Here in America, religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. They've lost the Axial Age vision of concern for everybody.

Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

We are what we are because of the hard work, insights and achievements of countless others.

The early doctrines of the church, even doctrines like Trinity and Incarnation were originally also calls for action, calls for selflessness, calls for compassion, and unless you live that out compassionately, selflessly, you didn't understand what the doctrine was saying.

You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.