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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.

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
Even
Lack
East
Criticism
Tradition
Middle
Religious
Sense
Gripped
Whole
Dread

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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.
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The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
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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.
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Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There must be no coercion in matters of faith!
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Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.
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Religions don't own compassion it is a human virtue.
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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.
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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 idea
Karen Armstrong
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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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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
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I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
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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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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.
Karen Armstrong
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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.
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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.
Karen Armstrong