Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being — wh… - Karen Armstrong

Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff:
'When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quiet lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

Every single one of the major traditions — Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms — teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others.

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.