Compassion Is Not A Popular Virtue

There Is A Danger In Monotheism, And It's Called Idolatry. And We Know The Prophets Of Israel Were Very, Very Concerned About Idolatry, The Worship Of A Human Expression Of The Divine.

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.

Jewish, Christian, And Muslim Theologians Have Insisted For Centuries That God Does Not Exist And That There Is 'nothing' Out There; In Making These Assertions, Their Aim Was Not To Deny The Reality Of God But To Safeguard God's Transcendence.

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.

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.