Interview with Karen Armstrong

From an interview with author Karen Armstrong in Parabola Magazine. If you want to read more, click on the title above.

P: We're in a frightening place in world history. Your predictions about religious war have come true, and our whole environment is in a perilous shape. From your study of the origin of the great religious traditions, what really matters?

KA: The exercise of compassion is what matters in our world. The Dalai Lama says "my religion is kindness." Confucious said "religion is altruism". Dethroning yourself from the center of your world and putting another there. Now this requires intelligent thought. You really have to think and practice the golden rule about what the other person really wants rather than what you think he ought to want. When we speak to people we should behave as Buddha or Socrates did. Address them where they really are and not where we think they should be. We have to put ourselves in the place of another, and we have to be able to do this globally.

P: This state of compassion, of engagement, does take thinking.

KA: It does. It takes constant, flexible intelligence. Each case will be different so principles are really not the point. You have to be flexible to respond to each situation that arises, especially in a time where everything is changing so fast.

We have to investigate. We have to find out more about the world. I've had some extraordinary conversations with highly educated Americans who have asked me where the Palestinians have come from, as if they marauded in off the desert. I've had to explain Palestine. There is so much ignorance.

All the great sages have said that we must see things as they really are. Don't bury your head in the sand and say that environmental catastrophe isn't going to happen, for example. In the Axial Age, the prophets of Israel called those positive thinkers who thought that Jerusalem was not going to fall because God was with them "false prophets." You cannot achieve enlightenment that way. It takes information gathering and that does not mean being content with the little scraps of sound bytes that are handed out by politicians or Fox News.