Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. We are delighted to have back as a guest, again, someone who has been far and away one of the most popular and compelling of all of the guests that we’ve had. Karen Armstrong is back to be with us again. We are delighted to have you, Karen.

Armstrong: Thank you.

Lloyd: Karen has been productive since last time we saw her. She has written a massive book called The Case for God, which we will be talking about and which I highly recommend; but also very involved with what she calls the Charter for Compassion, bringing the various world religions together to work as agents of peace in the world around us, and we want to hear some about that as well.

Many of you are familiar with the long string of marvelous works by Karen Armstrong, including A History of God, The Spiral Staircase, and The Great Transformation. You know they are all rich substantive books that are rich in thought, demanding in length, but always limpidly clear in what she writes. One of the great qualities of her writing is how clear she can make some very complex material. It is just great to have you with us again, Karen.

Armstrong: Thank you.

Lloyd: I want to say we have quite a large crowd today. If there are some in the back who cannot see very well, there is room in both transepts where the sight lines are considerably better, so feel free if you would like to come up and join us up here. Well, arguing for God is something that is part of the trade of people around a place like this, but you’ve taken it on in major terms. What made you decide, at this point, and in what’s happening in the world around us, to write your own case for God?

Armstrong: Well, there’s been a lot of discussion about the existence of God ever since the publication of those atheistic tracts by Dawkins, Harrison, Hitchins, and I was very much concerned about the nature of the debate on both sides.

On the one hand, it was extremely aggressive on both sides, and I’ve come to the conclusion after twenty years of studying religion that to quarrel about religion is counter-productive on both sides. To quarrel with animosity is going to impede any hope of religious or philosophical enlightenment, because ego is coming into play. And to attempt to wipe out, to argue that you are to wipe out faith… I don’t think, after the twentieth century, we can talk easily about wiping out or expunging anything.

Lloyd: Pretty frightening language some of them were using, that this is a blight on the face of the earth and should be eliminated.

Armstrong: Yes, it’s a poison, and we should withdraw all respect from religion and religious people, you know, and people like me and you Sam are sort of seen as complicit with Osama bin Laden.

Lloyd: We’re enablers. Terrible thing.

Armstrong: Yes, us so called “moderates,” whom they scorn as Quislings, so this is really sort of a bit immature, I felt. But some of the people who are arguing for God and against these atheists, I felt we could all benefit by looking at a strand of spirituality that is very very clear in all three of the monotheisms, right up to the sixteenth, seventeenth century, when things began to change.

Lloyd: I want to hear all about that but I want to stay, just for a minute with this phenomenon. It’s now, I guess, eighteen months, twenty-four months old, this vitriolic explosion from atheists about the idiocy and dangerousness of religious faith. Why now? What led to this spilling of vitriol on both sides at this moment in our culture?

Armstrong: I think first of all, 9/11. Sam Harris was inspired to write The End of Faith after 9/11.

Lloyd: Because he says that proves how dangerous religion can be?

Armstrong: That it’s faith, its credulity, the ability to believe anything, that enables people to do these heinous acts. In fact, the problems that led to 9/11 have been largely political. They’re political problems and the terrorists use religious imagery but they are inspired by politics rather than religion. Their objective is political.

But also, I think, the fact that in the twentieth century, in the mid-twentieth century, people took it for granted that secularism was the coming ideology, and that religion was fading out and certainly would not play any major role in public and world events. But that’s proved wrong.

There’s been an explosion of religiosity, an increase in religiosity everywhere except Western Europe. And people feel baffled by that. You know, the prediction hasn’t gone according to plan. Now not all this new type of religion is good, or as the Buddhists would say, skillful. A lot of it is sort of angry and they are reacting, their God, the atheist’s God, is the God of the fundamentalist, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim. And they see religion as the source of all the world’s problems: get rid of religion and we’ll have a world of peace and harmony.

