Karen again

Page 234:
All ideologies imagine an unrealistic and, some would say, an unrealisable utopia.

Page 236:
It is always impossible to obliterate the past, which continues to live on in the minds of its people, even if old institutions and their personnel have been removed.

Without silence, the words about you - however profound they may be - will always skew the reality.

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong in "The battle for God" page 201
It is important that we understand the dread and anxiety that lies at the heart of the fundamentalist vision, beause only then will we comprehend its passionate rage, its frantic desire to fill the void with certainty and its conviction of ever-encroaching evil."
(Come to think of it, this is rather the way I feel about Brexit!)


This amazing book has helped me a lot although not especially because of its lucid and compassionate research into the reasons for the fundamentalist´s point of view. Her emphasis on the gulf between what she terms "mythos" and "logos" is useful certainly, but is it really that simple?

page 233:
During the '60's the youth revolution was, in part, a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational language and the suppression of MYTHOS by LOGOS. . . .
 . . .but because the understanding of such disciplined ways of arriving at a more intuitive knowledge had been neglected in the west since the advent of modernity, the '60's quest for spirituality was often wild, self-indulgent and unbalanced."