who Doesn't Belong To Our Ethnic Or Ideological Or Religious Group, An Otherness That Can Repel Us Initially, But Which Can Jerk Us Out Of Our Habitual Selfishness, And Give Us Intonations Of That Sacred Otherness, Which Is God.

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.

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.

Illness Itself Can Make You Angry, Enraged, Furious, And It Made Me Angry, Enraged, And Furious. I Don't Think It Brought Me To God At All. It Depends How You Deal With It. And I Think That, At Its Best, Three Little Words That Always Have To Be Applied To Religion, Religion Can Help You To Deal With That.

God [is] Not The Exclusive Property Of Any One Tradition. The Divine Light [cannot] Be Confined To A Single Lamp, Belonging To The East Or The West, But Enlightens All Human Beings.

Compassion Has To Become A Discipline. It's Something That You Do. It's No Good Thinking That You Agree With Compassion Or Not, You've Just Got To Do It. Just Like It's No Good Agreeing That It's Possible To Float, You Just Have To Get Into The Pool And Then You Learn That It's Possible.

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.

Religion Is Not About Accepting Twenty Impossible Propositions Before Breakfast, But About Doing Things That Change You. It Is A Moral Aesthetic, An Ethical Alchemy. If You Behave In A Certain Way, You Will Be Transformed. The Myths And Laws Of Religion Are Not True Because They They Conform To Some Metaphysical, Scientific Or Historical Reality But Because They Are Life Enhancing. They Tell You How Human Nature Functions, But You Will Not Discover Their Truth Unless You Apply These Myths And Doctrines To Your Own Life And Put Them Into Practice.

We Are What We Are Because Of The Hard Work, Insights And Achievements Of Countless Others.

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.

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.

There Must Be No Coercion In Matters Of Faith!

The Only Way To Show A True Respect For God Is To Act Morally While Ignoring God’s Existence.

If Your Understanding Of The Divine Made You Kinder, More Empathetic, And Impelled You To Express Sympathy In Concrete Acts Of Loving-kindness, This Was Good Theology. But If Your Notion Of God Made You Unkind, Belligerent, Cruel, Of Self-righteous, Or If It Led You To Kill In God's Name, It Was Bad Theology.

He Was Decisive And Wholehearted In Everything He Did, So Intent On The Task At Hand That He Never Looked Over His Shoulder, Even If His Cloak Got Caught In A Thorny Bush. When He Did Turn To Speak To Somebody, He Used To Swing His Entire Body And Address Him Full Face. When He Shook Hands, He Was Never The First To Withdraw His Own. He Inspired Such Confidence That He Was Known As Al-amin, The Reliable One.

Religion Is A Practical Discipline And It's One That We Have Always Done, Ever Since Humanity Appeared On The Scene When Homo Sapiens Became Homo Sapiens. Sapiens Became A Human Being, Our Minds Very Naturally Segue Into Transcendence.

Beethoven's String Quartets Express Pain Itself; It Is Not My Pain.

I Like Silence; I'm A Gregarious Loner And Without The Solitude, I Lose My Gregariousness.

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.

Many Entire Nations Are Marginalised By The More Powerful Nations. That Is Causing Imbalance, Violence And Terror. Women Must Do Their Best To Introduce Another Perspective.

Look Into Your Own Heart, Discover What It Is That Gives You Pain And Then Refuse, Under Any Circumstance Whatsoever, To Inflict That Pain On Anybody Else.

Alexander's Achievement Was Not The Conquest Of India, But The Feat Of Actually Getting There And His Two Years In India Were More Of A Geographical Expedition Than A Military Campaign. .... A Greek Army Had Reached What They Regarded As The End Of The Earth. They Had Pitted Themselves Against The Ultimate As Bravely As The Yogins Had Struggled To Break Through The Limits Of The Human Psyche. Where Mystics Had Conquered Interior Space, Alexander Explored The Farthest Reaches Of The Physical World. .... Like Many Of The Axial Sages, He Was Constantly 'straining After More'.

Religion Is Hard Work. Its Insights Are Not Self-evident And Have To Be Cultivated In The Same Way As An Appreciation Of Art, Music, Or Poetry Must Be Developed.

