Something called 'the Oklahoma Standard' became known throughout the world. It means resilience in the face of adversity. It means a strength and compassion that will not be defeated.

I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.'

I was raised Jewish my wife was raised Catholic. Though we respect each other's heritage and while many of our friends are deeply religious we have chosen to focus on our similarities not our differences. We teach our children compassion charity honesty and the benefits of hard work.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people and mention how important it is that compassion is the key that it's the sine-qua-non of religion people look kind of balked and stubborn sometimes as much to say what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego their identity.

Whether one believes in a religion or not and whether one believes in rebirth or not there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.

When one has love for God one doesn't feel any physical attraction to wife children relatives and friends. One retains only compassion for them.

Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race to grow and mature.

The super power that I would choose would be compassion. Because that's what I think it takes to make it through life-an understanding a give and take. It saves an awful lot of resentment.