Lloyd: And so a lot of the arguments in those tracts, by Hitchins and Dawkins and Harris and the rest, are knocking down what looks to most people of faith like a straw man: destroying this fundamentalist, all-powerful, manipulator, angry, cruel God, something that really doesn’t register with most people who try to make sense of what they are saying.

Armstrong: No. Well, I would not dream, for example, of writing a book about evolutionary biology. And someone said, Perry Eagleton, when he was reviewing Dawkins’ book said, “if you can imagine that somebody writing a book about biology who’s read only The British Book of Birds, then you have some idea of what it’s like to read Dawkins on theology.” So and indeed they don’t know much about it and they certainly don’t seem to understand any other religion, Christianity and fundamentalist Christianity at that.

And so their God concept is the God of the fundamentalist. And they say that all religion is fundamentalist, and this really weakens their critique. Because fundamentalism in all its forms, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, it’s erupted in the twentieth century, it’s a modern innovation, and in many cases, in their anxiety to protect their tradition, which they see as endangered, fundamentalists actually distort the tradition.

It’s a fearful theology, where people are fighting for survival, as they feel they are, and feel their backs are to the wall, it’s very easy to fall into aggression.

Lloyd: And so you’ve taken up a strand of Christianity but of the other monotheistic traditions that provides a kind of counter-response to a lot of the noise we’re hearing around us.

Armstrong: Well, up until the early modern period that we’re talking about, the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries, about the time of our scientific revolution in the West, people knew that it was very difficult to talk about God. And in the same way as Buddhists would never dream of defining nirvana: it’s a state that can’t be regularly put into words. It’s transcendent.

All too often, however, in the modern world today, we talk too easily about God. We ask him to bless our nation and save our queen, and we expect him to be on our side in an election or a war—even though, our opponents are also God’s children and presumably the object of his (ridiculous pronoun) love and concern. And the idea of saying that you could prove God’s existence from nature would have been absolutely abhorrent to major carriers of the tradition. Thomas Aquinas, for example, would have turned in his grave at the idea.

Lloyd: Why can’t you prove God?

Armstrong: Because God is not another being. We know only, our minds are equipped only to deal with individual beings. You and me and this water and these stones, we all have existence, but a limited form of existence. We’ll die. We will get worn out. We know our limitations.

What we call God, or what others have called Brahman or Dao, is the All, it is everything that exists. And it is transcendent. Now transcendent means it lies beyond the reach of words. Too many people say, “Yes, I know God is transcendent. But I know what he means. I know what he thinks and says and loves and approves.” And this is, we’re in danger of creating an idol.

And I show this strand of thought. It’s very common in all the religions. And I think I’d like to go to ancient India to give an example of what this spirituality was like because, in about the tenth century before Christ, the people of India devised a sacred competition called the Brahmodya contest. And the Brahmin priests would go out into the forest and make a retreat, putting themselves into a different sort of mind, and they’d fast and do early yoga exercises, breathing which changed people’s consciousness, and then they’d come back and start the competition. And the object was to find a formula, a verbal formula, in which to define the Brahman, the Ultimate, the all.

And the challenger would kick off with a learned, elliptical, poetic definition of Brahman, which he felt said it all. And his opponents would listen, and they would have to build on that and reply to it with equally learned and elliptical statements.

And the winner was the person who reduced everybody to silence. And in that silence, the Brahman was present. The Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions, the Brahman became present when you became aware, you had a stunning realization of the absolute impotence of speech: that when we are talking about God we are beyond what words can do.

Now a great poem can do that and a modern theologian, Dennis Turner, has defined theology as “speech that segues into silence,” that moment of silent awe that the arts bring with us. A poem will take you to the end of speech, so that you say oh and ah, and it can sometimes take years for a poem to become fully clear to you. You grow with the poem and it reveals constantly new depths; and especially music does this a great deal, because music is an art form that has always been important in religion. That is, it introduces us to a type of knowing and experience that is not about anything, or is not about words.

You can’t say what a late Beethoven quartet is about. And you know, at the end of the symphony, often when the last notes die away, there’s often an absolute electric beat of silence in the hall before the applause begins. And theology at its best should help you to enter that beat of silence.

In the pre-modern period, Christians too developed their own kind of spirituality and discourse that was like the Brahmodya competition to lead you to silence. And these were not minor people that I’ve dug out of the footnotes. These were major carriers of the tradition, people like Thomas Aquinas, Ibn-Sina in the Muslim tradition, and Maimonides, who said you cannot say that God exists, because our notion of existence is far too limited to apply to God, to make you aware of the inadequacy of words.

So that’s the strand of theology I’ve tried to delineate, so to say, don’t worry about proving God’s existence; it’s impossible.

When, in the fourth century, Christians decided for the first time to adopt the highly novel idea of God creating the world out of nothing—an idea that’s not in the Bible, actually. In the Bible, as in most pre-modern creation stories, gods can only help on a creation process that is already started, not bringing something out of abysmal nothingness.

Now when they decided to say, “Yes, God did create the world out of nothing,” in the fourth century, people like Athanasius, whose name is a symbol of Orthodoxy, said that that shows us that the world, the natural world, can tell us nothing about God. Creation shows that this new doctrine, everything that exists comes from nothing, an abysmal nothingness, and therefore its essence is entirely different from that of the God that is being itself.

Lloyd: You’re describing a highly paradoxical way of knowing God, and I know, in the Christian mystical tradition, mystics will talk about the notion that “this is thou,” but also, “this is not thou,” that for everything we say about God, the opposite is also true in some way and God is transcendent and majestic. God is intimate and inside me. We have to say both those things and hold those things together. God is present everywhere, but God comes close intimately as well. So it’s a paradoxical, mysterious, often mystical way that some centuries along ran up against modern scientific thinking, that set up a whole different set of expectations for what we can know. Say something about that.

Armstrong: Well, in the seventeenth century, people, scientists of towering genius, like Sir Isaac Newton or Descartes, believed that they’d found scientific proof for God’s existence.

Newton’s solar system didn’t work without God. He thought matter was absolutely inert and it needed a God to kick start the whole thing, get it going and the intricacy of the solar system that he found proved, he said, beyond doubt the existence of what would later be call an intelligent designer. It shows the Bible was right. That there really was an omnipotent, omniscient Being who was really very well versed in mechanics and geometry. [laughter] Really, sort of a bigger version of Newton himself, who used to say, when, he was doing his researches, he would cry aloud, “O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee.”

Science and religion were not opposed. We got into the habit of thinking that they’ve always been at daggers drawn. And apart from a few extremely unfortunate blips like the Galileo incident, the problem was that in the seventeenth, eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century until Charles Darwin, science and religion were best friends, passionately in love with one another.

Now of course it was only a few generations before later scientists, people like Laplace began to find a natural explanation for the cosmos. They began to be able to dispense with the God hypothesis. Newton, with the best of intentions, had reduced God to a scientific explanation. And once Charles Darwin came along and said he had found a natural explanation for life itself, Christians fell into a loop, because they had become intoxicated by this scientific theology.

And first learned philosophers and theologians, and later evangelical Christians brought Newton’s God, who could be proved definitively, and which saw science as the best way of approaching God right into the heart of the Christian tradition. So Paley’s intelligent designer in the early nineteenth century became absolutely standard, and people got used to thinking of God as a fact instead of a symbol, a human symbol that pointed beyond itself, like all religious language, into a transcendent silence. It became something we could delineate quite clearly.

It became what previous generations would have called an idol, a larger version of ourselves, writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own, very well versed in mechanics and geometry. And Christians lost the older habits of thought, they lost this apophatic spirituality. Apophatic means wordless, without speech.

And we began to read our scriptures with a literalness which is unparalleled within the history of religion. St. Augustine, way back in the fourth, fifth century, said that if a Biblical text was shown to contradict science, then we had to find a new interpretation of that text. We had to allegorize it.

