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Karen Armstrong Karen Armstrong excuse me one of the most provocative original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world is a former Roman Catholic nun who chose to even British convent while pursuing an undergraduate degree in modern literature at Oxford where she went on to do graduate work on Tenison. In 1982 she wrote a book about her seven years in the convent. Through the narrow gate in her more recent memoir the spiral staircase she discusses her personal travails and her path to becoming an author of books on the great monotheistic religions. Ms. Armstrong has written more than 20 books around the ideas of what Islam Judaism and Christianity have in common and around their effect on world events including a magisterial history of God and Holy War and the Crusades and their impact on today's world. Armstrong has written numerous articles as well for the U.K.'s Guardian and other publications. She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers PBS series on religion. She has addressed members of the

U.S. Congress and she was one of three scholars to speak at the United Nations first ever session on religion. In February of last year she called for a council of Christian Muslim and Jewish leaders to draw up a Charter of Compassion and interfaith initiative that was awarded a 2008 TED prize of her new book The Case for God. The Observer writes Karen Armstrong is one of a handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion as in so much of the rest of her hugely impressive body of work. Armstrong invites us on a journey through religion that helps us to rescue what remains wise from so much to so many no longer seems true. And bookless comments. That a case for God in registers at once is a classic of religious and world history. An Episcopal bishop Reverend John Bryson Chane writes the same book. This is a

book that is so well-researched and so deep within sight and soaring scholarship that only Karen Armstrong could have read it. Please welcome Karen Armstrong. Thank you very good to be back in Cambridge if only briefly. On route to Texas tomorrow. Now we're talking. An awful lot about God these days and a great deal of the things we say fast sighted because despite our scientific and technological genius brilliance we are out of ideas about religion in general and about God in particular are

often remarkably undeveloped. We often learn about God it's about the same time as we hear about Santa Claus for the first time. And while our ideas of sads of course mature and change over time. Ideas of God about God to often often get stuck and don't develop and mature. For example I know some of you may have me quote this before but it's stuck with me. Something I learned when I was 8 years old in the Roman Catholic catechism and at a grave and it became all my memory. What is God. Was the question and the answer was God is the supreme spirit. Who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections now at eight years old that didn't mean much to me and I still find it a rather pompous and airy definition but after about 20 years of

studying the world religions not just Judaism Christianity and Islam but more latterly Buddhism Hinduism and the Chinese traditions. I've come to the conclusion that that definition is incorrect because it takes it for granted that it's possible simply to draw breath and define a word that literally means to set limits upon a reality that must go beyond anything we can conceive or no now in the pre-modern period and that this is the first part of my book people knew that it was very difficult indeed to speak about God that we really didn't know what we meant when he said that he was wise or intelligent or good. What does it mean to say of a being that God is not only good but goodness itself. We have no notion of what such a being can be in

fact the great theologians by monarchies in the Jewish tradition Ibn Sina in the Muslim tradition Thomas Aquinas said that it was really not possible to say that God existed at all because our notion of existence is so limited that we really can't apply it to God and many of the mystics in all three traditions preferred to call God nothing with a capital N because God was not another being not even the Supreme Being which simply means the bigger and best the last in the series where when we talk about God we're talking about something entirely different. And so why were they so concerned about it because we've got a difficult image of God in the Bible. We've got a highly personalized deity and but of course that's not the end of the story that

personalized deity we see in the very early chapters of Genesis. It changes and develops even in the course of the Biblical writings and then goes on and on to be refined upon further and changed in both the in the Jewish Christianne and also the Islamic traditions. But it was a start nevertheless and a good start because the idea of a personalized God does help one to recognize the sacredness of human personality. But it's all too easy to imagine that God as a being like ourselves writ large with likes and dislikes similar to our own so that we ask God regularly to bless our nation and save our Queen and we ask him to we expect him to be on our side in an election or a war. Even though our opponents are

also God's children presumably and the objects of his love and care when the Crusaders went into battle they cried. God wills it when they went into slaughter thousands of Muslims and Jews. Now obviously God will no such thing. The Crusaders were simply projecting onto an imaginary being in their own image and likeness. What all their fears and clothings of these rival faiths and got this God to give these horrible atrocities a seal of absolute approval an inadequate idea of God can do great harm. And that's one of the three. And we see it as we know very well today when Latter-Day Crusaders are doing much the same thing. So I don't the tree does not simply mean bowing down and

worshiping a statue. Idolatry is raising the. What can only be a human idea a human humanly constructed idea and making it absolute. Once you've done that it's very easy to fall into violence and intolerance because that can only be one absolute. And as Paul Tillich pointed out a long time ago. You then feel compelled to destroy or eliminate all rival claimants. So when religion gets violent in the monotheisms that's a very good chance that there's an idolatrous conception of God. But Paul Tillich said also said that a great deal of orthodox theology is often idolatrous to and without necessarily devastating results but how often we hear people not in this church I'm sure but saying that God wills this God loves

that God approves of the other and there's an uncanny resemblance usually between the opinions of the deity and the opinions of the preacher concerned. Again we sort of cut God down to size domesticate the transcendence of God now. So in the very very earliest religious traditions that has that that have come down to us. I'm thinking of for example the in the religions of the Aryans who would eventually inhabit India and Iran. They didn't have. They didn't think of their goals. As absolutes they have a bunch of gods but they were not gods in our sense. They were not omnipotent. They were not omniscient. They had to had like human beings and animals suns and trees and stars.

They had to submit to the order the Sacred Order of the cosmos just like everything else. The only thing that differentiated them from human beings was that they were immortal and it wasn't illogical to think or irrational to think of there might be these imaginary invisible beings because you know there were so many. And in a pre-scientific society there were so many invisible things that had a profound effect on one's life like emotion or wind air disease. You know things that affect one profoundly and which feel that all my shaker beings sometimes but we can't see or pin them down. Quite interesting that very often the word for Spirit in Latin or Hebrew for example is the same as the word for wind. They use that. And these gods were identified very strongly with the Corpuz real things like fire and

and water things and it expressed a sort of holistic sense but that they had some human characteristics expressed people's sense of identity with the natural world and their sense that it was somehow sacred. But that was not the gods were not supreme. They all pointed to an unknown reality which the Indians would always call Brahman. Brahman was what held everything together it was the life that flowed through all things it was being itself you couldn't pin it down. All gods humans and were only manifestations in part partial limited manifestations of Brahman. The ultimate the all it was we can't conceive of the all our minds can only cope with individual beings. Now very early in the tenth century before

Christ the people the Aryans of India developed a sacred competition that would I think become a model of authentic religious discourse. It was called the bra Moji competition and periodically the priests would go out into the forest and there they would make her retreat. And that tells us something straight off that we cannot talk about God in the same sort of logical rational way in which we conduct our ordinary everyday affairs when we talk about God. We must put ourselves in a more receptive frame of mind the sort of freight the kind of mindset that we when we listen to poetry when we open our minds or music and you can actually measure that switch if you have one of these sort of brain wave machines strapped on you when people go into a more receptive mode the brain rhythms change. And so the priest would go off

and put themselves in a more receptive frame of mind more intuitive frame of mind. They need to breathe they do breathing exercises. They'd fast when they were ready they'd come back and the competition would begin. And the object was to find a definition of Brahman and the challenger would is you would give out a what he thought was a poetic learned definition of of Brotman very elliptical strange but he thought that's got it. And then the others would listen and they'd have to respond to that and take it further. You know being even more elliptical but building upon it is pointing out the inadequacies at the same time of that first definition. So they would go on until the winner was the one that reduced everybody to silence.

And in that silence the Brahman was present. The Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions but it became known in the stunning realisation of the importance of speech now in their various ways as I've tried to show in this book The God religions Jewish Judaism Christianity and Islam also develop their own Pramoedya. Not competitions but rituals. That was a ritual and its purpose was not just a sort of silly game. Its purpose was to take you like poetry to the end of speech so that you became aware that you were at the end of what words and thoughts would do our minds our human mind SEGUI very easily into transcendence. We music for example every day confronts us with a mode of knowing that is not dependent on rational empirical thought or proof.

You can't prove what or define exactly what a late Beethoven quartet is about. It's not about anything but it touches one with in lifts one momentarily beyond oneself and it gives us intimations of that transcendence It's a peculiar characteristic of the human mind that we have ideas and experiences that go beyond what we can logically conceive. That's one. And it may be that the desire to live somehow in relation to such transcendence is the defining human characteristic. It's akin to Art. Art does that to you know how it is at the end of the symphony when the last notes die away. And that's often a beat of silence before the applause begins. The a lot of these rituals we're helping you to live in that beat of

silence. Now that's not easy. And religion is hard work and we've kind of forgotten that. And Newton for example said religious discourse should be easy. Thomas Aquinas would have turned in his grave. But it should be easy he thought. And indeed now people pop in for a church once a week sing a few hymns here perhaps hopefully an uplifting sermon and then go back unscathed by the immense demands of the tradition. But it's but religion is hard work and above all religion is depends not on thought but on practice. Now in the modern world and this is another symptom of our religious malaise we sort of have rated especially in the Christian world. It has to be said less so in the Muslim and in the Jewish world. We put a great premium on belief and believing things. In fact we often call religious people

believers as though accepting certain creedal propositions was their main activity. And often you know frankly give when you hear people haranguing the faithful about the nature of faith. It does seem to be their most important activity but the word belief has changed its meaning as the Great had Will Smith former professor of comparative religion at Harvard made it clear in two memorable works the word belief has changed its meaning in the Middle Ages. And in the early AM it meant 11 meant to love to trust to involve yourself to loyalty fealty I accept to my believer said one of Chaucer's nights. That means accept my loyalty accept my fealty. I believe I was related to the German libber beloved. The Latin libido desire and it was a translation of the Greek in pistis which which Jesus

is asking for in the New Testament pistis which means trusting engagement involvement. Jesus isn't asking anybody to believe that he is the Son of God. He is asking for commitment for disciples who will live like the birds of the air and the limits of the field. Who will give all they have to the poor who devote their whole lives to the kingdom and follow Him and live rough with no where to lay their heads. And then it will believe also was a good translation for the Latin credo which comes we think from the word Cordo. I give my heart when St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century made his famous prayer credo ought in telegram I believe it's usually translated I believe in order that I may understand. Now I always thought I took that to mean all my tortured religious

childhood that first I had to force myself to accept all these doctrines believing them. And then as a reward God would give me understanding. But that's not what Anselm is saying at all. Credo or intelligibly should be translated. I engage myself. I involve myself in it so that I may understand and an answer he goes on to say in this prayer and only if I so engage myself will I have any understanding at all. Religion is basically a practical discipline. It's like swimming or driving or you can learn to swim simply by reading a textbook. You have to get into the pool and acquire the knack. A dancer doesn't just saunter onto the stage and immediately become a prima ballerina. It

takes years of dedicated practice day after day hour after hour pain distress on words. But if she succeeds she can learn to move with an earthly beauty and revealing unsuspected capacities of the body that are feats that are utterly impossible for an untrained person and that is what religion is supposed to do by means of the rituals of religion by means of the ethical practices of religion. We develop new capacities of mind and heart in the course of which we are able to sense what God Brahman Tao is. Even though we can never express it logically now today largely because of our scientific revolution we are reading our scriptures or many of us are reading our scriptures with a literalism that is

without parallel in the history of religion. And so before the modern period for example new Christiaan expect stuck with the plain or literal sense of Scripture the great Oregon in the third to second third century said you can not take these texts literally. They are filled with contradictions on every page one takes few pages later you'll find something completely contradicts the text you're reading at the moment. What he says Hourigan that God has planted these things to him force us to go deeper and down Oregon took the plain sense of that and the text of the Bible extremely seriously and he was he was approached it in a very scholarly way. But you said you couldn't stop there in order to make these text speak to us and to have religious value. You've got to go deeper. So first he said you look for a moral sense applying it to your own

lives in a way that the biblical writers would never have thought of because they lived years ago or million that thousands of years ago in quite different circumstances. Then you go on and develop a spiritual allegorical sense coming closer. It was a sort of ascent from the body of the plain text to the spirit of the allegorical sense and sense from body to soul and throughout the Middle Ages in the west right up to the Reformation. Christians literally applied all four. They've developed another sense a mystical sense to each verse of scripture. The rabbis said you cannot you know you've got to move scripture on. And they found they said that every time a Jew confronted the tech sacred text it meant something different because the word of God was infinite and couldn't be confined to a single interpretation you had to engage with the text literally

wrestle with it and make it yield insight that spoke directly to the present not clinging desperately to the past. Now nobody for example ever until about the 70 or 18th century thought of the creation. First chapter of Genesis is a literal account of the origins of life in the ancient world cosmology a creation story was telling us important things about how to live now how we were to be creative in our own lives. It was myths and myth was not something that is not true. That's the popular meaning of a myth today. It was something that had had in some sense happened once but which also happened all the time. A timeless truth something that was continually going on and that reflected the deeper more intangible aspects of our living. So

it and it was primarily therapeutic you'd recite a creation story at a death bed or at the start of a new project or at the New Year when people felt in need of an infusion of those mysterious utterly mysterious powers that had somehow brought something. What we have whirled out of an abysmal nothingness. And it was the object was to tap into that. Now the first chapter of Genesis was seems to have been written in the sixth century before Christ while the Israelites were in exile in Babylon. And it could be read quite easily as a gentle satire on Babylonian religion which must have been balm to the bruised spirits of the exiles and also its vision of a world in which everything has its place and see is here and land is here and there's light here and

darkness there must have been consoling to a displaced people but no one was required to believe it because we know quite well from other parts of the Bible that some of the other exiles preferred an entirely different kind of cosmology much more violent where God was depicted. Yahweh was depicted bringing ordering the cosmos by killing a sea monster like the other middle eastern gods. So and and so the rabbis for example started putting up when later on they thought they didn't like the first chapter of Genesis much so they put back some of these sea monsters and things in their explication of the text. The Cabalists the mystics of Judaism you made every single sentence of the first chapters of Genesis into an allegory that depict secret meaning was an account of the inner life of God and in

the 16th century Isaac Luria a famous Cabalist made up an entirely new creation myth one which bore absolutely no relation to Genesis at all. It was full of explosions and full stops and everything ending up in the wrong place with terrible cosmic accidents and of course this appealed to the Jews of that time because their world had been splintered during the 15th and 16th century as they were being thrown out of one country of Europe after another. Now if someone did that today and started to made up an entirely new creation story there'd be hell to pay. People would say you can say that it's not in the Bible but Liore is creation myth his strange creation story which became real to the people not because they believed it but because they activated it and made it a reality in their lives. Putting it into practice through ritual and ethical practice that

helped them to face their grief and fear and dismay. This became a mass movement in Judaism from Poland to Iran. The only theology in the Jewish world at this time to gain such universal acceptance that in the who can be called. The founder of Western Christianity revered by Catholics and Protestants alike is a major authority said that if a biblical text contradicted science we had to find a new interpretation of that text. And it's a pity he wasn't around today or people didn't remember that. But the example he gave was that people in the in the ancient he said used to think that there was a great body of water above the sky and it

dripped through the clouds and that's how we got rain. Well no one believes that anymore says Augusten. Science has completely disproved that. So we. So we have to find a new meaning for that text and to find an allegory allegorize it do something else with it the scripture and science cannot be in contradiction. They're doing different things. And Calvin and this was common practice right up to the time of the Reformation. There was a blip with Galileo. But. But basically you know at about this same time a bit but you know just on the dawn of the scientific revolution we have Koven of all people and his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis taking to task those that he called frantic persons who are upset about

the findings of the New Scientist because it contradicts Scripture. These people are frantic he said. They condemn what they cannot understand. OK he says the Bible says that the sun and the moon are the largest heavenly bodies. Now scientists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are much bigger than the moon. Well isn't that a great problem says Calvin. The scripture is not telling us anything about science. It is telling us how to live virtuous lives. It's telling us how to get in contact with the divine. It's Mithal it is not telling us how you know. Giving us scientific information. Science Calvin said is very useful and Plez pleasant and it must not be impeded by these frantic persons. If you want to he said to find out about science astronomy or cosmology go elsewhere. And a

lot of people today who are opposing the teaching of evolution in schools are Calvinists. Calvin himself would have not would or would not have agreed with that way of thought at about the same time. Actually about the same time as the Galileo crisis. A weighty cardinal in the Vatican after this Bonomo which went the rounds saying in the Bible the Holy Spirit is telling us how to go to heaven not how the heavens go now. So what happened. Well not it wasn't that religion and science were utterly opposed. The problem was that they fell in love with each other in the 17th and 18th centuries. Newton this claim that he had found definitive scientific proof for God's existence. I thought that would fill dates and Thomas Aquinas turn in his grave. Now he claimed that the solar system with his

towering genius he had uncovered pointed to the existence of an intelligent creator who is just as the Bible said omnipotent omniscient all powerful. And I quote who was obviously very well versed in mechanics and geometry. And Descartes himself developed his own proof and that has been one of Newton's objects he said. Wrote later to a friend and saying you know when I began to devise my system I hoped you know it was my hope that it would work with considering men for belief in a deity using the word belief in its new meaning of accepting a somewhat dubious proposition. The word belief is beginning to change its meaning now. God was essential to Newton's physics. His solar system didn't work without a god to kickstart it.

But of course it was only a matter of time before later generations of scientists found that they could dispense with this god hypothesis that they found natural explanations for both the universe and for life itself. And this wouldn't have mattered a whit had not the theologians and the churchmen become intoxicated with this natural scientific theology and made Newton's God absolutely pivotal to Christianity. And then the evangelicals in it had been a rather a minority pursuit an issue you know and in eight during the Enlightenment. But in the nineteenth century the evangelicals who disliked the Enlightenment enormously clung to Newtonian physics and brought this scientific religion into the mainstream. So when Darwin came along people had lost the old habits of thought and were left without recourse. Dismayed

because they began that God had been reduced to a fact. And once God has been reduced to a fact you've lost the transcendence and you've made an atheism is only a matter of time now. So. What if we call it believe in religion was always what. How do we get it. Well principly buy in and this is not my little idea this is the bedrock position of all the major world faiths by means of compassion. What holds us back from our best selves is ego self-preoccupation that which makes us toss and turn at night thinking how unfair life is when you wake up at 3:00 in the morning as I did thinking how unjust it was that I was on the book tour. I I you know this self self

self that imprisons us in a limited timeframe with compassion you dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put another there all day and every day said Confucius. You practice the Golden Rule which he said was the central thread that ran through all his teaching. Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you and not do it just oh that's my good deed for the day as we often say so that we can then return to our normal lives of selfishness and greed and aggression. No way we do it all day and every day endlessly looking into our own hearts discovering what gives us pain and then refusing under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict pain on anybody else. Rabbi Hillel the older contemporary of Jesus is my favorite Golden Rule story and some who may have heard me say it before. But you know we can hear it often

enough. Pagan is said to have come to the rabbi one day and said that he would convert to Judaism on condition that the rabbi recited the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg and Hillel stood on one leg and said that which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary. And then he said Go and study it. Now go and study it. Men look at scripture in this way. What's the wrath. Early rabbis were trying to do as we see many of them do. I was trying to make the whole of the Torah the whole of Scripture a commentary a gloss on the Gold groom and Augustan made the same point just as he said about science. He said that if a biblical text seems to preach hatred and of course many of them do then you've got to allegorize it and make it speak of charity. Charity was the

major principle of biblical interpretation or should have been of course religious people haven't always been compassionate any more than they are now. People often prefer to be right rather than compassionate and that gives you a nice egotistic below but basically that is the teaching the rituals and doctrines like the Trinity and incarnation as I show in my book where telling us how to activate that compassionate ethos how to apply the the study of God and act it out in our own lives. They were calls to action. Trinity was originally not just a slogan three in one and one in three western people have not really understood it because when they went that people were taught Trinity in the early church in the

Greek church they were introduced to a meditation. It was a meditative exercise not unlike Amandla in which Buddhists try to find their own sacred center. But if you don't do the meditation you're not going to get it. It's just like you when you read the first chapter of the Dowd aging The Tao that is cannot be kept that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. And it goes on and on and on and you'd think very lovely. But why should I believe that you don't have to believe it. You have. That's just the end of the meditation. And if you haven't done the meditation it's a senseless to you as a theorem by Euclid. If you haven't done the working out beforehand and seen how you arrive at that solution. So religion demands practice. It demands compassion. It demands

rituals that involve us and engage us and lift us to a sense of transcendence. I've tried I you know I though I'm reaching but if you time to ask questions. But in the book I've shown how one leading theologian after another always insisted that when we listen to scripture read aloud in church we questioned it and like the romaji a competition made by made yourself aware of the inadequacy of all talk about God not in order to be frustrating but in order to get that beat of silence. Now I'm not claiming before you all jump down my throat that everybody. Did this but what I am claiming is there were always literal minded blockheads around in every generation. But what I am claiming is that this is me. This was not just a little tributary of piety. This was this

was the teaching of some of the major major carriers of the tradition in both in Judaism and Christianity in Islam. And we've lost sight of it today. But if we could reactivate it in a 21st century way it might solve many of our religious problems. Thank you. I have to. Two very easy question. Sure for you One is that your opinion is a result you study. The we referred to in the creation stories both in the Bible and the Koran and the tiger comment on which you think that means and also the concept of God existing or God being manifested as an individual as Jesus and Christianity and Islam. You know God is in me. I

mean God I am God. That type of thing. So is God is God in human. And the we are who we are as we you know let us make man in our own image says God in this Elohim. In the first chapter of Genesis and Allah constantly sometimes says we I think Allaah is using the royal we hear you know where the queen says we are very pleased to be here today. I think when the time is up and. But but I think he's also doing it because he keeps switching pronouns. Have you noticed sometimes it's me sometimes it's sometimes it's your God sometimes it's. So in order to make people keep shifting the way they relate to Allah so that it's as the concept is continually on the move I think that the first chapter of Genesis is God talking to his heavenly counsel.

They you know that there was strong belief in and was in the ancient Middle East in a heavenly Council of divine beings. And originally it seems Yawa was one of the heavenly councils in the God of counsellors in council that the high God's council. But then he sort of ousts and becomes the head of it himself. This idea was very very important to the Prophets. Isaiah sees him with the Caribbean and Serafin you know surrounded by these councils the second Isaiah who constantly sort of speaks of as God imagines God speaking addressing his council and. And I think he's saying now let us make man in our own image. Now later people said aha you know they're really thinking of the Trinity but you know the Trinity is neither singular or plural. Watch that meditation is trying to show

is that God can't be tied down to a number. You know there's only one of me thank God. And there's you know you know there are three people over there or. That's not what God is God is not a being that can be enumerated. And Trinity is one of those attempts to say God lies beyond numbers that you have to do the meditation in order to get to that conclusion. Now incarnation Well of course that has a long history. The the the saying that Jesus became divine and it's conceived of very differently in the West and in the eastern churches in the east the western church is St. Anselm my friend of earlier said evolved the doctrine of atonement that Jesus died to save us from sins and that because he the sin of Adam was so great. Only God could determine because man had committed that

sin it was only just that a man atoned sense. Therefore God had to become man. Well you know the Greeks didn't like that. They found it far too forensic and it's weighing up God thinking like a human being ready. And they say rather wonderfully. First of all that the only finishes. Who is the you know either the hero or the villain of the Council of Nicea depending on how you see it. But he says the only way we can say that Jesus was God is because we do not know what God is. That God is. If you think like the Ariens he said that God is simply a huge large being that of course Jesus can be college two incompatible things called become one. It would be like Arius was imagining you saying God can become

a human being any more said Arthur Neisha. Well he didn't use this simile of course. Then you could cram a whale into a can of sardines. It's just not possible but because there was some incomprehensible transcendence that we find in Jesus we can say that God that God was there. But it said that Jesus. He says it tells us how little we know about God. So and then but then of course that gets Bauder rise too. And then later Maximus the confessor said Jesus is the first full day a fine human being one who is by sort of giving himself solely to others. Getting rid of ego has in that supreme effort of the Cross has been wholly filled and imbued with divinity. And we can all be

like him even in this life. So and Jesus seems to say much the same in the Gospels. You can be like this you know and he says you're all sons of God. But then it gets hard. And so Jesus becomes some kind of divine power. And often the end of the religious quest instead of his he says you know I'm the way rather than the terminus. It's very you know Ibn Arabi also has an incarnational theology in the Muslim world. The Shiites develop it. It's something that humans do and it expresses the fact that God is not something out there. God is also within every single one of us as Brahman is also the atman the self of every single creature the inner self the core of being that makes things grow and develop and that makes you what you are that is a noun that is God that is Brahman. And that's when Hindus

will bow. I was with the Dalai Lama this weekend so I'm very much into doing this. When they. Not that he's a Hindu when they meet each other in order to acknowledge the divinity that they are encountering in the other human being. So we need to revisit incarnation. I think the Christians and also remind ourselves that we can't think God without thinking human too. Our God is within us and we think human without thinking god. I think this question is somewhat related to what you just said about relations between God and humans what do you think of the idea or the contention that God is essentially a human construct. It's not that God created man or anything. But in fact it's just the reverse that man created God. It gave it and it gave God certain qualities and characteristics and then

reified him and held him up for worship. It was a source of explanation or inspiration. Yes indeed. And that's Feuerbach largely as he makes that point but he's right in practice because as Thomas Aquinas makes it clear our ideas about God are human. They can be nothing else. And so and this is also true in the other traditions too in the in Judaism they talk about God and sauf without end. They and they say this after being the ground of God isn't even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud that all that we see are intimations of the divine. And that's what Trinity is saying too. Actually it's saying that there's one divine O.S. ground that we'll never

know. That is transcendent and that is that there are the ways in which we have sort of formulated our experience of that to ourselves. But the trouble was we started with our scientific in our scientific age of saying that the symbol of gods that we had was the fact and that that was that's ruining the whole thing. Language about God can only be an illogical and that that that was what all these spiritual exercises were doing. And once you forget that once you have the reformers saying the Eucharist is only a symbol you've got the arrival of the modern ethos. Because in the pre-modern world as you said what do you mean only a symbol is where you find God just as when you throw a gin and

tonic into a cocktail together she thinks longingly of of all of them you know they become utterly inseparable. But we can and Thomas Aquinas makes it quite clear that our doctrines are manmade they are manmade and Revelation is not giving us a whole bunch of facts about God and the rabbis make this clear. They say you know we have to work on Revelation. And it would change and develop it's not something that happens once we have to be creative about it. So by the Bible they say is not finished just. And we have to develop it just as we do. We've made bread from wheat and flour for wheat and we've made linen from flax. We must make do the same and continue it with with the Bible. So Revelation is not something that happened on Mt. Sinai. It's

something that we by our ingenuity develop because God is in us and guiding us and we've lost that such a wonderful sort of freedom to use our intelligence. And anybody who thinks that religion means you just have to believe a whole lot of stuff and stop thinking should read the early rabbis as an example of that they're sort of iconoclastic view. Have they even changed the words of scripture when it suits them and say don't read this read that and substitute a kind of pun that completely changes the sense. Not for all time but to make the Word of God or dabble in a new way in these particular circumstances and the whole Talmudic spirituality is that every Jew who studies Torah and Talmud is taking part in an endless conversation that began on Mount Sinai. And your views are as valid as Moses.

