Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
Karen ArmstrongRead
Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the tendency of religious leaders to prioritize doctrine over compassion in spiritual discussions.
Karen Armstrong highlights a fundamental issue within religious discourse where leaders focus on abstract principles and sexual ethics instead of emphasizing the importance of compassion as the true measure of spiritual life. This perspective suggests that genuine spirituality should prioritize empathy and kindness over rigid adherence to doctrine.
Themes
CompassionSpiritualityDoctrineReligionEthics
In practice
Example use cases
During a sermon, a pastor could use this quote to emphasize the importance of compassion in their teachings.
More from Karen Armstrong
All quotes βYet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.
Karen ArmstrongRead
When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.
Karen ArmstrongRead
Far from being the father of jihad, [Prophet] Mohammad was a peacemaker, who risked his life and nearly lost the loyalty of his closest companions because he was determined to effect a reconciliation with Mecca
Karen ArmstrongRead
Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.
Karen ArmstrongRead
Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.
Karen ArmstrongRead
Similar quotes
Yes, know thyself: in great concerns or small, be this thy care, for this, my friend, is all.
JuvenalRead
It is much easier to do something than to trust in God; we mistake panic for inspiration.
Oswald ChambersRead
Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.
Walter BenjaminRead
All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?
Thomas SowellRead
The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read