From an interview with Karen Armstrong on CBC's radio show Tapestry on February 19, 2006:
"Lots of the time we are worried about religion. We're thinking about trancendance, going beyond, and what we are trancending to...what is the nature of God, Jesus, and so on. But really it is about what you are transcending from, but what you are going away from which is ego, greed. And once you've lost ego and greed, you should find that you've lost a lot of fear."
"What our world needs now is not more certainty. We've seen too much certainty - political and religious certainty - recently. What we need is compassion to be able to feel with the other."
"I had a very parochial religious upbringing...I was raised Catholic and that was it...I actually didn't even know much about Protestants for heavens sake. And actually this discovery of other religions - Judaism, Islam, Greek and Russian Orthodox and finally Buddhism - showed me what religion could be. It showed me what my own tradition had been trying to do at its best. And then I could reassess my own tradition more kindly and see much more about it than I had been aware of, despite my intensely religious childhood and youth."
1 comment:
I think of Karen Armstrong as a modern-day Savante of the Spiritual, really I do.
Cold Mol, I know that straight-ahead biography stuff is not really your "cup of java" as it were, but I cannot overzaggerate to you [hey, is overzaggerate a word? If not, it should be]... how much you would enjoy reading her TWO memoirs. I encourage you to force yourself Through The Narrow Gate and then climb The Spiral Staircase.
These are indispensable works, in one's pursuit of understanding the higher echelons of religious retarditry. [Is retarditry even a word? If it isn't, it really should be]!
Your blog is a joy to my soul.
[Hey. P.S. This evening, sitting in the Starbucks of a Chapters outlet, I looked over and there is this guy, freshly cracking open Harris's "Letter To A Christian Nation" so I could not help myself. I had to go over and talk to him. The guy was about a hundred years old, and delightful as hell. What made me go over to him was that I could see him chuckling at something from the very first pages. So I knew he was liking the book. We had a great talk. People are listening. People are learning. Breaking free of the stranglehold of insane certainty. It is refreshing to see this....]
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