Great Throughts Treasury

"If it is written and read with serious attention, 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."

"If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role."

"If we don?t manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we?ll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation."

"If this God is omnipotent, he could prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster."

"If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life."

"If we want to preserve our humanity, we must make the compassionate voice of religion and morality a vibrant and dynamic force in our polarized world. We can no longer afford the barbarism of hatred, contempt and disgust. At the same time as we are so perilously divided, we are drawn together electronically, economically and politically more closely than ever before. A Quran burning, whenever it is held (it appears to have been delayed for questionable reasons by the pastor behind it), would endanger American troops in Afghanistan and send shock waves of distress throughout the Muslim world. In an age when, increasingly, small groups will have powers of destruction that were previously the preserve only of the nation-state, respect and compassion are now crucial for our very survival. We have to learn to make a place for the other in our minds and hearts; any ideology that inspires hatred, exclusion and division is failing the test of our time. Hatred breeds more hatred, violence more violence. It is time to break this vicious cycle."

"In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living."

"In [the] early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of the primordial faith of the ?People of the Book?, the Jews and Christians. In one remarkable passage, God insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God?s messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, Jesus and all the other prophets. The Qur?an is simply a ?confirmation? of the previous scriptures. Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the revealed traditions had its own din; it was not God?s will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community. God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East or to the West, but enlightened all human beings. Muslims must speak courteously to the People of the Book, debate with them only in ?the most kindly manner?, remember that they worshipped the same God, and not engage in pointless, aggressive disputes."

"If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology."

"In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence."

"Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death."

"It all depends on the weather. We're doubting a large number this year because the rivers aren't frozen."

"In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do."

"Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past."

"It is, therefore, a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought, which can be cast aside when human beings have attained the age of reason. Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking 'what if?' -- a question which has also provoked some of our most important discoveries in philosophy, science and technology."

"It is always tempting to try to shut out the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human condition, but once it has broken through the cautionary barricades we have erected against it, we can never see the world in the same way again."

"It was not the weather religious rituals in the world before the modern product of religious ideas but on the contrary was the product of ideas ritual"

"It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles."

"Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence."

"Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories."

"Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate."

"Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life."

"Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength."

"Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else."

"My favorite Golden Rule story belongs to Hillel, the great Pharisee, who was an older contemporary of Jesus. And it said that a pagan came to Hillel one day and promised to convert to Judaism on condition that Hillel could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. And Hillel stood on one leg and said that which is hateful to you do not to your fellow man. That is the Torah, and everything else is only commentary. Go and study it. That's a remarkable statement. I mean no mention of the things that we would assume to be central to Judaism, like the existence of God, there being only one God, the creation of the world in six days, the exodus from Egypt, the 631 commandments of the Torah. All these are simply a gloss, a commentary, on the Golden Rule?a deliberately provocative statement. And then at the end, as always in Jewish exegesis, a miqra, a call to action, go and study it. In your study of scripture, make sure that when you read your scripture you make it a commentary on the Golden Rule instead of just picking out bits of hatred here and exclusion there."

"Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it."

"My work has continually brought me back to the notion of compassion. Whichever religious tradition I study, I find at the heart of it is the idea of feeling with the other, experiencing with the other, compassion. And every single one of the major world religions has developed its own version of the Golden Rule. Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you. . . . Compassion doesn't mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn't mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other. Learning what's motivating the other, learning about their grievances."

"Oedipus had to abandon his certainty, his clarity, and supposed insight in order to become aware of the dark ambiguity of the human condition."

"Now, of course, God meant nothing of the sort, but what these Crusaders were doing were projecting onto an imaginary deity that they were creating in their own image and likeness, and giving him a seal of absolute approval. And today, terrorists do the same. So theologians and priests were very much alert to this. And so they devised spiritual exercises, not just for mystics, not just for an elite group, but for all the faithful to make them realize that when we talked about God, when we said God was good, we were doing this in a very inadequate way - that God couldn't be good like you or me, when we talk about a good person or a good meal or a good dog. We have an idea of what we're talking about, but God was, as the Muslims say, allah hu akbar - God is always greater than anything we can understand. And in the Quran, for example, God is continually saying, look, everything I'm saying to you is an ayia(ph), a parable, a sign. Even the great statements like paradise or talk about creation or the last judgment, these are ayia. They're parables, symbols of realities that we, with our finite, earthbound minds, can't grasp."

"Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:"

"Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings."

"Of the millions of people we might call fundamentalists in all these major religions, only a tiny, tiny proportion take part in acts of terror or violence. The vast majority are simply trying to live what they regard as a good religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to religion."

"Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester."

"People worship different things; there must be 'no coercion in matters of faith!"

"Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice."

"Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn?t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God."

"Religion is supposed to be about the loss of the ego, not about its eternal survival."

"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."

"Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue."

"Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place."

"Religions should be making a major contribution to what must be the chief task of our day: to build a global community where all peoples can live together in mutual respect and where the powerful do not treat other nations as they would not wish to be treated themselves. If we do not achieve this, it is unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. Any ideology ? religious or secular ? that breeds hatred and disdain for others is failing the test of our time."

"Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to believe it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants. The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and has now become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. In the ancient world, it was inspired by an acute sense of the contingency and frailty of existence. Why had anything come into being at all, when there could so easily have been nothing? There has never been a simple or even a possible answer to this question, but people continue to ask it, pushing their minds to the limit of what we can know."

"Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity."

"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."

"Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree."

"Saint Augustine? insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity."

"The causes of warfare and violence, often hatred and greed and fear, all too often it's true. These self-serving emotions have often been given a religious justification. And yet, each one of the major faiths, I discovered, has at its core the ethic of compassion. Every single one of them has developed its own version of the Golden Rule, never to treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself, and has said that this is the test of spirituality; that it is this which takes us beyond the prism of ego and selfishness and greed, that enables us to enter into our best selves and into the presence of what some have called God, others Nirvana, Brahmin or Dao. And yet, so often you don't hear about it. Often when religious leaders come together they talk about a particular sexual ethic or an abstrused doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life. And yet it seems to me, quite clear, that unless we now learn to implement the Golden Rule globally so that we treat all peoples, all nations, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we're not going to have a viable world. This is the task of our time, to build a global community where people of all persuasions can live together in harmony and respect."

"Some people simply bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about the sorrow of the world, but this is an unwise course, because, if we are entirely unprepared, the tragedy of life can be devastating."

"Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories."

"Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden."