From a Bill Moyers
interview with Karen Armstrong.
Compassion is far more important than belief. That is the essence of religion. All the traditions teach that it is the practice of compassion and honoring the sacred in the other that brings us into the presence of what we call God, Nirvana, Raman, or Tao. And people are remarkably uneducated about compassion these days....
We've got to do better than this. 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....
People don't want to be compassionate. When I go around lecturing about this, I sometimes see the good faithful looking mutinous. Because they may know that they ought to be compassionate. But what's the fun of religion if you can't sort of slam down other people? This is ego....
We are not doing well at the moment. The three monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they have a besetting problem, a besetting tendency. That is idolatry. Taking a human idea, a human idea of God, a human doctrine and making it absolute. Putting it in the place of God. Now, there have been secular idolatries too. Nationalism was a great idolatry.
Paul Tillich said, "We are makers of idols." We are constantly creating these idols. Erecting a purely human ideal or a human value or a human idea to the supreme reality. Now, once you've made of something essentially finite, once you've made it an absolute, it has, then, to destroy any other rival claimants. Because there can only be one absolute.
BILL MOYERS: Who created God?
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Human beings created the idea of God. But the transcendent reality to which the idea of God nudges us is embedded in part of the human experience.
BILL MOYERS: But if we create God, then we can read into God. Our passions, jealousies, envies, animosities, aspirations.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: Yes and this is idolatry. When you are creating a God in your own image and likeness. When the crusaders went into battle with the cry, "God wills it," on their lips. They were projecting their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto other people. And we get a lot of secular people doing this too. We’ve got people saying, "We want to get rid of religion." Or Radical Republicans slanging Democrats. We are very agonistic society. Meaning competitive....
In our discourse, it is not enough for us in the western democratic tradition simply to seek the truth. We also have to defeat and humiliate our opponents. And that happens in politics. It happens in the law courts. It happens in religious discourse. It happens in the media. It happens in academia.
