Paulson asks if the religions of the Axial age developed independently of each other and Armstrong responds to the affirmative. Buddha and Mahavira were both born into the "Hindu" fold, I don't understand how anyone can make the case that the Indic religions of that age did not greatly influence each other greatly...

i admire the scope of karen armstrong's books, but wonder if it's possible to talk about faith traditions w/o sounding like an antrhopologist(?)

Armstrong is very intelligent and her ideas and interpretations are highly thought provoking. I'd like to add my own version of the "i don't know" in the form of what John Keats referred to as "negative capability" - the ability to live in the unknown. We struggle for answers to questions we really have yet to conceive. We have to learn to live in this negative capability as we leap, trudge and shuffle through our lives, to find some beauty in life's ugly truths and to bear our pain and our joy with compassion towards ourselves as well as others.

The issue of whether Adolf Hitler was a Christian, atheist, or neither has been much discussed on the Internet. The arguments are summarized, with proof texts, at http://tinyurl.com/5y7ym

Hitler was a master propagandist and we can't believe anything he ever said, But, we can judge him by his actions.

No one doubts that he was a vegetarian. Obviously, he is the perfect example of the kind of monster you can turn into if you practice the religion of vegetarianism ;-)

(unlike real intellectuals like Richard Dawkins who backs up everything with evidence or dismisses ideas for the lack thereof).

Like, say, his idea of memes, for which there is approximately ZERO empirical evidence, and for which no falsifiable hypothesis to test their validity has ever been proposed?

When Dawkins answers a question like "why do people ask what the purpose of human existence is" by saying "just because you can formulate an English question beginning with the word why doesn't make it valid" (as he did in Salon's own interview) he's being just as nebulous, vague, and semantically nitpicky as you accuse Armstrong of being. Just because you don't agree with somebody's views doesn't mean they are intellectually invalid. And just because somebody agrees with you, it doesn't mean all their views ARE valid. To fail to recognize that is the sign of either a closed mind or a small one. And I say that as what most people would consider an atheist.

Is Karen Armstrong a quiet Muslim now? I get that sense of it.