One more question. Yes. The the concept of God is very broad. That means some very different things to different people ranging from sort of a literalist view in which God is present and acts in the world causes miracles to Dia's view that's more a move to a much more symbolic sense. So I've got a two part question. One is sort of in the context that said the Eskimos have 20 different words for snow that rather than maybe accepting God as a catch all term. But would it. Do you think it would be useful to have a better vocabulary to use different words that distinguish some fundamentally different views. And

the second part is in your own personal view your own understanding. Does that include a god that takes or can take specific actions in the world. OK. Thank you. Thank you very much. Two huge questions and I haven't got much time to answer them I'm sure but thank you. But do we need. I think you know what we've got to learn with all these different ways that people speak about God in different ways. Think about God in different ways. Of course they do because God is infinite and nobody has the last word. And so that when we you know and I don't want to destroy anybody's faith if some people can take that symbol that personal god and find that by talking to him you know they die they get some kind of illumination and help that is fine by me with one condition which is not my condition but the condition of the traditions that it

leads you to become more compassionate and open hearted. I can have faith that moves mountains but if I lack charity it's worth nothing. And that's that that's that's the test of any spirituality throughout the traditions that it leads to compassion after enlightenment. So the Buddha or a man must return to the market place and their practice compassion for all living beings. Going back to the well if it makes you hard and violent and unkind about the beliefs of others then it's probably you've got to worry whether you're not verging on an idolatrous thing here with god endorsing your views. God should open you up. But so I don't think we need to keep inventing new ways of talking about God you know because we feel that he's a very worthy discipline are we care even though we know we must fall silent. We we keep on

talking about God and that's important. But just remember that no one has the last word and that all these multifarious views tell us how impossible it is to sum up God in that kind of definition that I gave at the beginning and to experience and to listen to the inadequacy of that's what some of the spiritual exercises that I've been describing in the book that were helping us to come to that realisation that our words were utterly useless. And since that's a spiritual exercise making you say Oh and as you get it when you when you read a great poem that takes you beyond the confines of speech. In my own life what was it. Well I you see I have a problem

with a sort of god that leaps in and changes things. You know and because they're that awful for you know how how are we to explain these dreadful catastrophes that happened. And you know if we pray for a fine day for the picnic you know somebody else has the storm down the road. You know this is it is God going to change the whole ecosystem. No. But I think you see that this is this again was only symbolic. Look says the Koran up the signs of God's activity in the world. I see that same symbol parable that sort of signals to us but they're not God. Actually they're tweaking strings. I don't think that's again a rather simplistic literalistic Newtonian. I have to say way even though Newton didn't think God would ever intervene once it's kindly set up the whole thing. He could sort of sit back and watch it all going on. But

you know it actually made got to be useless. But he did see God more in this literalistic way and help taught Christians to think the same. But you see I think if we think if we look at the world. I mean some of you may have seen my article in the paper was The Wall Street Journal where if you look at say the whole evolutionary image of all those species dying and perishing on the way to this terrible nature red in tooth and claw and the terrible record is being called A Natural History of pain before you know if there was a plan Divine Plan and God they're doing it all you know woo you have to ask a lot of questions because it was not a very good plan. It all seemed so haphazard. But if you look at it this way and make evolution instead of bothering about you know the sort of Dawkins kind of style things or the fundamentalist style

arguments and if you look at this and look at the pain and let it seep into you it resent this resembles many of the classic Buddhist meditations on the first noble truth that existence is suffering that pain is written into the interstices of life and existence inexplicably. So and that that realisation that fill one that is not comfortable for us and we push it away when ever week at anything. Pain doesn't apply to me but if we let it break our hearts just as if we let the suffering of the world break our hearts then we're on the road to enlightenment because without that red line sation the enlightenments that as I say some called Nirvana aren't who God is simply not a possibility that I accept that vision of suffering because without an understanding of the ubiquity of suffering and the terrible nature of suffering it's impossible to be

compassionate. You can see seal yourself up in positive thinking and tell others to back up to bat. So I think those are kind of the new ways I think that perhaps we should look at science and scripture rather than getting beyond the old artistic mindset. Thank you