In the example he gave, of course, his science was rudimentary compared to our own but he said it is clear the ancients for example thought there was a great body of water above the earth which dripped through the clouds and that’s how we got rain. That’s why the Bible talks about the waters above the earth. Well now, St. Augustine, we don’t believe that now. We’ve got to find, that can’t be literal truth, we’ve got to interpret that text allegorically some way and see it as God somehow imparting a knowledge to human beings according to the science of their day but you’ve got to keep abreast of science, he said.

And right on the cusp of the scientific revolution, Calvin in his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis took to task those people whom he called those frantic persons who find it extremely upsetting that the new scientists were beginning to contradict scripture. For example, saying that Jupiter and Saturn were bigger than the moon, which the Bible had described as one of the largest of the heavenly bodies.

Well now, to Calvin, obviously the difference is to science that the Bible was not talking about science. It has a completely different job to do and science he said is very useful and pleasant and it must not be impeded by these frantic persons and if you want to learn about science and cosmology and astronomy, go elsewhere. Don’t look in the Bible. And it was about the time of the Galileo crisis, a very witty cardinal in the Vatican made this bon mot which soon became sort o a joke in church circles saying that in the Bible, the Holy Spirit is teaching us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

Until the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, nobody understood the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life. It was mythos, and right up until the sixteenth century, you find the great Jewish mystic, Isaac Luria making up an entirely new creation myth.

Lloyd: And one of the things you say is, interpreters were playful with scripture, both in Jewish midrash, but across the traditions. But it wasn’t squeezing every precise piece of factual knowledge out, but entering imaginatively into the text and allowing the text to take them to surprising places.

Armstrong: Yes, and the rabbis said that every time a Jew confronted scripture, the word of God, it would mean something different and you had to find a new meaning in scripture, even if it had borne no relation at all to the individual author. They bring texts together from different parts of the Bible. They jam them together to make a new meaning, or just for the sake of argument they would change the wording, punning on the wording of the Bible to bring out a new meaning.

The person who invented this innovative style of exegesis was the great Rabbi Akiva, the great Talmudic master living in the first, second century. And it was said that the fame of his genius reached heaven, and Moses heard about it. And Moses was intrigued so he thought he’d come down to earth to attend Rabbi Akiva’s Torah class.

So he sat in the back row, the eighth row behind all the other students and found, much to his astonishment and embarrassment that he couldn’t understand a word of Akiva’s exposition of the Torah, the Law that had been revealed to him, to Moses on Mt. Sinai. And he went back to heaven shaking his head, saying you know, “Why God did you choose me to be the recipient of Your Torah when you could have chosen someone of Akiva’s genius? My children,” he said, “have defeated me, like any proud parent, they have gone beyond me.”

And another rabbi put it more succinctly. He said, that which was not revealed to Moses was revealed to Rabbi Akiva and his generation. So the rabbis saw revelation not as something that had happened once in the distant past on Mt. Sinai, but as continuous and it happened every time a Jew delved prayerfully into the sacred text. And he said that scripture was incomplete, it needed human ingenuity to play with it, just as we’ve learned to make flour from wheat and linen from flax.

So we’ve lost that kind of confidence. Now if you made a new creation, like Isaac Luria, there’d be hell to pay. People would say, “You can’t say that, it’s not in the Bible.” But in the sixteenth century, this created a mass movement in Judaism from Poland to Iran. It was the only Jewish theology at that time to win universal recognition.

Lloyd: Another of your very significant themes working through the book is how religion is at heart a practical enterprise more than a speculative enterprise. That it is in fact in the practice that we realize the truth at the heart of the religious experience.

Armstrong: Yes, religious myth after Newton got a bad press. Myth came to mean something that isn’t true. In the pre-modern world, a myth was something that in some mysterious sense happened once, but which also happened all the time and it was essentially a program for action. It told you what you must do to negotiate the sorrows of life and find transcendent meaning.