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.

Likes And Dislikes

Each Of The World Religions Has Its Own Particular Genius, Its Own Special Insight Into The Nature And Requirements Of Compassion, And Has Something Unique To Teach Us.

If We Try To Hold On To Our Partial Glimpses Of The Divine, We Cut It Down To Our Own Size And Close Our Minds. Like It Or Nor, Our Human Experience Of Anything Or Anybody Is Always Incomplete: There Is Usually Something That Eludes Us, Some Portion Of Experience That Evades Our Grasp.

The Hajj Is One Of The Five Essential Practices Of Islam; When They Make The Pilgrimage To Mecca, Muslims Ritually Act Out The Central Principles Of Their Faith.

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.

I Think I Get From My Books What Other People Get From Family Or A Relationship Or From Prayer.

God Is Not Good, Or Wise, Or Intelligent Anyway That We Know. So, People Like Maimonides In The Jewish Tradition, Eboncina In The Muslim Tradition, Thomas Aquinas In The Christian Tradition, Insisted That We Couldn't Even Say That God Existed Because Our Concept Of Existence Is Far Too Limited And They Would Have Been Horrified By The Ease With Which We Talk About God Today.

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.

The Great Task Of Our Time Is To Build A Global Society, Where People Can Live Together In Peace

We Are Addicted To Our Egotism, Our Likes And Dislikes And Prejudices, And Depend Upon Them For Our Own Sense Of Identity.

Likes And Dislikes

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.

Theologians In All The Great Faiths Have Devised All Kinds Of Myths To Show That This Type Of Kenosis, Of Self-emptying, Is Found In The Life Of God Itself. They Do Not Do This Because It Sounds Edifying, But Because This Is The Way That Human Nature Seems To Work. We Are Most Creative And Sense Other Possibilities That Transcend Our Ordinary Experience When We Leave Ourselves Behind.

A Theology Should Be Like Poetry, Which Takes Us To The End Of What Words And Thoughts Can Do.

The Early Doctrines Of The Church, Even Doctrines Like Trinity And Incarnation Were Originally Also Calls For Action, Calls For Selflessness, Calls For Compassion, And Unless You Live That Out Compassionately, Selflessly, You Didn't Understand What The Doctrine Was Saying.

Nirvana Is Something Within You. It Is Not An External Reality. No God Thunders Down From The Mountaintop. Just As The Great Mystics In The Christian, Jewish And Muslim Faiths All Discovered, God Is Within The Self. God Is Virtually Inseparable From Ourselves.

The Trouble With A Lot Of Modern Theology And A Lot Of Modern Thinking About God, Is That We Think Of God A Sort Of Being Like Ourselves, But Bigger And Better With Likes And Dislikes Similar To Our Own.

Likes And Dislikes

Bigger And Better

Fundamentalists Are Not Friends Of Democracy. And That Includes Your Fundamentalists In The United States.

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.

When You Feel Compassion, You Dethrone Yourself From The Centre Of The World.

Storytelling Is Fine As Long As You Can Encourage People To Act On The Stories.

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.

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.

Western Liberal Humanism Is Not Something That Comes Naturally To Us: Like An Appreciation Of Art Or Poetry, It Has To Be Cultivated. Humanism Is Itself A Religion Without God-not All Religions, Of Course, Are Theistic. Our Ethical Secular Ideal Has It's Own Disciplines Of Mind And Heart And Gives People The Means Of Finding Faith In The Ultimate Meaning Of Human Life That Were Once Provided By The More Conventional Religions.

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.

Secular Society

Yet While Nature Is In Constant Flux, We Always Go Against The Grain And Try To Freeze Our Ideas And Experiences And Make Them Absolute. It Is Egotism That Makes Us Identify With One Opinion Rather Than Another, Become Quarrelsome And Unkind, Say *this* Could Not Mean *that*, And Think We Have A Duty To Change Others To Suit Ourselves.

I Had Failed To Make A Gift Of Myself To God.

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.

Alas, All Traditions Lose Their Primal Purity And We All Fail Our Founders.

