Karen Armstrong

[Alex]

Going beyond God
Historian and former nun Karen Armstrong says the afterlife is a "red herring," hating religion is a pathology and that many Westerners cling to infantile ideas of God.
Steve Paulson
30 May 2006
Salon



So what was the spiritual message that rejected violence?

First of all, they all insisted that you must give up and abandon your ego. The sages said the root cause of suffering lay in our desperate concern with self, which often needs to destroy others in order to preserve itself. And so they insisted that if we stepped outside the ego, then we would encounter what we call Brahman or God, nirvana or the Tao.

I take it you don’t like the question, do you believe in God?

No, because people who ask this question often have a rather simplistic notion of what God is.