And if you didn’t act on the myth it remained opaque and closed, rather like an abstract and peculiar, rather like the rules of a board game, which seemed terribly complicated, dull and incomprehensible, until you pick up the dice and start to play and then everything falls into place.

And our Christian doctrines, I tried to show in the book, were like that too. They were telling us what to behave and if you don’t do it. you don’t get it. Religion is like dancing. You can’t just learn to dance by reading a book. You have to do hours and years of dedicated practice.

Religion is hard work, not just a matter of coming into a beautiful place like this once a week and singing a couple of hymns. It requires constant efforts of the mind in the way we’ve described, rituals of the mind to bring you to a state of transcendence and above all it requires the dedicated overcoming of egotism and selfishness, especially by compassion, the ability to put yourself in the place of another. The Golden Rule, which has been developed by all the major world faiths: Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you; or, always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, which requires you to look into your own heart, discover what gives you pain, and then refuse under any circumstances whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else.

I can have “faith that moves mountains,” says St. Paul, but “if I lack charity it’s worth nothing.” And you have to do that, as Confucius said, all day and every day. Not just doing “Oh, that’s my good deed for the day,” as we say and now we can return to our ordinary selfish lives. That again, Trinity and Incarnation were telling us to behave like that.

Lloyd: It is very striking, just to take the Gospels. Jesus never invites people to come believe a set of things, Jesus says, “Come and see,” or, “Follow me,” and the conviction is that it is in the living out of the faith one finds the confirmation and the deeper understanding and ultimately the transcendent insight. But it is by living it out.

Armstrong: It’s by living it out. The word pistis, which is used for faith in the Bible, doesn’t mean belief, it means trust, commitment. In Latin, when the Bible was translated into Latin we had credo which comes from the Latin cor do, “I give my heart, I commit myself, I involve myself.” And the word bileven in Middle English meant that, to trust, to commit yourself, engage yourself. “Accept my bileve,” says a knight in one of Chaucer’s poems: “Accept my loyalty.”

In Shakespeare, just shortly before the King James translation of scripture, one of the characters in the play who is being forced to marry a low born girl, someone advises him, “Don’t make your bileve a part of you.” Don’t commit yourself to this idea, don’t entertain it. Don’t make it part of yourself.

It is only in the late seventeenth century that the word “belief” was used to express the intellectual acceptance of a rather dubious proposition and Newton uses it first in this new sense, in the late seventeenth century when he said that he hoped that his solar system would work with considering men for belief in a deity.” And so in the Bible, Jesus is not asking people to believe in the Trinity or the Incarnation. These would have been very strange doctrines to him. He was asking for commitment, for people to leave all they had and follow him. To live rough, to give all they had to the poor, to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and trust, bileve, in God the Father who was their Father as well as his.

Lloyd: I want to jump for a minute to the kind of questions someone might raise about the strand of religious faith you’ve held up which is the more mystical less cognitive understanding, I mentioned to you before we came out a review of your book in the New York Times last week, written by a more conservative person theologically, very appreciative of the book but saying that, is there a danger of losing the content of religious faith, the convictions that there are things that actually happen that God did engage the world in particular ways and then he comes up with this memorable sentence: “The casual reader would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of pre-modern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians before their time,” [laughter] which insults us and lots of other people as well.” But the question is there. Is there something being emptied out of the faith here?

Armstrong: Not if you are doing it. If you just want to tick a number of boxes saying “Yes, Jesus walked out of the tomb,” and “God created the world,” things you know that even the Biblical authors would have quarrels with, then that’s fine.

But if you are trying to live the Golden Rule all day and every day, if you are using incarnation and Trinity as a call to action to dedicate to charity, to dedicate to getting rid of emptiness, all day and every day, if you are putting these doctrines into practice, then you understand, and it’s St. Anselm of Canterbury who utters a memorable prayer in the eleventh century in Latin, Credo ut intelligam, and it’s usually translated, “I believe in order that I may understand.”

