Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
Karen ArmstrongRead
Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A genuine religious life does not require blind acceptance of doctrines; rather, it should stem from a deeper understanding and trust in faith.
Karen Armstrong suggests that many people mistakenly believe that they must first adhere to a set of religious doctrines before they can genuinely engage in a religious life. However, she argues that this approach is misguided, as true loyalty and trust in faith should arise naturally rather than being forced upon an individual by dogma. The essence of spirituality and faith encompasses understanding and personal connection, rather than mere acceptance of established beliefs.
Themes
FaithDoctrineReligionTrustUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a lecture on the nature of faith in religious studies.
More from Karen Armstrong
All quotes →Yet 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
the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider’s measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it.
Mark TwainRead
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
Andre BretonRead
Your face is a book, where men may read strange matters.
William ShakespeareRead
breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Guy De MaupassantRead
Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.
Edward YoungRead
And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. AudenRead