Guess who said this?
In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.
Well, it could have been any number of Sophisticated Theologians™, but you’re right if you guessed Karen Armstrong, the ex-nun who has been lavishly honored for explaining that God isn’t “real” in the sense that most people think. Ironically, she has laid out her apophatic thesis—that one can’t say anything meaningful about God—in a string of books. (By the way, she wrote the above bafflegab in a Wall Street Journal printed debate with Richard Dawkins, which is worth a read.)
If you know Armstrong, and you know that she’s about to come out with a new book that looks like this (click on screenshot to go to Amazon listing; book out Oct. 28), you can guess what it will say:
That’s right: her thesis is that religion has almost nothing to do with creating violence—it simply absorbs violence whose causes are social or cultural. Even the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t really about religion. Sound familiar?
Of course it will sell well, for Armstrong has done quite well for telling believers and faitheists what they want to hear, whether it be that it’s useless to look for evidence for God, that Islam is a religion of peace, and now that religion has never been a cause of violence.
And yet there’s already a negative review in the Telegraph by someone who is not at all a fan of atheism or a critic of religion, but still has enough integrity to see through shoddy arguments. The reviewer is Noel Malcolm—Sir Noel to you—scholar, journalist, and author. And Malcolm, who has no great love for Dawkins (why is Richard even mentioned in this piece?), at least has no truck with the idea that religion births no evils. A few snippets (more than usual because I savored this review):
First, the obligatory Dawkins-dissing, just to show that Sir Noel is on the side of the angels:
‘Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. We thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11 changed all that.” So said Richard Dawkins, who until his retirement enjoyed the title of Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Some of us began to wonder whether Dawkins had secretly renegotiated the terms of his job, becoming instead the Professor for the Public Misunderstanding of Religion. To argue that one act of terrorism, however extreme, committed by members of one radical movement proved the harmfulness of all religion was a strange piece of reasoning.
But then on to Armstrong, who gets the brunt of it:
. . . her new book runs from the one to the other, from Gilgamesh to bin Laden, covering almost five millennia of human experience in between. This is both an apologia and a history book, aimed always at supplying the context of what may look like religiously motivated episodes of violence, in order to show that religion as such was not the prime cause.
But what is, or was, religion “as such”? Armstrong argues from the outset that it is impossible to give a clear answer to that question. Writing about ancient Persia, she declares that “a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence; it is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends”. That sounds reasonable enough, but then she makes a much bolder claim. Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion. Ergo, it is wrong to single out “religion” as something to blame. [JAC editorial comment: Oy vey!]
If that were true, it would also mean that you can’t single out religion as something to excuse, or at least partly exonerate. But when she discusses medieval Christian anti-Semitism, for example, Armstrong is quick to say that not only “religious conviction” but also “social, political and economic elements” were to blame. The violence of the Spanish Inquisition, likewise, “was caused less by theological than political considerations”. What was all that about it being impossible to distinguish religious issues from non-religious ones?
The whole idea that no such distinctions could be made in western Europe until the end of the 17th century is, in any case, highly dubious.
. . . When she comes to the present day, Armstrong’s defence of religion seems questionable on other grounds too. She is no doubt right to say that the aggression of a modern jihadist does not represent some timeless essence of religion, and that other political, economic and cultural factors loom large in the stories of how and why individuals become radicalised. Yet she goes beyond that, to suggest that such violence tends always to be a response to provocation or oppression.
The key term here is “structural violence”, which crops up repeatedly in her pages. When Anwar Sadat tried to introduce a free-market economy to Egypt, his policy involved “blatant structural violence”, as it increased inequality and inequity: radical Islamism swiftly followed. “Structural violence” is a bit of a weasel phrase, as it means something other than actual violence. What it seems to imply is a kind of equivalentism between the actions of the state and those of the genuinely violent radicals who seek to overthrow it.
The next paragraph ends with a zinger—the kind of puncturing of pretension I love to see directed at apologists:
Equivalentism is carried one step further in Armstrong’s comments on George W Bush and his response to 9/11. In launching the “War on Terror”, he was displaying the “quasi-religious fervour” of neoconservatism, with its “semi-mystical belief” in “America’s unique historical mission”. “Suicide bombing shocks us to the core,” she writes, “but should it be more shocking than collateral damage in a drone strike?” The answer, surely, is “yes”: the intentional slaughter of people is worse than the unintentional slaughter of them.
But then the obligatory dissing of Dawkins occurs again in the last sentence:
I am all in favour of mounting a sensible defence of religion against the Dawkinsite dogma. But I doubt this is the right way to go about it.
Others can read this book, though I doubt many here will. I’ll save my dosh for, say, Golfing for Cats:
.h/t: Pyers
Apparently Coren was told by the publishers that books will sell well if they have a cover which features either cats, Nazis or golf. He concluded that he could maximize sales if his cover included all three.
Oh, I see this story is already covered by the link provided. Oh well. I’ll go back to lurking.
And the, sadly, late Alan Coren shows more intelligence and wit in a single paragraph than Armstrong has in a lifetime. Coren is strongly recommended.
You forgot sharks!
I think she goes beyond merely osculating the posterior of the faithful to inserting her entire cranium into the colon….
b&
The gist of Armstrong’s argument seem to be that if religion can’t be demonstrated to be the sole cause of something, it can be be excused and if the result was bad, exculpated entirely.
Applied consistently, all of human history is now without cause. Well done.
The argument that these people are all making is that there is no relationship between the philosophy and the outcome.
If that’s true, then what is the point of the philosophy, if not to guide one’s behavior?
L
Excellent point.
But this is exactly what postmodernists claim:
That beliefs do not guide behaviour.
Sam Harris tried to dispel this in the Moral Landscape, if I recall correctly.
Postmodernists are full of bull.
If you want to know exactly what people believe, don’t listen to what they say, observe their behavior.
This is an absolutely foolproof strategy. L
Linda’s point isn’t necessarily directed at postmodernists. Rather, at those who would argue that in order to determine the moral merits or demerits of any given action you need to adopt this or that philosophy (Buddhism, Xianity, Confucianism, etc).
Religious moralists who agree with Armstrong contradict themselves.
The question is not whether beliefs guide behavior, but the more specific one of: do religious beliefs lead to violent behavior (an apologist might reverse that and assert that religious beliefs lead to less violent behavior).
I think the general empirical answer is “no.” There seems to be little to no correlation between religious belief writ large and either better or worse behavior in general. There are certainly exceptional sects: ISIS being a prime example of a sect correlated with violence, and perhaps the Amish or Mennonites being a prime example of a sect where the correlation runs the other way. But as a general concept, religious belief doesn’t seem to correlate with better or worse morality/ethics in the general population.
This is a good thing for nonbelievers, because it points to no mystical or supernatural effect of becoming a believer. Example: what does baptism do? Well it gets your head wet, but other than that, there is no indication it results in a better or worse person. “No behavioral correlation” is exactly what we would expect if religions had no fundamental truth to them.
There’s ample evidence that religious belief does not improve morality, so it’s not even a case where the religious right can at least fall back on equivalency. There’s good reason to believe that atheism doesn’t lead to better morals for both the reasons spelled out in the linked article and for the fact that the idea of not believing something could improve your morals seems absurd.
That is, until you look at specific beliefs: Not believing that flying jetliners into a skyscraper will provide you eternal paradise with 72 virgins will tend to have a positive effect on one’s consideration for flying jetliners into buildings. Likewise, holding such a belief sincerely just may lead you to kill people indiscriminately or blow yourself up in a marketplace. Naturally, religion writ large doesn’t cause these behaviors because the wide array of beliefs out there.