And I always thought, as a young girl, that it meant that first I had to accept all these doctrines, just swallow them down and then as a reward God would give me understanding. But that is not what Anselm was saying because, Credo, should be translated, “I involve myself, I engage myself, and then I will understand.” And he goes on to say, “Only if I so engage myself will I understand.”

If you are just sitting on the sidelines saying, “Do I believe that God created the world and that everything happened exactly as in Genesis? Well okay. Do I believe the Atonement, the physical Resurrection?” These are rather abstract doctrines.

We now think that first you’ve got to believe this stuff and then live a dedicated life. It’s the other way around. First you live, then you encounter it, what we call transcendence.

You get what the Greeks call kenosis if you are emptying yourself of yourself as St. Paul says Jesus did, in Philippians, when he emptied himself and accepted death on the Cross. If you are doing that every day, getting beyond selfishness, greed, and ego, then you discover new capacities of mind and heart, and you understand what God is, though you can never explain it rationally.

Lloyd: That happens very much in my own experience with something like the enormous Christian claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. If you make that the starting line for getting someone to believe, it’s a huge fence to get over. A lot of people would find it absolutely impossible. But if you start down the path of living the Jesus way, the Christian way, and find in all of the disciplines, the practice, the Eucharist, the prayers, the service, you begin to trust there is something going on bigger and deeper than what you had imagined, that begins to make resurrection seem credible if not compelling.

Armstrong: And look at the Resurrection narratives, what they’re actually saying, Paul’s Resurrection narratives the earliest ones we have are quite different from the ones we have in the Gospels and they seem to be apparitions. He doesn’t distinguish between his own vision of Christ on the Road to Damascus and those of the people who first saw the risen Christ.

And the Gospels seem to be making it clear that Jesus was neither a ghost, because He eats and drinks but he’s not an ordinary body that’s walked out of a tomb either, because he suddenly appears. And my favorite one is the road to Emmaus story where two disciples disconsolately are walking along the road and a stranger joins them, and he says, “What’s up”, and they say,” Oh,” but they trust the stranger instead of saying in a British way, “ Oh we’re fine actually, don’t worry about it, you know.” But they trust themselves and their vulnerabilities to this utter stranger who then says “Look,” taking them to task, “don’t you find it in the scriptures that the Messiah would have to suffer before he entered his glory?” Now he’s doing a bit of Akiva style inventive exegesis, this stranger, because the Bible says no such thing. But with the typical Jewish Midrashic intention, they are finding new meaning and so they walk along and later they remember how” their hearts burned within them as he discussed the scripture.”

And then the stranger comes in to eat with them, he breaks the bread, and in that instant they realize it was Jesus all along, but their eyes were held from recognizing him. And then he goes.

Now this is not an ordinary body walking out of the tomb. What Luke is telling us is that now we will encounter Jesus in the study, in the inventive study of scripture, in the Eucharist, in the breaking of bread, and in reaching out to the stranger. And in Luke’s communities Jews and Gentiles were living together in community, getting beyond their differences and finding out that reaching out to the stranger breaks down those boundaries of ego and identity.

The Resurrection is telling us something much more important and that’s what you must do, study scripture, go with the Eucharist, reach out to all, even the stranger, and then you will understand, you’ll glimpse have momentary intimations that Christ is alive and also in you.

Lloyd: Intimations of a love that could actually be more powerful than death as you begin to live into that experience.

Karen Armstrong And victory in the heart of what seems to be absolute failure and defeat.

Lloyd: That’s right, that’s right. We need to go to questions from you all but before we do I want to get one quick update on the Charter of Compassion, before we do that. Please pass your questions forward.

Armstrong: The Charter of Compassion for compassion is now written. I can’t tell you what is in it because it will be unveiled at a big major global launch. on November 12, right here in DC will be the launch. But there will be events happening all over the world, in Australia, in the Middle East, in Malaysia they are putting up a wall of Compassion right in the middle of Kuala Lumpur.

