There is a danger in monotheism, and it’s called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine.
We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.
Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They’ve lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.
In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.
If we try to hold on to our partial glimpses of the divine, we cut it down to our own size and close our minds. Like it or nor, our human experience of anything or anybody is always incomplete: there is usually something that eludes us, some portion of experience that evades our grasp.
It is not difficult to find a religious justification for killing.
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.
Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.
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.
Compassion has to become a discipline. It’s something that you do. It’s no good thinking that you agree with compassion or not, you’ve just got to do it. Just like it’s no good agreeing that it’s possible to float, you just have to get into the pool and then you learn that it’s possible.
Compassion doesn’t, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.
A gentleman is not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.
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.
And so, one of the reasons why I started my Charter for Compassion, was to bring the Golden Rule back to the center of religion and morality and not put other’s secondary goals, less demand goals, into the forefront.
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.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France.
Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It’s not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.
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.
You are your best self when you give yourself away.