There Is No Ascent To

Yes, All Fundamentalists Feel That In A Secular Society, God Has Been Relegated To The Margin, To The Periphery And They Are All In Different Ways Seeking To Drag Him Out Of That Peripheral Position, Back To Center Stage.

Buddhists Talk About Nirvana In Very Much The Same Terms As Monotheists Describe God.

Compassion Is The Key In Islam And Buddhism And Judaism And Christianity. They Are Profoundly Similar.

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.

Eventually, With Regret, I Left The Religious Life, And, Once Freed Of The Burden Of Failure And Inadequacy, I Felt My Belief In God Slip Quietly Away. He Had Never Really Impinged Upon My Life, Though I Had Done My Best To Enable Him To Do So. Now That I No Longer Felt So Guilty And Anxious About Him, He Became Too Remote To Be A Reality.