Author: Karen Armstrong

Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.

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

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god which can be a very unspiritual unreligious concept.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.