If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)
Far from being the father of jihad, 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.
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.
We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicionwork with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)
The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.
Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.
[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.
Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.
there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.
Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion.
The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.
Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He 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.
The cosmology of the ancient world was telling you about the nature of life here and now. Genesis is not about the origins of life. There were many other creation stories current in Israel at that time and no one was required to believe in that one.
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.
Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.
