As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain.
As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected.
Another peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something t...
A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.
A primitive capitalism had developed, which had quite different priorities. The lavish sacrifices had been designed to impress the gods and to enhance the patron’s prestige. By the fifth century, thes...
A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.
A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego thatrelates to a thou...
Imaginaţia este principala facultate omenească la care recurge religia. Jean-Paul Sartre a definit-o ca abilitatea de a gândi ceea ce nu există. Fiinţele umane sunt singurele făpturi înzestrate cu cap...
Şi totuşi, un Dumnezeu personal poate deveni o mare răspundere. Se poate transforma într-un simplu idol , făcut după chipul şi asemănarea noastră, o proiecţie a nevoilor noastre limitate, a temerilor...
We sometimes fail to recognize the signs of poverty, loneliness, grief, fear, and desolation in our own city, our own village, or our own family.
We have come to depend on the instant rush of energy and delight we feel when we display our cleverness by making an unkind remark and the spurt of triumph when we vanquish an annoying colleague. Thus...
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars were the crucible in which some of the competing forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into new compounds …...
People are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to...
Instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
In a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the principle of charity; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an interpretation...
If they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because the unexamined life is not worth living.7
Finally ‘Ali, a gawky thirteen year old, could bear it no longer: O prophet of God, he cried, I will be your helper in this matter! Muhammad laid his hand tenderly on the boy’s neck: This is my brothe...
Dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, s...
Compassion derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning to suffer, undergo, or experience. So compassion means to endure [something] with another person, to put ourselves in somebody e...
All rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews o...