And the idea is to restore compassion to the center of religious and moral life because that is what our world needs right now. Unless we learn to practice the Golden Rule globally, treating all peoples as though they were as important as ourselves, with the same consideration, we’re not going to have a viable world. And religion should be playing a major role in this.

But it is not all going to be just finished at November the 12th. I shall be working on this ‘til my dying day, I think, but you can find out all about the Charter on our new website, www.CharterforCompassion.org

We’ve now got about seventy or eighty partners worldwide. People are coming on board every day, organizations, and there’ll be a separate website for the partners so that we can continue all over the world working together. So instead of people being isolated, that we now have a sort of communal thing. So I do urge you, if you want to sign up for the charter, there is a little button you can click on the website which says how to join up, how to bring your own organization or group, and how to organize an event on November the 12th.

Deryl Davis: We have several questions to start with here as others continue to pass theirs forward. The first is, “Do you see a future of greater religious pluralism, or a future of growing distinctions and differences between various religious traditions?”

Armstrong: I think there will be both. I think religious pluralism is a factor of our time. People are turning without any great fanfare for nourishment to more than one tradition. Lots of Americans like to read Rumi, for example, the Sufi poet, without abandoning their own faith.

Pluralism is not a mishmash or pick and mix. As it’s often, you know, you just pick out the bits you like and concoct your own faith. It is basically just a reaching out, again, to the other and getting some tips on how we can improve our own tradition. No need to convert, as the Dalai Lama always says, from one to another. They all teach the same, but go your own way, but find out how Buddhists have done things perhaps better than we do, the likes of us.

The more pluralistic people become, the more global we’ll become, the more others will retreat into denominational ghettos and want to cling to a clear and distinct identity so that is going to be with us too, I think.

Davis: “A centerpiece of your book is the impact that science has upon religious practice. Is there an inherent tension between religion and technology? And if so, how do we overcome that since technology plays an increasingly larger role in our daily lives?”

Armstrong: Yes, it does. Technology is a bit difficult for us. We know expect information at the click of a mouse. You know, “What is God?” click, and up it comes, a number of websites, and we’ve got it there and then. We’re not used to waiting and this whole idea of wordless, incremental knowledge, acquired over years and years of practice, this is alien to us. So it is a difficulty, but on the other hand, technology can bring us together.

And working with the TED organization, for example, I am pre-technological. I’m that generation. I manage my computer and love it, but I don’t do half of what I should with it but it was TED who said to me, “Look, your thinking is pre-technological, let’s put the Charter on line.” So I had never thought of that in a thousand years, and so hundred and thousands of people from all over the world contributed to this Charter on a multi-lingual website, as I described. We’ve got our website. We can work together on compassion. It poses challenges, but it can also be, let’s make technology, I mean, the terrorists all use technology, but we can also use it to serve our work for a more compassionate world.

Davis: “Is commonality in religious traditions about the importance of compassion? Why do you think it’s so hard for us to learn and practice it?”

Armstrong: Why is it so hard? Because people really often don’t want to be compassionate. They’d rather be right. [Laughter] You know, sometimes you know I can see—not in this audience of course, [laughter] when I’m talking about compassion, I see a slight flicker of mutiny coming over people’s faces, because they know they ought to be compassionate. But what is the fun of being religious if you can’t sort of denounce this or sort of condemn the other with that glow of feeling.

The Buddha said when he achieved enlightenment by getting beyond ego and by compassion, it occurred to him first that he ought to preach this message, which would end the suffering of the world. And he said “No, no, no, I don’t want to do that. People will not want to get rid of their ego.” And then he’s persuaded to do so. Why? Because it is hard, and people often use religion not to transcend ego in order to get a larger enhanced self, but to make their identity even more so: I’ve got God behind me.

