From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
[T]he Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion… Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders…: he had summoned his nights to recover his patrimony – the Holy Land – from the infidel… In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Not everybody was capable of philosophical thought, however, so Falsafah was only for an intellectual elite. It would confuse the masses and lead them into an error that imperiled their eternal salvation. Hence the importance of the esoteric tradition, which kept these dangerous doctrines from those unfitted to receive them. It was just the same with Sufism and the batini studies of the Ismalis; if unsuitable people attempted these mental disciplines they could become seriously ill and develop all kinds of psychological disorders.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Science demands the fundamental belief that there is a rational explanation for everything; it also requires an imagination and courage which are not dissimilar to religious creativity. Like the prophet or the mystic, the scientist also forces himself to confront the dark and unpredictable realm of uncreated reality. … [T]he scientific vision of our own day has made much classic theism impossible for many people. To cling to the old theology is not only a failure of nerve but could involve a damaging loss of integrity. The Faylasufs attempted to wed their new [scientific] insights with mainstream Islamic faith… Yet the ultimate failure of their rational deity has something important to tell us about the nature of religious truth.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
The problem of predestination and free will … indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond “good” and “evil,” which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this “God” a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make “him” fulfill our expectations. We can turn “God” into a Republican or a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Politics is not extrinsic to a Muslim’s personal religious life, as in Christianity, which mistrusts mundane success. Muslims regard themselves as committed to implemented a just society in accord with God’s will. The ummah has sacramental importance, as a “sign” that God has blessed this endeavor to redeem humanity from oppression and injustice; its political health holds much the same place in a Muslim’s spirituality as a particular theological option (Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptist) in the life of a Christian. If Christians find the Muslims’ regard for politics strange, they should reflect that their passion for abstruse theological debate seems equally bizarre to Jews and Muslims.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Nobody in the new empire was forced to accept the Islamic faith; indeed, for a century after Muhammad’s death, conversion was not encouraged and, in about 700, was actually forbidden by law: Muslims believed that Islam was for the Arabs as Judaism was for the sons of Jacob. As the “people of the book,” … Jews and Christians were granted religious liberty as … protected minority groups. When the Abbasid caliphs began to encourage conversion, many of the Semitic and Aryan peoples in their empire were eager to accept the new religion.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
The image of the olive tree in [certain Koranic] verses has been interpreted as an allusion to the continuity of revelation, which springs from one “root” and branches into a multifarious variety of religious experience that cannot be identified with or confined by any one particular tradition or locality: it is neither of the East nor the West
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Denys’s God has two aspects: one is turned toward us and manifests himself in the world; the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely incomprehensible. He “stays within himself” in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally immersed in creation. He is not another being, additional to the world. Deny’s method became normative in Greek theology. In the West, however, … some imagined that when they said ” God,” the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their own thoughts and ideas to God – saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other – in a way that was dangerously idolatrous.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. Even though Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of Augustine. The letters of Jerome teem with loathing of the female which occasionally sounds deranged. Tertullian had castigated women as evil temptresses, an eternal danger to mankind …. Augustine is clearly puzzled that God should have made the female sex: after all, “if it was good company and conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better arranged to have two men together as friends, not a man and a woman.” Women’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease. … Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny …
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
The notion of an enlightenment that was impersonal, beyond human categories and natural to humanity was also close to the Hindu and Buddhist ideal in India … Thus despite the more superficial differences, there were profound similarities between the monotheistic and other versions of reality. It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality – called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God – seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings.
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