I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

Compassion is not an option. It's the key to our survival.

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering.

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.