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Human sacrifice was common in the pagan world. It was cruel but had a logic and rationale. The first child was often believed to be the offspring of a god, who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur. In begetting the child, the god's energy had been depleted, so to replenish this and to ensure the circulation of all the available mana, the firstborn was returned to its divine parent. The case of Isaac was quite different,..
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Karen Armstrong |
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25e8dfc
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There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Marriages conducted in absentia to seal an alliance were often contracted at this time between adults and minors who were even younger than 'A'isha. This practice continued in Europe
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Karen Armstrong |
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f272485
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The word qur'an means "recitation." It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear." --
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Karen Armstrong |
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pre-Islamic period jahiliyyah, which is usually translated as "the time of ignorance." But the primary meaning of the root JHL is "irascibility"--an acute sensitivity to honor and prestige, excessive arrogance, and, above all, a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation.4"
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Karen Armstrong |
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You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. Throughout our lives, we all find ourselves in situations in which we come face to face with the unknown, and the myth of the hero shows us how we should behave. We all have to face the final rite of passage, which is death.
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Karen Armstrong |
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471cdae
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The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war.
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Karen Armstrong |
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Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder.
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Karen Armstrong |
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30c5ac7
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One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over,..
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Karen Armstrong |
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f45b61e
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The dispassion of paedeia also informed the doctrine of the Trinity, which these three men, often known as the Cappadocian Fathers,
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Karen Armstrong |
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The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed.27 The hunters could see that women were the source of new life; it was they - not the expendable males - who ensured the continuity of the tribe. The female thus became an awe-inspiring icon of life itself - a life that required the ceaseless sacrific..
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Karen Armstrong |
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When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God "out there," there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has greeted various remarks by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, even though these ideas are commonplace in academic circles. Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, has also been dubbed "the atheist priest": he finds the traditional reali..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh reformed their attitudes and behavior, they too would fall prey to the anarchy that threatened to engulf the world. Under the inspiration of Allah, Muhammad was feeling his way towards an entirely new solution, convinced that he was not speaking in his own name, but was simply repeating the revealed words of God.
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Karen Armstrong |
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The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.
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Karen Armstrong |
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as the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24"
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Karen Armstrong |
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Krishna explains. "When enemies become too numerous and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all."
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Karen Armstrong |
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f4b50d7
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Christian spirituality had been strongly influenced by Platonism, which sought to liberate the soul from the body, but in some circles in the early fourth century, people were beginning to hope that their hitherto despised bodies could bring men and women to the divine--or at least that it was not a reality separate from the physical, as the Platonists held.25
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy's ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.
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Karen Armstrong |
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d72f8bb
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Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people's misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way, Moses explained, "the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert pla..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Surely, argued the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-73), it was better for a Breton to accept French citizenship "than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage remnant of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world."
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations.
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Karen Armstrong |
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There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour.
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Karen Armstrong |
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b3f99c8
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Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne "Holy Roman Emperor" in the Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as "Augustus," and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne's feet."
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Karen Armstrong |
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d9d7132
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Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of "superhumanity." Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary"
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Karen Armstrong |
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168e6fc
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Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50
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Karen Armstrong |
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Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as "Son of God," "lord," and "savior" and announced the "good news" (euaggelia) of his birth. Thus when the angel announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, he proclaimed: "Listen, I bring you euaggelion of great joy! Today a Savior has been born to you." Yet this "son of God" was born homeless and would soon b..
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Karen Armstrong |
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61954b7
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Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually ach..
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Karen Armstrong |
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Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine "state of exception" during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh's adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods."
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Karen Armstrong |
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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.
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Karen Armstrong |
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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.
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Karen Armstrong |
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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
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Karen Armstrong |
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b50e634
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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.
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Karen Armstrong |
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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."
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Karen Armstrong |
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d717441
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A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights.
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Karen Armstrong |
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b1b3a03
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In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests. God could be present in the humblest home as well as in the Temple. Consequently, they lived like the official priestly caste, observing the special laws of purity..
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Qur'an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The
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Karen Armstrong |
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At the end of my first attempt to write a biography of Muhammad, I quoted the prescient words of the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Writing in the mid-twentieth century shortly before the Suez Crisis, he observed that a healthy, functioning Islam had for centuries helped Muslims cultivate decent values which we in the West share, because they spring from a common tradition. Some Muslims have problems with Western modernity. They h..
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Karen Armstrong |
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We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao. What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great fa..
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The
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Karen Armstrong |
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The Qur'an had begun to develop a primitive just war theory. In the steppes, aggressive warfare was praiseworthy; but in the Qur'an, self-defense was the only possible justification for hostilities and the preemptive strike was condemned.5 War was always a terrible evil, but it was sometimes necessary in order to preserve decent values, such as freedom of worship. Even here, the Qur'an did not abandon its pluralism: synagogues and churches ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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96e6bf9
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Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.
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Karen Armstrong |
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ff4de8b
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all who benefit from the inherent violence of the state are implicated in its cruelty.
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Karen Armstrong |
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There is a growing intolerance of inadequate images of the Absolute. This is a healthy iconoclasm, since the idea of God has been used in the past to disastrous effect. One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call "fundamentalism" in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and int..
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Karen Armstrong |
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One might well wonder how much more unanimously opposed to terror the Muslim world might have become, but for the course the United States and its allies took in the wake of 9/11. At a time when even in Tehran there were demonstrations of solidarity with America, the Bush and Blair coalition lashed out with its own violent rejoinder, a drive that would culminate in the tragically misbegotten Iraq invasion of 2003. Its
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Karen Armstrong |