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

-Karen Armstrong

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Karen Armstrong quote about religion: "Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god..."

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"Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse."

-Karen Armstrong

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"We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level."

-Karen Armstrong

"Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective."

-Karen Armstrong

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"Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it."

-Karen Armstrong

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"Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death."

-Karen Armstrong

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"Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength."

-Karen Armstrong

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"Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race."

-Alfred Russel Wallace

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"Religion is no more the parent of morality than an incubator is the mother of a chicken."

-Lemuel K. Washburn

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"I appreciate the 'Surreal Life.' I had a really positive experience on that show, and with those people. I found some love in my heart for religion again, and had the support of a new family of friends. I wouldn't have had the pleasure of meeting those people, if we were not all placed in that fishbowl."

-Vince Neil

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"Contradictory to my religion, I think, is journalism."

-Sydney Schanberg

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"Religion is the idol of the mob it adores everything it does not understand."

-Frederick II

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"When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied."

-John Woolman

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