Quotes from Stephen Prothero

Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war.

One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.

Pretending that the world's religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.

Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.

Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.

If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.

True, (Jefferson's) rational religion ran in rivulets outside the American mainstream, but heterodoxy is faith of a different form and, like orthodoxy, should be recognized for what it is: a way of being religious.

One reason we are willing to follow our fantasies down the rabbit hole of religious unity is that we have become uncomfortable with argument. Especially when it comes to religion, we desperately want everyone to get along

The ideal of religious tolerance has morphed into the straightjacket of religious agreement.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst.

What the world's religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.

While I do not believe we are not witnessing a clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world's two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap.

The world's religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.

At the heart of this project is a simple, four-part approach to the religions, which I have been using for years in the classroom and at lectures around the world. Each religion articulates: * a problem ; * a solution to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal; * a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and * an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.

American undergraduates. They are very religious, he told me, but they know next to nothing about religion. Thanks to compulsory religious education (which in Austria begins in elementary schools), European students can name the twelve apostles and the Seven Deadly Sins, but they wouldn't be caught dead going to church or synagogue themselves. American students are just the opposite. Here faith without understanding is the standard; here religious ignorance is bliss.

During their personal interview, Exman asked Schweitzer about mysticism. He was particularly interested in how intellectual puzzles that have vexed our ordinary minds for years can be answered "in a flash of illumination, after we had ceased to struggle with our thoughts." Schweitzer replied, "All deep thinking ends in mysticism," before arguing that mystical experiences are surprisingly common, by no means confined to "the privilege of a few.

Hasidism is considered Ultra-Orthodox, but when it began in the 1730s in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, it was seen as liberal and even revolutionary because of its emphasis of the heart over the Head. This movement was inspired by the Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760), a man beloved not so much for his book learning as for his heartfelt spirituality, his down-to-earth stories, and his unshakable conviction that God is near to all of us, and not just the intelligent and the learned.

Christianity and Islam are the two greatest religions today. They are the traditions that draw the atheists' ire. And they are the ones that are redrawing the geopolitical map.

Religions cannot be reduced to "belief systems" any more than they can be reduced to "ritual systems." Belief is a part of most religions, but only a part, and in most cases not the most important part.

Spirituality, in short, is religion stripped down to its experiential dimension. More than do-it-yourself religion, spirituality is do-without-religion, a form of faith that denies its connections to the institutions, stories, and doctrines that gave it birth - religion without memory.