Great Throughts Treasury

"A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect. He becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all?knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified."

"A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair."

"A personalized God 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. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: It means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, he can encourage us to remain complacently within them; he can make us cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as he seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religions, he can encourage us to judge, condemn, and marginalize."

"A novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest."

"After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful."

"A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do."

"After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity."

"And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God."

"Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God."

"Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being--whoever he or she may be--is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery."

"Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders."

"All religious language must reach beyond itself into a sort of silent awe, and it was all too easy to end - stop it and say that, well, God is a bit like us writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own. And when the Crusaders went into battle in the Middle Ages to kill Jews and Muslims, they cried out: God wills it. This was their battle cry."

"All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering."

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France."

"But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value."

"By increasing the amount of Torah (obligatory religious laws) in the world, they were extending His presence in the world and making it more effective."

"Clashes and vitriol only make it worse. I think what we must learn to do is to read the imagery. We need to analyze and understand the subtext."

"Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day."

"Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?"

"Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way."

"Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d?Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this scientism have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other new atheists ? Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist ? religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and poisons everything. They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science."

"Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar."

"Deeds that seemed unimportant at the time would prove to have been momentous; a tiny act of selfishness and unkindness or, conversely, an unconsidered act of generosity would become the measure of a human life"

"Do not attach yourself in an exclusive manner to any one creed, so that you disbelieve all the rest: if you do this, you will miss much good; nay, you will fail to realize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for He says, "Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah" (Quran 2.109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just but his dislike is based on ignorance. It is time to combat the ignorance that inspires hatred and fear. We have seen the harm religious chauvinism can do; now let us bear witness to the power of compassion."

"Confucius said, it's quite simple, you seek to establish yourself, then seek to establish others. You want to turn your merits to account, then make certain that other people also have the ability to turn their merits to account. Never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself. And that, he said, has brought you into the presence of the Dao. I'd like to call your attention to the phrase "all day and every day." In England we have a habit of when we've done something nice for somebody, we often say, well that's my good deed for the day, as though we could then return to the next 23 hours to our usual lives of selfishness and greed and ego. But no, all day and every day putting yourself in the shoes of others."

"Even though the disciples were not aware of it, the presence was with them while they were reviewing the scriptures together on the road. Henceforth, we will catch only a fleeting glimpse of it -- in the study of sacred writings, in other human beings, in liturgy, and in communion with strangers. But these moments remain us that our fellow men and women are themselves sacred; there is something about them that is worthy of absolute reverence, is in the last resort mysterious, and we will always elude us."

"Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity."

"Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East - the slagging off of a whole religious tradition."

"Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us."

"Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality."

"Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion."

"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."

"Fundamentalism represents a rebellion against modern secular society, the separation of religion and politics. Basically, fundamentalists want to drag religion and/or God from the sidelines to which they've been relegated in modern secular society and bring them back to center stage. And, in this, they've enjoyed considerable success in some ways, though in other ways... it can represent a defeat for religion."

"For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ?misfiring of something useful?, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive."

"For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East."

"Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States."

"Geniuses are not always pleasant people."

"He was decisive and wholehearted in everything he did, so intent on the task at hand that he never looked over his shoulder, even if his cloak got caught in a thorny bush. When he did turn to speak to somebody, he used to swing his entire body and dress him full face. When he shook hands, he was never the first to withdraw his own. He inspired such confidence that he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable One."

"I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions."

"I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it."

"Human beings have always been mythmakers."

"I believe that what we have is now. The religions say you can experience eternity in this life, here and now, by getting those moments of ecstasy where time ceases to be a constraint. And you do it by the exercise of the Golden Rule and by compassion. And just endless speculation about the next world is depriving you of a great experience in this one."

"I had failed to make a gift of myself to God."

"I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle."

"I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time."

"I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness."

"I was a lousy nun. I couldn't do it. I couldn't find God. It wasn't suitable for me. It is suitable for very few people."

"I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness."

"If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void."

"Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance."