God Is Not One Quotes

“Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Almost all religions provide opportunities for human beings to convince themselves of their own righteousness, to speak in the name of God, and even to go to war on God's behalf. This 'blasphemy of certainty' is also rife among secularists who in their case have not God but science or the proletariat on their side.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to to make sense of the world.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Like all religious people, Christians repress, remember, and retell their core stories selectively. They emphasize this episode at the expense of that episode, in keeping with their own biases and the preoccupations of their times.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to All Religions Are One (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing.¹ No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, essentially the same, and this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture, not least in Dan Brown's multi-million-dollar Da Vinci Code franchise.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“One of the challenges for practitioners of any religion is wrestling with elements in their tradition that have been used to justify evil and then bending those elements back toward the good. Many Christians ignore New Testament passages that blame Jews for the death of Jesus. But because some Christians have used these passages to justify hatred, persecution, and murder of Jews, the challenge is to attend to these words with care and then to drain them of anti-Semitic connotations. Similarly, the challenge for Muslims is to attend to passages in the Quran that extremists have used to justify unjust killing. Many Muslims are meeting this challenge. To suicide bombers, they point out that the Quran condemns suicide unequivocally—"Do not kill yourselves" (4:29)—and promises hell for those who do so. To those who kill women or children or civilians, they point out that the Quran condemns mass murder (5:32) and insists on proportionality (2:194). Since the seventh century, Islamic law has been committed to vigorously defending the rights of noncombatants.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“One reason we are willing to follow our fantasies down the rabbit hole of religious unity is that we have become uncomfortable with argument. Especially when it comes to religion, we desperately want everyone to get along”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Unfortunately, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are—not just at their best but also their worst.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Religious folk worldwide agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it. Christians see sin as the problem, and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in their tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem, and liberation from suffering as the religious goal. If practitioners of the world's religions are all mountain climbers, then they are on very different mountains, climbing very different peaks, and using very different tools and techniques in their ascents.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“While I do not believe we are not witnessing a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world's two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Today it is widely accepted that there is no one essence that all religions share. What they share are family resemblances—tendencies toward this belief or that behaviour. In the family of religions, kin tend to perform rituals. They tend to tell stories about how life and death began and to write down these stories in scriptures. They tend to cultivate techniques of ecstasy and devotion. They tend to organize themselves into institutions and to gather in sacred places at sacred times. They tend to instruct human beings how to act toward one another. They tend to profess this belief or that about the gods and the supernatural. They tend to invest objects and places with sacred import. Philosopher of religion Nina Smart has referred to these tendencies as the seven "dimensions" of religion: the ritual, the narrative, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal, and material dimensions.¹³

These family resemblances are just tendencies, however. Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the men in Michael Jordan's family was over six feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“The world's religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“At the heart of this project is a simple, four-part approach to the religions, which I have been using for years in the classroom and at lectures around the world. Each religion articulates:

* a problem;
* a solution to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal;
* a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and
* an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“All too often world history is told as if religion did not matter. The Spanish conquered New Spain for gold, and the British came to New England to catch fish. The French Revolution had nothing to do with Catholicism, and the U.S. civil rights movement was a purely humanitarian endeavor. But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to make sense of the world.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“One of the most common misconceptions about the world's religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in a tsunami. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after "the soul" in the singular. Every religion, however, asks after the human condition. Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorifying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as "slaves" of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. "The idol of yourself," writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, "is the mother of (all) idols." Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a "soul at peace" (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Of all the terms used in the world's religions, none is as controversial as jihad. Jihad literally means "struggle," and Muslims have traditionally understood it to point to two kinds of struggles: the spiritual struggle against pride and self-sufficiency; and the physical struggle against the "house of war," namely, the enemies of Islam. The second of these struggles calls for a variety of tactics, including preaching, teaching, and working for social justice. It may also include war.

Some apologists for Islam have tried to minimize the importance of jihad, and to insulate Islam from its extremists, by arguing that, of these two struggles, the spiritual struggle is higher. A Muslim merchant I met in Jerusalem took this argument further, contending that jihad has nothing whatsoever to do with war because jihad is nothing more than the personal struggle to be good. "Treating me with respect is jihad," he said. "Not ripping me off is jihad." The Quran, he added, never even mentions war.

But the Quran does mention war, and it does so repeatedly. One Quranic passage commands Muslims to "fight," "slay," and "expel" in the course of just two sentences (2:190–191), while another says that fighting is "prescribed . . . though it be hateful to you" (2:216). Whether it is better for a religion to largely ignore war (as the Christian New Testament does) or to carefully regulate war (as does the Quran) is an open question, but there is no debating the importance of the themes of fighting and killing in both the Quran and Islamic law. So while it is incorrect to translate jihad as "holy war," the plain sense of this struggle in both the Quran and contemporary Islamic practice is both spiritual and military.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“The Second Noble Truth is more hopeful: suffering has an origin. Everything in this world is interdependent, linked in a great chain of cause and effect, so suffering must come from somewhere. Buddhists identify twelve links in this chain of “dependent origination” (pratitya-samutpada) but the key links are ignorance, thirst, and grasping. We suffer because we close our eyes to the way the world really is. We pretend we are independent when we are really interdependent. We pretend that changing things are unchanging. And we desperately desire the world and the people who populate it to be as we imagine it (and them) to be. And so we suffer when our spouses take up new interests, or when our favorite (and perfect just as it was) old-fashioned ice cream store puts up a ridiculous Web site with a stupid new logo, or when the brand new T-bird we are proudly driving home from the Ford dealership is hit by a rock thrown by a six-year-old kid who would go on to write this book (true story). We suffer because we desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our suffering. We suffer because we cling to beliefs and judgments, not least beliefs in gods, and judgments that this friend or that enemy is morally bankrupt. Today “you have changed” is an explanation one lover gives to another as she is walking out the door. In Buddhism, “you have changed” is a description of what is happening every moment of every day. The”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“На социальном уровне даосизм представляет собой бунт земли против города, деревенского юга Китая против урбанистического севера. И на земле, и в своих телах мы находимся дома. Мы становимся собой в наименьшей степени, когда наши тела вынуждены передвигаться по городскому бетону и асфальту, и в наибольшей – когда мы бродим в окружении гор.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“14 из 100 наиболее влиятельных личностей 20-го века по версии журнала Time – евреи, в том числе кинорежиссёр Стивен Спилберг, автор дневника Анна Франк, «человек столетия» Альберт Эйнштейн. Ещё успешнее евреи завоевывали Нобелевскую премию: на их долю пришлась почти четверть премий с тех пор, как в 1901 году они были вручены впервые. Всякому, кто надеваю джинсы Levis, потягивает капучино в кофейне Starbucks, проводит ночь в отеле Hyatt, включаю компьютер Dell или ведёт поиск в Google, следует благодарить предпринимателя евреев.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Иудаизм начинается с предания и заканчивается им же. Если христианство – это в значительной мере учение, ислам – ритуал, то иудаизм – повествование. Быть иудеем – значит рассказывать и пересказывать некую историю, ломая голову над её ключевыми символами: такими персонажем, как Бог, народ Израиля, а также внушающими беспокойство отношениями между первыми двумя.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“What is required in Judaism is not to agree, but to engage. According to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, “If a Jew has no one to quarrel with, he quarrels with God, and we call it theology; or he quarrels with himself, and we call it psychology.”8 It was a Jew, Albert Einstein, who proved via the theory of relativity that even scientific observations depend on your perspective. Another Jew, American philosopher Horace Kallen, coined the phrase cultural pluralism and with it the metaphor of civilization as an orchestra in which differences in religion, language, and art can enhance social harmony rather than undermining it.9 In what might seem like the cacophony of yeshiva training, Jews hear a symphony.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“We are least ourselves when those bodies are stuck in the concrete of a city sidewalk. We are most ourselves when walking through the mountains.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Muslims took Jerusalem from Christians in 637 C.E., Crusaders took it back in 1099, Saladin seized it on behalf of Islam in 1187, and the British recaptured it on behalf of Christianity in 1917.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“Before I came to describe myself as religiously confused, I thought I had the answers to the big questions. I now know I didn't even have the questions right.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter