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1b76a79
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nfrT fy 'ymn hdhh, fy lHdyth `n llh, byd 'n m`Zm m nqwlh ytsm blsTHy@ wltbsyT. n`tqd, fy mjtm`n ldymqrTy, 'n mfhwm lrb yjb 'n ykwn shlan, w'n ykwn ldyn mtHan lljmy`, kthyran m yqwl ly lqrW, `l~ sbyl l`tb, 'n ktby hdh 'w dhk S`b. w'ryd 'n 'jyb "nh `n llh" lkn lkthyrwn yjdwn jbty mHyr@. fmn lmw'kd 'n ljmy` y`rfwn mn hw llh: lky'n l'`Zm ldhy khlq l`lm wkl shy fyh. tZhr `lyhm lHyr@ Hyn nbyn 'nh mn Gyr ldq@ 'n nsmy "llh" lky'n l'`Zm l'n llh lys ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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01c1982
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finally 'Ali, a gawky thirteen year old, could bear it no longer: "O prophet of God," he cried, "I will be your helper in this matter!" Muhammad laid his hand tenderly on the boy's neck: "This is my brother, my executor, and my successor among you," he said. "Hearken to him and obey him."
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Karen Armstrong |
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d1c3a9c
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The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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bb3582e
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The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecca. The sanctity of the Kabah was thus essential to the success and survival of the Quraysh, and their competitors understood this.
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Karen Armstrong |
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86ba92b
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Tiamat, Mot and Leviathan are not evil, but are simply fulfilling their cosmic role. They have to die and endure dismemberment before an ordered cosmos can emerge from chaos.
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Karen Armstrong |
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9be6d2a
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It was only possible to define or comprehend something when there was duality. A person can see, taste, or smell something that is separate and apart from him- or herself. But when "the whole [brahman] has become a person's very self [atman], then who is there for him to see and by what means? Who is there for me to think of and by what means?"14 It was impossible to perceive the perceiver within oneself. So you could only say neti . . . ne..
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Karen Armstrong |
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ba53d6f
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The book of Job, based on an ancient folktale, may have been written during the exile. One day, Yahweh made an interesting wager in the divine assembly with Satan, who was not yet a figure of towering evil but simply one of the "sons of God," the legal "adversary" of the council.19 Satan pointed out that Job, Yahweh's favorite human being, had never been truly tested but was good only because Yahweh had protected him and allowed him to pros..
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Karen Armstrong |
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55532e4
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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.
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Karen Armstrong |
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540e71c
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What is lawful, what is unlawful?" asked Ku Yuan, prince and poet of Chu. "This country is a slough of despond! Nothing is pure any longer! Informers are exalted! And wise men of gentle birth are without renown!"3"
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Karen Armstrong |
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1b0c80d
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A primitive capitalism had developed, which had quite different priorities. The lavish sacrifices had been designed to impress the gods and to enhance the patron's prestige. By the fifth century, these eastern peoples had realized that their improved trade and agriculture brought them far more wealth and status than the Vedic rites.
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Karen Armstrong |
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1c53266
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The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: "Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?"
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Karen Armstrong |
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0b39a06
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we find a combination of three themes that would recur in the ideology of all successful empires: a dualistic worldview that pits the good of empire against evildoers who oppose it; a doctrine of election that sees the ruler as a divine agent; and a mission to save the world.128
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Karen Armstrong |
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09f57df
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The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people. So we need to acquire a healthier and more balanced knowledge of our strengths as well as our weaknesses. As
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Karen Armstrong |
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89ee803
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Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade..
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Karen Armstrong |
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96cf23a
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Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.
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literature
philosophy
plays
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Karen Armstrong |
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3890c99
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man of the Axial Age, Confucius wanted people to become fully conscious of what they were doing. Performance of the li was
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Karen Armstrong |
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f78e42b
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Where establishment Islam was becoming less tolerant, seeing the Quran as the only valid scripture and Muhammad's religion as the one true faith, Sufis went back to the spirit of the Quran in their appreciation of other religious traditions. Some, for example, were especially devoted to Jesus, whom they saw as the ideal Sufi since he had preached a gospel of love.
