3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
3 December 2020 Karen Armstrong 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.