Religion can also cause some people to act morally; e.g., theists who help the poor thinking that this will ultimately gain them an eternal reward. Dawkins’ point is that there are good secular reasons for doing anything good that religion will drive one to do, and there are no good secular reasons for wreaking havoc on a global basis trying to establish theocracies. September 11th demonstrated that all religion cannot simply be dismissed as harmless fantasy. As Steven Weinberg said, “With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
Agree with your point about specificity. Also agree in large part about ‘no good secular reason’ for much religious violence. But Weinberg is wrong. For me, Stanly Milgram’s experiments showed pretty definitively that good people can do evil things without religion. It just takes the right context and an authority figure they recognize as legitimate. Heck, given Migram’s experiments, I could just as easily paraphrase Weinberg to say “…But for good people to do evil things, that takes a guy in a white lab coat.” Because that’s almost literally all it took for the good people in Milgram’s experiments to do evil. Is my paraphrase unfair to science? Yes, it is. And what does that unfairness tell you about Weinberg’s original comment, about religion? Unfair also, right? Yes, a holy book or the guy in the mitre can cause good people to do bad things. That’s because those things are symbolic sources of authority, NOT because there is anything uniquely evil-causing about holy books or mitres.
You’ve demonstrated a problem that’s nearly ubiquitous with all quotes that are useful as sound bytes for larger point. Yes, it would be unfair to apply Weinberg’s quote to everything that can qualify as a religion. It would also be unfair to apply it to science as a whole. However, there are a couple more points about Weinberg’s quote that I think make it a little less unfair that you’re stating.
1) He was almost certainly referring to Abrahamic religions and the history of evils which were either justified by religion or caused directly by it. Of course, you are correct to point out that all it took in Milgram’s experiments was a guy in a white lab coat, but the common thread between that experiment and religion was the subject’s trust in an authority figure. In the experiment, many of the subjects continued, despite high feelings of discomfort, when repeatedly reassured what they were doing was okay. Like many religions, they had to repeatedly go against a trusted authority figure (along with reassurances about what they were doing) in order to break away.
2) One could draw a parallel between the supposed greater good of helping science advance and religion’s stated greater good of pleasing the ultimate authority figure and gaining what is supposedly the greater good in an eternal afterlife. This parallel is somewhat weak, as the experiment contained no obvious benefit anywhere near the scale of eternal paradise, but the pain the subjects believed they were inflicting on others was comparably low on the scale of suffering when compared to burning people at the stake or blowing up buildings full of innocent people.
So perhaps Weinberg’s quote would work better if he replaced “religion” with “repeated manipulation and misplaced trust in an authority figure combined with sufficient peer pressure to go along with group think,” but it would surely be less memorable and useful to demonstrate a larger point. These features are common throughout many Christian sects as well as Islam and Milgram’s experiment presents a nice microcosm of these features. Religion often adds another element of real or imagined punishment for going against the group. I will agree that any ideology that rules out critique and yields to an absolute authority can also cause good people to do bad things. I would argue that these ideologies, if not full blown religions, are at least religion-like in their dogmatism and practice.
If that’s true, then what is the point of the philosophy, if not to guide one’s behavior?
That’s the point of some philosophy, but it doesn’t mean that it actually works. It’s well-known that there is often a big discrepancy between a person’s stated beliefs and his actions.
What they state doesn’t tell you anything. What they do tells you everything.
In psychology, the term congruence refers to the distance between one’s statements and one’s actions. High congruence tells you something , low congruence tells you something else. L
So, Ms. Armstrong’s (and others’) apophatic theology says that we can’t say anything about God/god/gods.
Pardon me for flunking Sophistimicated Theology 101™, but isn’t that saying something of considerable import about God/god/gods?
This sentence say nothing about sentences.
All Cretans are liars.
Therefore, Ms. Armstrong is a cretin.
What I find fascinating is that those who claim that nothing can be said of the gods are often the ones who say the most about them. And, of course, similarly, those who most vigorously profess the limitless powers of their gods are the ones who claim limitless exceptions to said powers, those who claim their gods’s minds are unknowable describe the gods’s innermost thoughts in intimate detail, and so on.
A good working definition of a god is as a rhetorical device for shameless hypocrisy.
b&
And, the people who claim that nothing can be said, say that at length and expect people to pay them money for their books.
No irony there, eh? L
I guess I must be a simpleton but I would expect a conversation to be over at the point someone declares nothing can be said about a subject.
