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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 40efd7d | Fundamentalist movements in all faiths share certain characteristics. They reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. They also express real fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. This is not always a paranoid reaction. We have seen that secularism has often be.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f93469d | Another peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it, has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 738a0a2 | Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0fc6171 | We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 2b2ebb8 | Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the 'historical' Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he w.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| dc7a93a | Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text. | quran recitation tajweed | Karen Armstrong | |
| e2774f8 | 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,.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 25e8dfc | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f05148b | 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 | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f272485 | 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." -- | Karen Armstrong | ||
| ba9ebef | 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" | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 472bddc | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 471cdae | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| af55e23 | Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 30c5ac7 | 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,.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f45b61e | The dispassion of paedeia also informed the doctrine of the Trinity, which these three men, often known as the Cappadocian Fathers, | Karen Armstrong | ||
| fb17319 | 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.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0bcd689 | 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.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 3ef46ef | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 49f0815 | The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 353a666 | 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" | Karen Armstrong | ||
| be147b9 | 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." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f4b50d7 | 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 | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 034012a | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| d72f8bb | 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.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| dbcae57 | 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." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 5201fda | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 1ae2ba4 | There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| b3f99c8 | 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." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| d9d7132 | 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" | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 168e6fc | 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 | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 7be268c | 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.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 61954b7 | 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.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a462317 | 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." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| fef9fc7 | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 9faa529 | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 3f86a81 | 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 | Karen Armstrong | ||
| b50e634 | 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. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| bfbf05e | 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." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 65ff2be | He had no other life and no other knowledge; he knew that he could not live anywhere now because in his mind, slyly, there was nothing but horror. | Martha Gellhorn | ||
| 85f74f8 | What gave these krauts a right to say who should be born and who shouldn't, and who could live and be let alone, and who would get caught and killed? | Martha Gellhorn | ||
| 429cb05 | Since I am devoted to my own freedom, I didn't think it just to deny other people theirs; and a basic freedom must be to be bossed by your own kind, not by foreigners. | Martha Gellhorn | ||
| 65844a2 | Martha had been struck by a line in a Doris Lessing novel--"I don't enjoy pleasure"--and decided that what she enjoyed in life were surprises and work. "But it's alarming," she wrote to Teecher, "to grow less and less gregarious. I can hardly bear social occasions; I feel as if I'd written the script long ago." While" -- | Caroline Moorehead | ||
| 5cc61d7 | It is not easy to be the citizen of a Superpower, nor is it getting easier. I would feel isolated with my shame if I were not sure that I belong, among millions of Americans, to a perennial minority of the nation. The obstinate bleeding hearts who will never agree that might makes right and know if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless. Power corrupts, an old truism but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power s.. | power-corrupts stupidity vietnam war | Martha Gellhorn |