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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.

Karen Armstrong

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Karen Armstrong
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Religion
Islam
Visceral
Every
Convinced
Fundamentalist
Christianity
Judaism
Level
Wipe
Movement
Studied
Levels
Secular
Wants
Guts
Society
Liberal

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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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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.
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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.
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Religions don't own compassion it is a human virtue.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Geniuses are not always pleasant people.
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Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
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It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.
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Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.
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Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
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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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