Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong OBE FRSLis a British author and commentator known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She became disillusioned and left the convent in 1969. She first rose to prominence in 1993 with her book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth14 November 1944
beyond bigger divine god greater lay means meet regarded simply supreme symbol whereas writ
Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it.
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I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it.
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Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us: like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God-not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has it's own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.
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Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.
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Intelligence doesn't just mean tracking down terrorists; It means finding out what is in people's hearts and minds and discovering the complexity of most issues.
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Yet while nature is in constant flux, we always go against the grain and try to freeze our ideas and experiences and make them absolute. It is egotism that makes us identify with one opinion rather than another, become quarrelsome and unkind, say *this* could not mean *that*, and think we have a duty to change others to suit ourselves.
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Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of the selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred. And it gives us ecstasy, broadening our perspectives and giving us a larger, enhanced vision.
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The more aggressive our ideologies become, the more aggressive our discourse whether it's in the United States, from Washington D.C., or whether it's from Tehran, or from some underground Al-Qaeda cell. The more aggressive that discourse is, the more people of moderate persuasion have to organize and speak a voice of compassion. That means to feel with the other.
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People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.
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Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.
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It all depends on the weather. We're doubting a large number this year because the rivers aren't frozen.
You know what you have to do. Do it.
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The other day when I was driving over to Edina, there was a bald eagle that flew overhead on Highway 6. There's even a nest documented on the Chariton River.
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We will have a wet lab, displays, exhibits, hands-on activities, a 1,500-gallon aquarium and amphibian and reptile displays. The following summer we will have a trail behind the center.