And very often we use an inadequate idea of God, which is really nothing more than a larger version of ourselves, the God we’ve created in our own image, to back up such an identity, instead of giving it away. We are at our best selves when we give ourselves away. But that means that you have to sort of trust pistis, bileve, let go of the rail of the swimming pool and thrust yourselves into the depths and then you learn to swim and move in a new way.

Davis: This questioner points to the argument that says religion was created to deal with the fear of death. How do you respond to that, and is religion more than that?

Armstrong: Look, you know, there is nothing little about death and extinction. We all find that difficult when we see our loved ones becoming old. I never quite understood why the Buddha said that old age was so terrible until my mother started to decline into dementia. These are terrible things.

It’s not just death, though we do fear our extinction. And religion shouldn’t be giving us sort of facile hopes of paradise and all the rest of it because the Quran says that every single one of its statements, including the great statement about creation or last Judgment or Paradise, are ayat, parables, allegories.

And Paul said, “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those that love him.” And if that’s good enough for Paul, it’s good enough for me.

We don’t know really what is beyond. There is very little in Bible, in the New Testament about after life. Most of what Jesus is talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, he is talking about the reign of God here on earth rather than beyond, so…

But it’s not just that. We are creatures that crave meaning. When we look around and see the pain of life, it is inescapable for us. When we look at our mortality, when we look at human cruelty, when we look at these terrible natural disasters, we can feel utterly paralyzed when we experience human cruelty. And religion is at its best when it helps us to live in serenity in the midst of suffering. So we will still suffer but we will find a place within ourselves, call it God and we experience immortality here on earth right now, if we work at it. But we don’t get it just from singing a couple of hymns once a week.

It is hard work, religion. And if all our faith is simply geared to getting into heaven then frankly it’s no more religious than paying into our retirement annuity. [laughter] It’s all about the survival of the self. What we have is now, and we can discover an enhancement of being, nirvana, God, deification, as the Greek Orthodox say, here on earth if we work hard enough at it. And after our death, who knows what will be? I am entirely open minded about it, as are most of the traditions. It’s really only Islam and Christianity that have made a big deal of afterlife.

Lloyd: One more very brief question and then we have to stop.

Deryl Davis; A couple of different questioners ask you to speak briefly about your own spiritual practices. We might add as you do so eloquently in The Spiral Staircase.

Karen Armstrong; Yes, read The Spiral Staircase and find it in the last chapter is the quick answer. But for me, I couldn’t pray. I was absolutely hopeless at meditation when I was a young nun. I just could not do this thing. But I found for me, it’s my study. And my Jewish friends tell me this is a very Jewish form of spirituality. When I am immersed all day long in these great texts, sometimes I’ll get moments of absolute awe and wonder.

That compelled me to what a great Islamist has called the science of compassion, a way of knowing that is based on feeling with the other, with people who lived entirely in a different world. Which means you have to put your clever post-Enlightenment, Oxford educated, ego—voracious, rational intellect—on the back burner, and enter in a scholarly imaginative manner into the lives of people like Muhammad, who lived an entirely different world, and then you find yourself saying, you don’t leave a spirituality, you don’t say this is absolutely ridiculous of course, you enter into it and you then find that if you had lived in those circumstances you could imagine yourself doing and feeling the same. And that again is I think has been for me a training in ekstasis, which is what the Greeks call it ,which isn’t an exotic trance. Ekstasis means “a stepping outside of the self.”

Lloyd: I hate to bring this conversation to a close but I am afraid I have to. Next week we’re going to turn to the grave problems facing those addressing global poverty, in having with us a magnificent philanthropist and worker in this area, Ed Scott, the founder of the Center for Interfaith Action, an array of non-profits, to talk about what we can do to address the problems of global poverty around the world.

We hope you’ll stay for the service that takes place at 11:15 in just a few moments, but also Karen Armstrong will be in the West End of the Cathedral, out through the first set of doors, signing her book just after the service. Please join me in thanking her for this wonderful conversation. [Applause]