Compassion Is Not A Popular Virtue

Myth Was Regarded As Primary; It Was Concerned With What Was Thought To Be Timeless And Constant In Our Existence. Myth Looked Back To The Origins Of Life, To The Foundations Of Culture, And To The Deepest Levels Of The Human Mind. Myth Was Not Concerned With Practical Matters, But With Meaning. Unless We Find Some Significance In Our Lives, We Mortal Men And Women Fall Very Easily Into Despair. The Mythos Of A Society Provided People With A Context That Made Sense Of Their Day-to-day Lives; It Directed Their Attention To The Eternal And The Universal.

Every Fundamentalist Movement I've Studied In Judaism, Christianity And Islam Is Convinced At Some Gut, Visceral Level That Secular Liberal Society Wants To Wipe Out Religion.

Theologians In All The Great Faiths Have Devised All Kinds Of Myths To Show That This Type Of Kenosis, Of Self-emptying, Is Found In The Life Of God Itself. They Do Not Do This Because It Sounds Edifying, But Because This Is The Way That Human Nature Seems To Work. We Are Most Creative And Sense Other Possibilities That Transcend Our Ordinary Experience When We Leave Ourselves Behind.

Every Single One Of The Major World Faiths, Whether We're Talking About Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity And Islam, Have All Come To The Conclusion That What Holds Us Back From Our Better Self Is Ego, Selfishness, Greed, Unkindness, Hatred. And It All Springs From A Sense Of Thwarted Ego.

When Violence Becomes Imbedded In A Region, Then This Affects Everything. It Affects Your Dreams, Your Fantasies And Relationships, And Your Religion Becomes Violent, Too.