Indeed and Ms Armstrong has written about the unknowable at exhaustive length! “The History of God” was one of the most disappointing books of my life, 500 pages of decreasing knowledge of the divine. There is no obvious way to distinguish this woman from and atheist, but that doesn’t slow her down at all.
Curiously, I have a former-fundamentalist friend who credits The History of God with making him an atheist (he is nonetheless still deeply in the closet). As with many fundamentalists, he’d never really heard the arguments of the historical critics for how the Bible was written and put together over time (he assumed that even atheists agreed that some guy named Moses wrote the first five books, etc.), so Armstrong’s review of this material came as a revelation to him. He likened it to waking from a dream, or seeing a Necker cube shift: suddenly, and irrevocably, so that he could never see the Bible as anything but an accretion of people and not the Word of God. This is not a triumph for accommodationist writing. The bones she throws to religion went totally unnoticed by my fundamentalist friend. Whatever space she leaves for religion is, to the fundamentalist mind, still total annihilation of their world view.
The Journal editors saw fit to close their description of the two-author essay with, “Neither knew what the other would say.” However, Richard’s last two paragraphs indicate that he know exactly what Karen would write…and, for that matter, Karen’s entire half demonstrated that even she didn’t know what she was trying to write….
b&
I see Armstrong is still following her old recipe (which happens to be the same as Ecklund): hand-pick a few facts then claim they support your thesis when they clearly oppose it. I guess there must be an audience of people who like to read such nonsense because it matches how they imagine the world to be and they find it comforting. What luck for Armstrong.
The gullible leading the gullible.
The Oprah approach to writing books.
Karen Armstrong’s “A History of God” is one of the best arguments for atheism.
It was a popular book among atheists when it came out.
Still it gets some of the history of Judaism dead wrong, naively assuming the Biblical timeline is largely correct and there is some basis for the Genesis stories.
From the review, it seems she has continued to get some history dead wrong. Asserting that people before 1700 couldn’t distinguish…that’s absurd! Its like she’s basically ignored the historical existence of ecclesiastical courts in Europe. Of course they could distinguish: the whole separate court system would never have sprung into existence if her thesis was true.
Evidently, Ms. Armstrong can walk into a donut shop where they sell crullers on the left and boston cremes on the right, and declare that nobody distinguishes between crullers and boston cremes. Didn’t the different boxes and labels give you a clue?
Having read it I assumed she was an atheist herself. In fact I still think she is, she just doesn’t want to believe that death is the end.
You assumed correctly. She clearly believes God is a man-made human construct. She just puts a positive spin on it.
As I mention above, I have a good friend who credits his atheism to it. Speculatively, the title might make it a suitable trojan horse in certain circles. People who would find owning a copy of “God is not Great” a huge social stigma could, perhaps, sneak a copy of “A History of God” in under the radar.
They claim ownership of morality, yet want to disown it’s “evil” twin violence – who knew!
This strikes me as a dishonest interpretation of Dawkins’ argument.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire.
One act of terrorism illustrates the broader point. Religion, in insisting you believe nonsense leads to the sort of crazy thinking that causes terrorism.
That was my reaction also. I construe Dr. Dawkins statement as that prior to 911 one might see all religion as harmless, but now one cannot (see all religion as harmless). Malcolm twisted that into “all religion is harmful”. This is demagoguery.
That was my immediate reaction also.
Armstrong: “Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones.”
Yes they were: Josephus claimed that he coined the word ‘theocracy’ in the late 1st century CE. The idea behind the pre-Julian Roman state? The ‘res publica’ – the public thing, the Republic. What is she on about?
Btw. the opposite of apophatic is cataphatic – true! Go for it, Jerry!
Slaínte.
What about, “Render unto Caesar…” etc.? L
‘Sir’ Noel Malcolm (btw. as a reasonably informed Brit, I have never heard of him): “But what is, or was, religion “as such”? Armstrong argues from the outset that it is impossible to give a clear answer to that question… That sounds reasonable enough, but then she makes a much bolder claim. Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion.”
I do agree with Armstrong that it is difficult to define religion. But one thing that religions have in common is the presentation, within a set of self-defined rules, of a parameter of behaviours which produce a ‘good’, contemporaneously or later defined as religious – and the ‘good’ could be ritualistic, ethical, theological or philosophical, or subliminally ‘for reasons of state’. In all cases, a lunge for influence over others, and always on the basis of what you do not, and cannot possibly, know.
E.g. Ritualistic – classical Greek festivals, early Judaism, Mithraism; ethical – Middle Judaism, early Christianity; theological – Augustinian Christianity, Lutheranism; philosophical – Confucianism, Buddhism; reasons of state – Augustus’ restoration of religion, the god-building of the French Revolution, Comte and Gorky.
In short, Marx got it right in his critical mirror-image of Armstrong’s benign interpretation – that the people (and for Marx ‘the people’ were the non-proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy) may have been simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones: it is the opium of the people. As usual, Marx points out, things become much, much worse when the state promotes a wrong idea.
Slaínte.
Even on her own terms, the argument is curious. If people couldn’t distinguish matters, then it is presumably correct to say the Inquisition (or whatever) *was* religious to the people at the time too, since they couldn’t tell mattesr apart.
“Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion.”
Isn’t that the definition of a theocracy?
Armstrong lives in a fantasy world as do nearly all of the religious and they are the only ones who could believe this nonsense.
The real danger is when our politicians believe it as they do. Then we are all in big trouble. Bush’s war in Iraq was at least partly a religious inspired war because he received guidance and instruction from god to do it.
The irony is that she is not religious herself. She just likes religion.
Once again an author tries to thread the eye of a needle by exonerating religion from our evil ways.
Do not exhortations for violence in the various religious texts provide a hint that religion might, oh, actually motivate people for especially murderous varieties of violence? I can tick off a good number of genocides over the past century. Are those not ‘overkill’ for the purpose of winning an election or ceding territory? What would religiously motivated violence look like? [Sarcasm mode activated]: Hmmm…gosh, I dunno. I guess I have never seen it. Lol — but not really.
Anytime an historian (or a person writing about historical events) decides to reject the avowed motivations of people as their true motivations, there is an extraordinary evidentiary requirement. One must show on a case by case basis that the actors purposefully adopted a false position. It is not enough to show that there are possible, alternate causes. Armstrong would have to show that all of these religious people made their religion an excuse for murder. What would that really say about the history of religious belief?
Guess who said this?
I went immediately to David Bentley Hart, which shows how interchangeable they are.
As a note to JC and anyone rifling through these comments, I started reading Hart’s latest book back in March and I still haven’t finished it, to give you an idea of the tedious, painful drudgery that Sophisticated Theology is for me.
Sub
We make fun of them but they’re laughing all the way to the bank. Sometimes I spend 16, 24, 36 months researching a single painting (for a pittance-ish, in EU terms, anyway), they write god-ell-dee-gook and abracadabra- Rick Warren is on the NYT bestseller list. Some days I wake up and wonder if I shouldn’t just pretend to see the virgin mary on my toast, I’m sure that would be much more commercial than what pigments were used in X period.
Monet’s too tight to Titian.
Slaínte.
I’ld much rather have humanity filled with a minority of interesting people who take the time to actually research something meaningful like art, rather than fill spaces of banal books with circuitous arguments that evaporate meaning from religion rather than reinforce it…not that I think religion is reparable.
That’s exceedingly kind! Unfortunately I read the other day that a mega-church pastor can make up to $600,000 per year- and I’m still not over it.
That means real education and work is worth less than whatever it is those people do. I don’t mean to sound bitter, because I’m not, I live a perfectly comfortable life, even more than that; It just seems off that hoojie-pusher salaries can be so much higher than those of us who have to be competent and accurate and correct 100% of the time.
If I make a bad judgement tomorrow and wrongly attribute something, I’ll be tarnished forever more. In fact I could be blacklisted if the mistake was grave enough. Meanwhile they can do and say anything they want, even that god wants you to deodorize yourself with Lynx and get away with it… There’s something wrong with this scenario.
If Karen Armstrong and Deepak Chopra were ever to be in the same room, I fear such a quantum fluctuation would create a vacuum bubble that expands through space at the speed of light, wiping out the universe.
The collision of incomprehensibility and irrationality? You could be right….
b&
Or perhaps that’s how one creates a new
hubble volume!
sub
This seems to somewhat conflict with what Armstrong wrote in her book “Battle for God” which is a polemic against fundamentalism. There she contends there are rival conceptions of deity and religion, and that the fundamentalist approach is a bad one, and the approach that views scriptures as symbolic metaphors for the inevitable is better.
It’s not all bad, but she is over the top on blaming the scientific revolution for the rise of fundamentalism (there is some truth to that but she overstates it), and over the top in claiming the “correct” reading of religion is based on harmony with the Golden Rule.
She also neglects the degree to which power-mongering and money are corrupters of religion just as much as scriptural literalism.
she is over the top on blaming the scientific revolution for the rise of fundamentalism (there is some truth to that but she overstates it)
I don’t see how there could be any truth to that. If she’s talking about the publication of The Fundamentals and the protestant movement surrounding them, that occurred in 1910 – long after the scientific revolution. If she’s using the term in the more general sense of ‘strict adherence to doctrine,’ then there were fundamentalists running around Europe long before modern scientific methods and practices had been standardized.
And today’s fundamentalists are really pretty milquetoast. No, I don’t like the fact that they want to debase our science education. But how can you call fundamentalism a ‘rising’ force when the church used to conduct massive holy wars over doctrine and burn heretics at the stake, while today the best official actions it can take is to make campaign contributions and publish nastygrams as Op-Eds in the press? By objective measures, I think fundamentalism as a fore is falling. There may be many people today to call themselves fundamentalists, but they don’t kill their kids or burn witches in anywhere near the numbers their fundamentalist ancestors did.
“Even the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t really about religion. Sound familiar?”
Well, to be fair, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Um, why is there a swastika on the hole flag behind the cat in that book cover?
Since I don’t do golf or cats, this may be some inside joke I don’t understand, but since nobody has mentioned it either here or on the linked page, I pose the ? just to show I’m paying attention.
Take a look at the first post.
Christian Burnham
Posted September 21, 2014 at 1:59 pm | Permalink
Apparently Coren was told by the publishers that books will sell well if they have a cover which features either cats, Nazis or golf. He concluded that he could maximize sales if his cover included all three.
Ah, thx. I just searched the comments for swastika and came up empty, so figured it must not have been commented on.
No, I’ll pass on this one. I gave “The Case for God,” a go, but got a headache several times trying to figure out what she was even talking about throughout the book, and still didn’t know when I finished it. It also seemed completely different from any kind of religion I was exposed to growing up in a Christian environment.
It is different from any religion that anyone remembers being exposed to because it simply doesn’t exist. Armstrong’s concept of religion exists entirely in her head. It is not, in fact, actually practiced by anyone, anywhere.
With “Blood” in capital and bold.
Sir Noel Malcolm is an historian who is very much embedded in the British establishment as his knighthood shows. Anyone who wishes to acquire a knighthood had better not be caught dissing on religion. It will not have escaped notice that Charles Darwin was the only scientist of his era and importance to have died without some kind of ennoblement. By his scientific eminence he was entitled to a Barony at least. He should have been a lord but he died a mere mister because the religious establishment did not approve of him.
Richard Dawkins, being no fool will no doubt have abandoned any hope of a lordship on the publication of “The Selfish Gene”. Sir Noel has no intention of allowing a similar ignominy to befall himself. Hence the pandering to the church.
I’d not thought about Darwin in those terms, but it makes a lot of sense.
