Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
Karen ArmstrongRead
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.
Interpretation
Personal beliefs can distort our understanding of God, making Him a reflection of our biases.
This quote by Karen Armstrong highlights the dangers of a personal God who mirrors our own limited beliefs and desires. When we shape God according to our own images and prejudices, we risk losing the deeper, transcendent truths that challenge and expand our understanding. Instead of guiding us toward higher moral aspirations, such a God may reinforce our biases and hinder our spiritual growth.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of faith during a philosophy class.
Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.
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.
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
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.
Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.
Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.
The real attitude of sin in the heart towards God is that of being without God; it is pride, the worship of myself, that is the great atheistic fact in human life.
We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.
Some people take the view that we happen by accident. I think that there is something much deeper, of which we have very little inkling at the moment.
I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.
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