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Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?
Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”
Karen Armstrong’s first book, the bestselling Through the Narrow Gate, described her seven years as a nun in a Roman Catholic order. She has since published numerous bestselling books, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, Buddha, The Spiral Staircase and most recently The Great Transformation. She is a freelance writer and she lives in London.
For Karen Armstrong:
I have read the book and saw your 2008 TED video. Congratulations. As with your other books, this is very equilibrated and I totally agree with your comments on the sad condition and position of Dawkins. (He has become so obtuse that he cannot even consider the possibility of the existence of a reality of the spirit on another plane than the time and space reality!)
Now I have a question: Many of the concepts you advance in this book, I think, are included in “A Course in Miracles”. If you happen to know it, why have you mentioned it?
Take good care so you can continue for many years your wonderful work in favor of joining and sharing by all in all…
Yours,
Armando Brons (1931)
It’s pretty simple: if one makes a claim then one needs to back up that claim. The back up is called evidence.
Resending it because a “NOT” typo omission.
Sorry.
AB
For Karen Armstrong:
I have read the book and saw your 2008 TED video. Congratulations. As with your other books, this is very equilibrated and I totally agree with your comments on the sad condition and position of Dawkins. (He has become so obtuse that he cannot even consider the possibility of the existence of a reality of the spirit on another plane than the time and space reality!)
Now I have a question: Many of the concepts you advance in this book, I think, are included in “A Course in Miracles”. If you happen to know it, why have you NOT mentioned it?
Take good care so you can continue for many years your wonderful work in favor of joining and sharing by all in all…
Yours,
Armando Brons (1931)
Let’s see… I think I’ll opt for God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Christian No More by Jeffrey Mark, Atheist Universe by David Mills…
There are somewhere between 950 and 975 people on the entire planet who believe what Susan Armstrong does–that religion is a symbol and a metaphor and a valuable myth. The remainder are divided between those of us who think religion is an error or a lie and the huge majority who believe religion is *quite* literally, factually, actually true.
J, interesting statistic there. Your number is probably not true or accurate, but it as a symbol, metaphor, and valuable myth gets your point across…
There’s a tendency to disparage people who believe in God as weak, groveling sheep. It’s easier to debunk only evangelical Christianity, rather than Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or the Quakers or Gnostic tradition or Episcopalians. But let us not forget that Western mathematicians Goedel, Newton, Gauss or scholars like Emerson, Kierkegaard, and more had their own particular way of discovering what God meant to them.
Ms. Armstrong’s work is another a scholarly breath of fresh air to people that Christianity is more complex and God was often viewed as more apophatic than paternal deliverer of goodness to your prayers. One of her main points indeed is that both logic and myth have their place in thought, just as reason and emotion have their place in humanity.
If you ever studied advanced mathematics (I mean beyond the standard calculus or linear algebra/diff eq course), there is are places were “logic” becomes less insightful — Russell’s paradox is an example or invoking Zorn’s lemma just to create something as basic as counting (natural) numbers. What does it mean to the mind that there different sizes of “infinity”? Yet Cantor, who formalized set theoretic foundations of all modern mathematics, proved that indeed we do have different orders of infinity.
Read Ms. Armstrong’s metaphor on music and the limits of human understanding of God. Blanket rejection of faith in such a smug, strident attitude is rather sad and unappreciative of the beauty of a free mind engaging in something fully outside the limited realms of “self.”
Yes, there is doubt, but faith without doubt is mere credulity as Kierkegaard posits. Faith is not to simply overcome doubt, but it, like love, transcends rationality. Religion ought to be more than just a set of logical beliefs, as music is more than just notes on a page and dry theory or mere vibrations or life is more than books, theories, and philosophers. The theory came after the experience, to explain and justify and to share.
Ms. Armstrong emphasizes that religion is embodied in practice, in action, in process with something greater than yourself. The existence of God is not so much a falsifiable hypothesis, and the semantics of language obfuscate much communication. Show me where “love” exists. Show me where “music” exists. Show me where “beauty” is. There are many things outside the faculty of logic and language. Be humble and grateful that there is more.
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” – St. Irenaeus
This book is a clear example of how religious people are have begun to cloak their beliefs into something more palatable to a growing population questioning these beliefs. Essentially, an attempt at making us believe that religion is a purely spiritual expression. Unfortunately, when truly pressed if they believe in the dogma of their particular religion, then the answer is inevitably “yes”. By this I am referring to believing in things like the divinity of Jesus, along with his and Muhammad’s physical ascent into heaven, holy authority of the Pope, that the Hindu myths are historically accurate (monkey army building bridges, and the endless superhuman feats covered in the ‘holy’ books).
Ms. Armstrong tries to put forth the idea that religion requires self-discipline and rigor. I have met many ‘believers’ that certainly do live life in this admirable manner. However, religion always requires that a vital exception to this discipline be made in order to accommodate their belief in the supernatural. It is simply an area in their life that they do not emotionally allow themselves to put through the same intellectual standard as they apply to every other part of their lives. As much as we don’t want to admit it, even the most rational human has emotional motivations behind some beliefs and decisions, whether they are aware of this or not.
Johannes, you wouldn’t happen to be a single woman, would you? (Doubtful, given the name, but that ambiguous picture…)
If so, where have you been all my life?
If in fact you are a dude or even a hermaphrodite, same question.
When is your own book coming out?
John
I’ve always found it interesting that those who identify themselves as atheists feel a need to label themselves as such.
Why go to the trouble of calling oneself an atheist, if one weren’t doubting one’s atheism in the first place?
Could it be that “atheism” is just another term for “belief in god”?
I don’t know, but Karen Armstrong’s book looks like its worth reading. I’ll be entering it as a “to read” book on my page at goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/joshhaden
Paul, the disciple of Jesus, made it clear that “the things of God” are foolishness to “man whose breath is in his nostrils,” a metaphore for people void of spiritual discernment. As the philosopher said, “the dancers look like fools to those who cannot hear the music.” In our individual evolution some of us get earlier than others to a point of recognizing an inner need, even a conviction, for something beyond the material and mental. That “something,” by definition, cannot be accessed by an intellectual excercise. That is why, as brilliant as a book can be, it moves only those who already know, even if they seemed to have momentarily forgotten. Thank you to Karen Armstrong for her dedicated work.
Will Christianity ever modify its view on the divinity of Jesus so that all the world’s religions can really share a view of one God? Currently each religion tries to make their view of God “better” than the other views. I feel that if everyone had an “equal” view of God, God would be much more powerful in our troubled world – sort of like the whole elephant instead of just the trunk or the tail.
Johannes – great write-up. I was reminded of “Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter.
Johannes,
I saved your comment to edit on my blog site, http://www.jabmyeyes.com.. I haven’t even read the book yet. I live in a tiny obscure Ozark town and my library is ordering it. Your comment has affected me and I would like to include it in my next blog. I will infuse some of my own commentary in the blog and just know that I’m extraordinarily impressed with your comment.