Sea of Faith — Dunedin

“To presume that the conversation about religions starts with Christianity is to show your parochialism, and your age.   The nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have belonged to Christianity.  The twenty-first belongs to Islam”.

“ …. Ignatius Loyola famously pledged, “What I see as white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it”.

“Numbers aside, Islam is the leader of the pack in terms of contemporary impact.  Many Christians render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, restricting their faith to the private realm.  Muslims, by contrast, have never accepted this public/private distinction. Most see Islam as both a religion and a way of life.  This way of life affects how they dress, what they eat, and how they invest, spend and lend their money.  So the religious commitments of Muslims have a huge impact on the world around them.”

“I must admit …  that something in me found all this God-fearing [in Islam] refreshing.   In the modern West there is so much cheap chatter about befriending God that the prospect of fearing God seems almost illicit. What German theologian Rudolf Otto once referred to as the mysterium tremendum has been squeezed out of divinity and with it the prophetic possibility of punishment for those who glory in injustice”.

“Perhaps to understand Islam is not to know but to feel  –  to feel God moving inside you like the energy that animates a dance”.

“Progressive Muslims believe that the struggle for justice lies at the heart of the Islamic tradition.  They also believe that the better angels of Islam have always been on the side of the poor and the weak, and that their tradition’s ancient mandate to defend the defenceless compels them to struggle for gender equality and human rights.  “At the heart of a progressive Muslim interpretation”, writes Safi,  “is a simple yet radical idea:   every human life, female or male, Muslim or non-Muslim, rich or poor, ‘northern’ or southern’ has exactly the same intrinsic worth”.”

“There is an intriguing debate about the niche religion occupies in human psychology and society.   Is religion’s primary purpose to ward off the chill of death?  Many believe this is the case  –  that religions arise and fall largely on how well they address the problem of mortality.  But perhaps death and the afterlife are largely male concerns.   After all, it is men who have done most of the killing in human history.   Might it be that religion’s primary purpose is to make sense not of death but of birth, not of destruction but of creation?  After all, the Jewish and Christian Bibles begin not with the deaths of Abraham or Jesus, but with the creation of the world.  Perhaps where religions really compete is on the question of how to flourish”.