I Never Intended To Be A Historian Of Religion. My Aim Was To Become A Professor Of English Literature In A University, But I Had A Series Of Absolute Career Disasters And Found Myself Making Television Programs About The Nature Of Religion And About Christian History And Started To Discover About Other Religious Traditions, And That Was An Absolute Eye-opener For Me.

I Want To Create A Rapid Response Team, Right Around The World, Perhaps Starting Originally With Our Partners, Similar To The One We Have In The United Nations Whereby, Where There's A Problem In Our Society Which Demands A Compassionate Response, An Educated, Informed, Not Just A Splurgy Emotional Thing, But An Informed Compassionate Response That Puts Yourself In The Position Of The Other And Sees All Sides Of The Problem, Not Just Your Own, There'll Be Somebody Poised In Each Society Who Can Write To The Media, Write An Op-ed Piece, To Go On Tv Or Radio.

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.

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.

It Is Not Difficult To Find A Religious Justification For Killing.

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

Buddhists Talk About Nirvana In Very Much The Same Terms As Monotheists Describe God.

We Are Most Creative And Sense Other Possibilities That Transcend Our Ordinary Experience When We Leave Ourselves Behind.

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.

Religion Is A Practical Discipline And In The 17th Century In The West, We Turned It Onto A Head Trip. But It's Like Dancing, Or Swimming, Or Driving, Which You Can't Learn By Texts. You Have To Get Into The Car And Learn How To Manipulate The Vehicle.

If We Don't Manage To Implement The Golden Rule Globally, So That We Treat All Peoples, Wherever And Whoever They May Be, As Though They Were As Important As Ourselves, I Doubt That We'll Have A Viable World To Hand On To The Next Generation.

Every Single One Of The Major World Faiths, Whether We're Talking About Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity And Islam, Have All Come To The Conclusion That What Holds Us Back From Our Better Self Is Ego, Selfishness, Greed, Unkindness, Hatred. And It All Springs From A Sense Of Thwarted Ego.

A Gentleman Is Not Born But Crafted. He Had To Work On Himself In The Same Way As A Sculptor Shaped A Rough Stone And Made It A Thing Of Beauty.

Whatever Conclusions We Reach About The Reality Of God, The History Of This Idea Must Tell Us Something Important About The Human Mind And The Nature Of Our Aspiration.

It's A Great Event To Get Outside And Enjoy Nature. I Find It Very Exciting No Matter How Many Times I See Bald Eagles.

There Is Nothing In Islam That Is More Violent Than Christianity.

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.

Fundamentalist Religion

Compassion Is Not A Popular Virtue

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.

Huge Imbalance In Power Has Resulted In The Alienation, Rage, Fury, And Awful Amoral Terrorism That Has Erupted And Is Erupting At The Present Time. And In Order To Counter This, We Need To Make The Compassionate Voice Of Religion And Morality A Dynamic Force In Our World.

You Put Yourself In The Receptive Frame Of Mind With Which We Approach Music Or Poetry, Which You Can Measure The Difference On A Neurological Scanner.

Important Thing About Myth Is That It's Not Just Something That You Believe, A Myth Is Essentially A Program For Action. And Unless You Translate A Mythical Story, Or A Doctrine Out Of The Church, Into Practical Action, It Just Remains Incomprehensible. Rather Like The Rules Of A Board Game Which Seem Very Sort Of Dull And Complicated And Incomprehensible Until You Pick Up The Dice And Start To Play, When Everything Falls Into Place.

And So, One Of The Reasons Why I Started My Charter For Compassion, Was To Bring The Golden Rule Back To The Center Of Religion And Morality And Not Put Other's Secondary Goals, Less Demand Goals, Into The Forefront.

Religion Isn’t About Believing Things. It's Ethical Alchemy. It’s About Behaving In A Way That Changes You, That Gives You Intimations Of Holiness And Sacredness.

Religion Is Not A Nice Thing. It Is Potentially A Very Dangerous Thing Because It Involves A Heady Complex Of Emotions, Desires, Yearnings And Fears.

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.

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