Quotes from Karen Armstrong

Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to "prove" the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around.

instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

When these early people looked at a stone, they did not see an inert, unpromising rock. It embodied strength, permanence, solidity and an absolute mode of being that was quite different from the vulnerable human state. Its very otherness made it holy.

The texts emphasize that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally. They had nothing to do with ordinary logic or events in this world, but were merely symbols of a more elusive truth.

Paul's letters were occasional responses to specific questions rather than a coherent account of a fully articulated theology.

Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.

People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.

Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine.

The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants' uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo.

Yet the notion of Christ's sacrificial death was similar to the ideal of the bodhisattva, which was developing at this time in India. Like the bodhisattva, Christ had, in effect, become a mediator between humanity and the Absolute, the difference being that Christ was the only mediator and the salvation he effected was not an unrealized aspiration for the future, like that of the bodhisattva, but a fait accompli.

In his last impassioned speech, Stephen had claimed that the Temple was an insult to the nature of God: "The Most High does not live in a home that human hands have built.

Muslim fundamentalism, by contrast, has often-though again, not always-segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianity but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to modernity.

We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our

In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors' attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage.

the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.

Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives "without provocation"—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but "a special Commission from God" to take their land.19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics.

The Buddha did not deny the gods, therefore, but believed that the ultimate Reality of nirvana was higher than the gods. When Buddhists experience bliss or a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being. Such states are natural to humanity; they can be attained by anybody who lives in the correct way and learns the techniques of Yoga. Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves.

Culture was felt to be a fragile achievement, which could always fall prey to the forces of disorder and disintegration.

Our Master's Way," explained one of his pupils, "is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu)."3

We shall often find in our story that the religious behavior of people who have not been major beneficiaries of modernity articulates a strongly felt need for the spiritual

the Council of Constantinople that made Nicene orthodoxy the official religion of the empire in 381.

Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating.

in a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the "principle of charity"; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an "interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximise truth among the sentences of the corpus."11