Karen Armstrong writes a lot of books. And they are very abstract and wordy, seeming to flow past the reader’s brain like elevator ‘music’. I coined, or stole the phrase ‘Exponential Error Dispersion’ from science, to describe the verbal diarrhoea of Armstrong, WLC and others. Their writings and speeches come about because having assumed one fat lie (that the world was formed and is run by supernatural creatures) they are obliged to pile further lies to explain-away the original lie, and to reconcile the lie of religion with experiential knowledge of the world and its processes. Each lie required two or more to cover it. It is a desperate business.
Exponential Error Dispersion refers to the cosmological or meteological circumstance that in any closed system the errors build-up rapidly leading to extraordinary consequences, sometimes called ‘The Butterfly Effect’. In religion it means that a few ‘harmless’ lies justifying a belief in gods rapidly leads to great ice-palaces of lies, placing the poor hapless liar among those with serious mental health issues in expressing things that provoke scorn and laughter.
Should we send out search parties armed with some logic and an all-embracing confidence of a happy life without the need to cringe from angry gods? Could we tell Karen and William that it’s all right to come home now. There are no angry gods, and that they will not be punished for the ‘sin’ of escaping from Bronze-Age traditions? The deconversion rate in the USA is a great comfort. I suspect that WLC is rapidly reaching a deconversion event all by himself. Already he sees that a great gulf has opened between himself and the evangelists who are denying evolution. Come home, William Lane Craig and Karen Armstrong, and the atheists will probably be kind to you! (But not Ben, 😉
Did anyone watch the 60 minutes special on ISIS last night? It’s hard to square with this book’s premise.
(Although I admit to not having read it)
I read Golfing for Cats when I was a kid, in an edition with a swastika on the cover.
Maybe Armstrong is right. If you define religion as “something ineffable that doesn’t cause violence”, then….
Eating the wrong kind of wild mushroom is more likely to take the (liver, then the) life of the majority of people on the planet than anything religion does.
What is Armstrong defending? What are all Sophisticated Theologians defending? Here, Armstrong is proposing an argument: religion may or may not be responsible for an awful lot of violence in our history.
Arguments aside, does Armstrong have a God in mind that matches reality, one that provides purpose and has a modicum of empiricism?
Sophisticate Theologians need to focus their attention on two things first:
What is God? and What is a transcendent life?
These subjects must feel like dead weight to Sophisticated Theologicans, but they are critical if their attempts to argue anything else can have meaning. It is like watching an attempt to overturn all of thermodynamics without having a clue about contributions from Maxwell or Boltzmann.
While I completely agree this book’s thesis is rubbish, I wonder…
I have an idea: Perhaps not everything done in the name of religion IS religious. However, that being said, the very idea of religion is still the Cause of it. I’ll explain.
Let’s say I hated Hipsters. If I can wrangle some scripture up that appears to say that Hipsters are rotten, then I can launch a “godly campaign” against them. While people would have rightly called me a nutter for going after Hipsters for “normal” reasons, when you get religion involved then suddenly nothing can be questioned, for “god wills it!”.
Yes, the Inquisition was obviously religious, and ISIS is obviously religiously motivated, don’t think I’m saying otherwise…but even for those times when religion isn’t the REAL reason for the violence, it still facilitates the violence by making it unnecessary to explain the motivation rationally…b/c you cannot question Mr. Deity!
Everyone knows cats don’t play golf! How ridiculous! They are too busy painting.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Cats-Paint-Theory-Aesthetics/dp/0898156122
I have that book. It’s hilarious and a must for all ailurophiles!
I’m not one to deny the existence of religiously-inspired violence, and I have not read Armstrong’s books (and don’t plan to), but I have to say that there is indeed something to the theory that a lot of “religious violence” is in fact cultural violence that is absorbed by religion. The practice of honor killings, which is often blamed on Islam, can also be seen in non-Muslim populations of the Middle East, which tells me that it predates Islam and is therefore more cultural than religious.
This isn’t to say that there is no such thing as truly religious violence, and I find such claims to be absurd. I just don’t believe in this dichotomy that demands all apparently religious violence be either purely religious or purely cultural. Surely there is room for an interaction of the two and for each to sometimes subsume the other.
Religion is part and parcel of culture. They can’t be separated. One reflects the other.