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Karen Armstrong |
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145f174
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instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
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Karen Armstrong |
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1f71cd2
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During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910-91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God. The natural sciences provided the only reliable source of knowledge because it could be tested empirically. Ayer was not asking whether or not God existed but whether the idea of God had any meaning. He argued that a statement is meaningless if we cannot see how it can be verified or shown to be false. To say "There is intellige..
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Karen Armstrong |
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d06dd21
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The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul's Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul was Jesus's death and resurrection, the cosmic events that had transformed history and changed the fate of all peoples, regardless of their beliefs or ethnicity.
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Karen Armstrong |
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7ff010b
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In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker share the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.
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Karen Armstrong |
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b058cd2
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Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.
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Karen Armstrong |
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f5bf37e
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Most of the Israelites chose to stay in Babylon, where they would make an important contribution to the Hebrew scriptures. The returning exiles brought home nine scrolls that traced the history of their people from the creation until their deportation: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; they also brought anthologies of the oracles of the prophets (neviim) and a hymn book, which included new p..
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Karen Armstrong |
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the Council of Constantinople that made Nicene orthodoxy the official religion of the empire in 381.
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Karen Armstrong |
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the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars were "the crucible in which some of the competing forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into new compounds ... the matrix of all that came after."109"
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Karen Armstrong |
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cf8cf81
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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.
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Karen Armstrong |
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eced9ff
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THE PROPHET (570-632) During the month of Ramadan in 610 C.E., an Arab business-man had an experience that changed the history of the world. Every year at this time, Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to retire to a cave on the summit of Mount Hira, just outside Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor. He had long been worried by what he perceived to be a crisis in Arab society. In recent decades his tribe, the..
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Karen Armstrong |
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590bcab
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They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide.
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Karen Armstrong |
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7e6c8b2
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In the very earliest passages of the Talmud, God was experienced in mysterious physical phenomena. The Rabbis spoke about the Holy Spirit, which had brooded over creation and the building of the sanctuary, making its presence felt in a rushing wind or a blazing fire. Others heard it in the clanging of a bell or a sharp knocking sound. One day, for example, Rabbi Yohannan had been sitting discussing Ezekiel's vision of the chariot, when a fi..
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Karen Armstrong |
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617f2e8
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This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.
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Karen Armstrong |
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2bf6d91
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Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon.
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Karen Armstrong |
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bc71166
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Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item--albeit the highest--in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds.
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Karen Armstrong |
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be6b861
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In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith.
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Karen Armstrong |
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9fee9a8
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philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
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Karen Armstrong |
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54cee62
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The right to liberty was crucial: it is difficult to find a single reference to imprisonment in the whole of rabbinic literature, because only God can curtail the freedom of a human being. Spreading scandal about somebody was tantamount to denying the existence of God.104 Jews were not to think of God as a Big Brother, watching their every move from above; instead they were to cultivate a sense of God within each human being so that our dea..
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Karen Armstrong |
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b262193
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Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the "numinous" was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior."
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Karen Armstrong |
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9676c76
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A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.
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Karen Armstrong |
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72dbe75
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Descartes's argument turns out to be a reworking of Anselm's Ontological Proof. When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed. Yet we could not arrive at the idea of "imperfection" if we did not have a prior conception of "perfection." Like Anselm, Descartes concluded that a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in terms."
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Karen Armstrong |
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c0a86a4
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Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descartes had used the idea of God to give him faith in the reality of the world.
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Karen Armstrong |
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7317326
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Unlike Descartes, who had proved the existence of the self, God and the natural world in that order, Newton began with an attempt to explain the physical universe, with God as an essential part of the system. In Newton's physics, nature was entirely passive: God was the sole source of activity. Thus, as in Aristotle, God was simply a continuation of the natural, physical order.
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Karen Armstrong |
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2d237bd
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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."
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Karen Armstrong |
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4fa3ea6
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Was not space itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity? Was it a second divine entity, which had existed beside God from before the beginning of time? Newton had always been concerned about this problem. In the early essay De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, he had returned to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation. Since God is infinite, he must exist everywhere. Space is an effect of God's ..
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Karen Armstrong |
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24a2e58
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Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order.
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Karen Armstrong |
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31be354
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It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality--called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God--seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings.
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Karen Armstrong |