Quotes from Karen Armstrong

included: no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to practical compassion.

Religious people prefer to be right rather than be compassionate.

A truly compassionate person touches a chord in us that resonates with some of our deepest yearnings. People flock to such individuals, because they seem to offer a haven of peace in a violent, angry world. This is the ideal to which we aspire, and it is not beyond our capacity. But even if we achieve only a fraction of this enlightenment and leave the world marginally better because we have lived in it, our lives will have been worthwhile.

You could not be a muslim unless you also revered Moses and Jesus. True faith required surrender to God, not to an established faith. Indeed

the sacred reality is not simply transcendent, "out there," but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute honor and respect.

After Moses's death, it fell to Joshua to conquer the Promised Land. The biblical book of Joshua still contains some ancient material, but this was radically revised by these same reformers, who interpreted it in the light of their peculiarly xenophobic theology. They give the impression that, acting under Yahweh's orders, Joshua massacred the entire population of Canaan and destroyed their cities.

Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment. His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of Islam may have been reactionary, but it was also revolutionary. He outraged the conservative ulama, who clung to the textbook answers, and criticized the Mamluk government of Syria for practices which contravened Islamic law as he understood it.

if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because "the unexamined life is not worth living."7

the true followers of Jesus imitated his kenosis. As the Christ Hymn had pointed out, Jesus had achieved his high status only by emptying himself and accepting death on a cross.

But by 'faith' Luther did not mean 'belief' but an attitude of trust and self-abandonment: 'Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty, but a free surrender and a joyful bet on [God's] unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.

Muhammad would have understood the German historian Rudolf Otto, who described the sacred as a mystery that was both tremendum and fascinans. It was overpowering, urgent, and terrible, but it also filled human beings with "delight, joy, and a sense of swelling harmony and intimate intercourse.

This strong female presence was remarkable in the aggressive patriarchy of Mecca and may explain why women were among the first to respond to the message of the Qur'an.

Golden rule is not a notional doctrine that you either agree with, or make yourself believe in. It is a method and the only adequate test of any method is to put it into practice.

Philo believed that when we caught a glimpse of the Logos in creation and the Torah, we were taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to a rapturous recognition that God was 'higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything that is merely thought'.

Like any Platonist, he experienced knowledge as remembrance, as known to him already at some profound level of his being.

The silence in mysticism is alien. People want to do a few courses in mysticism, rather like the way you do French before going on holiday, and emerge a mystic. Mysticism isn't like that.

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, "something met which bars my passage" and "is before me in its entirety," and a mystery, "something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety."69

A myth has been well described as something that in some sense happened once—but that also happens all the time. It is about timeless, universal truth. If

Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the plank in your own?

He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was 'the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity'.75 True poetry had no time for 'the egotistical sublime',76 which forced itself on the reader:

changed the course of history, but the process was not yet complete. It was only when Jesus returned at the Parousia that "we shall all be changed" and "death be swallowed up in victory."64 Then and only then would Christ establish the Kingdom, "deposing every sovereignty, authority, and power."65

We are a talkative and opinionated society and not always good at listening

It was better to avoid ostentatious piety and pray in the privacy of one's cell because 'if we pray when others are present, their approbation may rob our prayer of . . . its effect'.25 There would be no sudden illumination;

The Qur'anic institution of polygamy was a piece of social legislation. It was designed not to gratify the male sexual appetite, but to correct the injustices done to widows, orphans, and other female dependants, who were especially vulnerable.