Karen armstrong Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Karen Armstrong
Quotes of Author: Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong _ A Short History of Myth
This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by , published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.
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Karen Armstrong _ The Case for God
Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate,"
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Karen Armstrong _ Twelve Steps to a
With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we will find that we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, feeling the same.
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Karen Armstrong _ St. Paul: The Apostle We Love
There are many opinionated religious people who would do well to heed Paul's warnings to the "strong" who were intimidating the "weak" with their overbearing certainty. Above all, we need to take seriously Paul's insight that no virtue was valid unless it was imbued with a love that was not a luxurious emotion in the heart but must be expressed daily and practically in self-emptying concern for others."
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Karen Armstrong _ The Spiral Staircase: My Climb
Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating.
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives "without provocation"-a procedure normally unlawful-because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but "a special Commission from God" to take their land.19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics.
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors' attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage.
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
Muslim fundamentalism, by contrast, has often-though again, not always-segued into physical aggression. This is not because Islam is constitutionally more prone to violence than Protestant Christianity but rather because Muslims had a much harsher introduction to modernity.
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
People still dreamed of going on Crusade and liberating Jerusalem, but in an important development, holy warfare was beginning to merge with the patriotism of national war.
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine "state of exception" during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh's adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods.
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Karen Armstrong _ Fields of Blood: Religion and
Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example.
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