- “They taught that compassion brings you into the presence of God. They weren’t saying this simply because it sounds good. They said it because it works.”
- “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.”
- “There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there’s bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.”
- “If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.”
- “Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.”
- “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.”
- “Surely it’s better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one’s capacity for love to harden.”
- “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.”
- “We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world.”
- “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.”
- “We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings.”
- “The choice is yours. 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.”
- “Religions don’t own compassion; it is a human virtue.”
- “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.”
- “The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.”
- “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.”
- “Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work.”
- “We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Compassion is not a popular virtue.”
- “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.”
- “Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.”
- “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.”
