By Deborah Solomon THE WAY WE LIVE NOW:  Q: You spent seven years in a convent, but in your new memoirs, ”The Spiral Staircase,” you describe yourself as a failed nun.

Karen Armstrong: 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.

In the decades since, you have become a distinguished scholar of Islam, but I get the impression that you don’t believe in God.

It depends on what you mean by God. 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.

Do you believe in the afterlife?

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

What do you consider the most important virtue?

Compassion. No question about it. It goes right across the board in all the world religions. Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.

If there’s so much similarity among world religions, why have wars been fought for centuries?

Because of egotism. Compassion is not a popular virtue. A lot of people see God as a sacred seal of approval on some of their worst fantasies about other people. With the election coming up in the United States, we’ll be hearing a lot about God being either a Democrat or a Republican.

I would hope he’s an independent.

That would be nice!

Could you feel compassion for someone who wrote a negative review of one of your books?

I spent so many years as an abject failure that if I get a good review, I am surprised. I didn’t get anywhere near success until I was 50 years old.

Perhaps you should have given more thought to the biblical belief in an eye-for-an-eye-style revenge?

An eye for an eye is about limiting vengeance. You can only take an eye out for an eye; you may not kill someone for knocking out your eye. It means restraining tribal violence, and it is in the Koran.

That’s fascinating, but I still find your emphasis on compassion simplistic. We know from Freud that all true achievement derives from selfishness. Who cares if Michelangelo was nice to his next-door neighbors?

Religions are not dealing with geniuses. They are dealing with ordinary people.

Fair enough, but are there people who are simply unworthy of our compassion? Do you have compassion for Osama bin Laden?

No, I don’t. But you start with your own circle, because it is no good thinking fine thoughts about people dying in Africa when you’re not looking after the people under your own nose.

You had a nervous breakdown before you left the convent. I wonder how you feel about the current widespread use of antidepressants.

We live in a culture where we think we shouldn’t be depressed and we demand things, including good moods. But you should be depressed if, say, your child dies. It’s a shame to miss it by blocking yourself off.

Oh, that’s so Catholic of you to ennoble suffering.

No. It’s a very Buddhist idea. Suffering in itself can be really bad.

It can make you into a psychopath. But if we do suffer, it can help us to appreciate the suffering of other people.

Do you find that more people are turning toward God these days?

No. Not in England, where most people are not interested in institutionalized religion, which they find tired and discredited after the horrors of the 20th century.

Europe seems to be in a post-Christian phase, although the U.S. is not.

You’re a younger nation. In Europe, we are tired and old and we know about our sins.

Is there any hope for the future of religion?

We need to rediscover what is in our religions, which has gotten overlaid with generations of egotistical and lazy theology. The current thinking — my God is better than your God — is highly irreligious.

D.H. Lawrence once said that it’s not religious to be religious.

And Jung once said that a great deal of religion shields us from religious experience. Deborah Solomon