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

Karen Armstrong

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Karen Armstrong
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Includes
Democracy
Friends
United
States
Fundamentalists

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We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.
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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.
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I like silence I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
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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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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.
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Religions don't own compassion it is a human virtue.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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You are your best self when you give yourself away.
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Geniuses are not always pleasant people.
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When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.
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Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.
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[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
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Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.
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A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
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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.
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Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself it is not MY pain.
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