WIE: How do you see us responding to our own pivotal moment in history?

Armstrong: All over the world, people are struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for a very different type of society. They are finding that the old forms of faith no longer work for them; they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find new ways of being religious. Like the reformers and prophets of the first Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new world they have created for themselves.

We have, from the very beginning of our existence as a species, created works of art and created religions to give us the sense that, against all the aggressive and spirited evidence to the contrary, life really does have some ultimate meaning, value, and sacredness. And the notion of the sacred has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to different groups of people at various points in time. If we look at our three major monotheistic religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective “God”; each generation has to create the image of God that works for them. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been discarded and replaced by a new theology. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived.

In that context, atheism takes on a different meaning. Atheism is often a transitional state: Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all called atheists by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. The people who have been dubbed atheists over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine. But is the God who is rejected by atheists today the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics, or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated, but they are very different from one another. Perhaps modern atheism is a similar denial of a God that is no longer adequate to the problems of our time.

WIE: So, we are again at a point when religion and the notion of God, or the sacred, may need to be redefined.

Armstrong: Religion is highly pragmatic, despite its other-worldliness. It should not only transform us, but it should also transform the world. Religion should make a difference. And as soon as it ceases to be effective, it will be changed. So we should be working now to make our religion and our faith effective in this lost, suffering, and terrifying world. But first, before we can make a proper difference, we must transform ourselves. There's a very good verse in the Qur'an where God says, “Therein God will not change the state of the people unless they change the state of their own selves.” And that's what we must do now.

WIE: In what way do you see this occurring?

Armstrong: At this moment in history, I believe that we need a new spiritual revolution. We need a new faith. Now, you can say, “Look, give us a break. This is hardly the time to start a new spiritual revolution. At this juncture, we've got war. We've got the prospect of terrorism. The economy is bad. Let's have a bit of peace and quiet so that we can go up a mountain, collect ourselves, and then begin this spiritual effort.” But suffering, fear, violence, and despair are the prime conditions for such a renewal.

I think the sages and prophets of the first Axial Age knew very well about our destructive potentials. What was happening in their own society was a tremendous shock to them. They had to look into their own hearts, discover what gave them pain, and then rigorously refrain from inflicting this suffering upon other people. In order to counter aggression, they taught their followers to cultivate the habit of sympathy for all living things. They discovered that greed and selfishness were the cause of our personal misery and that egotism imprisoned us in an inferior version of ourselves and impeded our enlightenment.

Our present Axial Age is characterized by globalization. We live in one world, and we have to learn to live with difference, at home and abroad. We have to see that we have very big brains and very puny bodies, and because of our big brains, we've been able to create a technology that compensates for our small size. But we don't seem to have the ability to keep our aggression in check. Unfortunately, as our technological expertise advances, our spiritual wisdom isn't growing up alongside it. Yet that's what we need now in this world that, as we're speaking, is falling apart. We've seen the bombs here in London, on 9/11, in Auschwitz, in Bosnia. We have lost all sense of the sacredness of human life. And that has to be cultivated.

We can't think “God” without thinking “human” now. We can't think “human” without thinking “God.” Because the sacred is not just something tacked on to our natural existence. It's no longer something out there. The sacred must be that to which we all aspire. It must become, in the best possible sense, deeply natural to us. It should fulfill our being so that we can all, as the Greek Orthodox said, be like Jesus even in this life, if we live right, in this certain way.

During the first Axial Age, the great sages worked at this. Everyone was prepared to be creative and spend as much time on this as people spend today on discovering a new computer. And that requires discipline. But we've lost the sense that spirituality is hard work. It is often turned into a commodity to make us feel good. But it isn't just wandering lonely as a cloud and hoping you'll see a clump of daffodils to enthuse about. I believe the Dalai Lama was reduced to tears when an American audience asked him how they could get instant enlightenment. He hadn't realized things were that bad. So we have to make a constant effort of imagination, which is the great religious faculty. As Sartre says, “The imagination is the ability to see what is not present, what is hidden.” We must exercise this faculty fully, whereby we apprehend, in a new way, the inscrutable and ever-elusive divine.