Quote

It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.

Karen Armstrong

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Karen Armstrong
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: November 14
Author
Historian Of Religion
Islamicist
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
Find
Justification
Killing
Religious
Difficult

More quotes by Karen Armstrong

Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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?
Karen Armstrong
Image
When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.
Karen Armstrong
Image
My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged.
Karen Armstrong
Image
The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
Karen Armstrong
Image
Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong
Image
I used to hate religion, I loathed it in my angry days.
Karen Armstrong
Image
The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
Karen Armstrong
Image
If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.
Karen Armstrong
Image
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.
Karen Armstrong