If We Could View Muhammad As We

I Think I Get From My Books What Other People Get From Family Or A Relationship Or From Prayer.

It Is People Who Are Violent, Rather Than "religions"; And Since We Secularised Our Politics We Have Had Two Major World Wars, The Holocaust, The Soviet Gulag, And The Atomic Attacks On Hiroshima And Nagasaki - None Of Which Were Inspired By Religion. If We Want To Understand The Dangers Of Our World, We Can No Longer Accept The Old Received Ideas.

Religion Is Not About Accepting Twenty Impossible Propositions Before Breakfast, But About Doing Things That Change You. It Is A Moral Aesthetic, An Ethical Alchemy. If You Behave In A Certain Way, You Will Be Transformed. The Myths And Laws Of Religion Are Not True Because They They Conform To Some Metaphysical, Scientific Or Historical Reality But Because They Are Life Enhancing. They Tell You How Human Nature Functions, But You Will Not Discover Their Truth Unless You Apply These Myths And Doctrines To Your Own Life And Put Them Into Practice.

I Never Intended To Be A Historian Of Religion. My Aim Was To Become A Professor Of English Literature In A University, But I Had A Series Of Absolute Career Disasters And Found Myself Making Television Programs About The Nature Of Religion And About Christian History And Started To Discover About Other Religious Traditions, And That Was An Absolute Eye-opener For Me.

The More Aggressive Our Ideologies Become, The More Aggressive Our Discourse Whether It's In The United States, From Washington D.c., Or Whether It's From Tehran, Or From Some Underground Al-qaeda Cell. The More Aggressive That Discourse Is, The More People Of Moderate Persuasion Have To Organize And Speak A Voice Of Compassion. That Means To Feel With The Other.