Reader Colin sent an email that Karen Armstrong was on the BBC this morning. His note, below, got me to listen to the first 15 minutes of the 43-minute show, the part that is pretty much a monologue by Armstrong before other discussants take over. His email:
If you can stomach it, you might find the interview on BBC Radio 4 this morning interesting. In the UK, you can generally get repeats on BBC iPlayer and this one should be here. The programme last 45 minutes, but KA gets the bulk of the first 15 minutes. I only caught snatches of it, but heard her, inter alia, trot out the strawman that all wars are caused by religion, just in order to shoot it down.
A different reader from the UK added this while also calling my attention to the show:
It was a discussion between Karen Armstrong, writer/historian Justin Marozzi and Christopher Coker, chaired by Tom Sutcliffe, a splendid journalist and presenter, although I think he was rather lenient on Armstrong.
Well, if you listen, you’ll hear that Sutcliffe does put her in the hot seat a few times, and even gets her to admit that religion has done some bad stuff (about 8:15).
In the US, you can hear it at the link as well, or just click on the image below and hit “play now.”
It’s pretty much what you expect from the Great Apologist, but her statement “that you can never separate religion from other activities” makes me wonder: she singles out things other than religion, like economics, humiliation, and race, as causes of violence, but somehow religion remains inseparably intertwined with everything else. Religion gets a pass for no obvious reason (except that she’s soft on it).
Somehow, when I listen to her, I’m sensing a machine whose gears are locked in a tendentious output of faith-osculation, a machine that can’t be tweaked. I wish Hitchens were still here to take her on: imagine a Hitchens/Armstrong debate!
The BBC description:
Karen Armstrong argues against the notion that religion is the major cause of war. The former nun tells Tom Sutcliffe that faith is as likely to produce pacifists and peace-builders as medieval crusaders and modern-day jihadists. But Justin Marozzi charts the violent history of Baghdad and asks what role religion had to play there. The philosopher Christopher Coker explores how warfare dominates our history, and argues that war, like religion, is central to the human condition.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
By the way, last night President Obama was interviewed by Steve Kroft on the t.v. show “60 minutes,” and I wrote down two statements he made:
1. ISIS is an “ideologically driven” organization.
2. The members of ISIS “think they can kill someone who doesn’t worship the same God.”
Isn’t that an admission that ISIS is driven by religion, and in fact adheres to a form of religion?
> imagine a Hitchens/Armstrong debate!
Easy: One where I listen to Hitchens and skip the parts of the other debater.
Imagine a debate between Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Armstrong. That would be fun. Although at some point, I suspect there would be a beheading.
we could also invite Bill Keller, lunatic Christian extraordinaire, who has claimed he and al-Baghdadi can have a altar fight to see whose god is real. then we can have Ms. Armstrong be all a twitter over how religion doesn’t make idiots.
Trial by Combat making a return to the field of debate? How quaint! How Mediaeval. Byzantine even.
That’s how all debates with Hitchens are: listen, skip, iterate.
One of Hitchen’s prescriptions applies to the ill-logic of the god-wanters: You never know what the religious will say next.
They do give indeterminacy a bad name.
If Armstrong were to travel to the Islamic State, will she be executed because:
1. She is an unbeliever or
2. She is the citizen of a former colonial oppressor.
//
With regard to Armstrong I wonder if she could conceive of a situation whereby overnight every single member of IS becomes an atheist. In that situation what would happen? Now can she really believe that religion does not play a major part in the barbarity of IS?
“osculates” :))
Uggghhh. She’s going to be in my neck of the woods in about a month giving a talk on this book. I’m almost tempted to go to see it on the chance that she spends more time in the hot seat, at least during the Q&A section, but honestly I don’t think I could stomach it.
Oh I think we can be more charitable than that. Today’s major religions produce far more peaceable citizens than they do violent extremists. There’s billions of religious people in the world and tens of thousands of violent religious extremists. However, it does produce some violent extremists, and we can identify religious doctrine as a source of their violent extremism. Which, if I understand her positon correctly, makes Ms. Armstrong wrong.
Our local NPR organization (MPR, I believe the largest and one of the oldest) just love to gush over Karen Armstrong. Makes me wonder what kind of mush-brains are working in top positions there.
But then, NPR is scared shitless of the right wing, scared shitless of losing federal funding. For good reason.
“The former nun tells Tom Sutcliffe that faith is as likely to produce pacifists and peace-builders as medieval crusaders and modern-day jihadists.”
She claims not just that religion has produced both, but that both outcomes are as likely. I’d like to see her maths on that question.
Or, to be clear, I actually suspect that she has not done the maths, and has instead substituted an orifice extraction.
“2. The members of ISIS “think they can kill someone who doesn’t worship the same God.””
hmmm, just like Christians
” ‘I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 27 But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me.’” – Luke 19.
See also Deuteronomy 17.
I do not believe religion is the motive. I believe religion provides cover.
The motive is always power.
More than a few people in the 20th century were killed by regimes that espoused atheism.
If there is a specific problem with religion, it is that the power it wields is not based on utilitarian ends and cannot be argued against on the basis of utility.
The atheists came and went rather quickly by historical standards. They did not deliver utopia, and they were displaced. Religion goes on and on.
Isn’t that special?
Ah, how nice to see a simple answer. I daresay we could argue that power is, in some form, responsible for every single problem we have, from violence to ignorance to pseudoscience to world hunger to why there are still potholes in the roads. It explains everything.
The solution, I have been told, is ‘love.’ It will solve everything.
Maybe. I think that answers which are a bit too general aren’t very useful, though. It seems to me that you could absolve almost anything by just calling it a cover for power.
But what if power provides cover for religion? The thirst for certainty and perfection lies at the heart of religion. One uses power to achieve it — internally and externally. This becomes particularly problematic when the control method called faith is translated into being a form of humility.
The secular humanists are still around. We’re the ones who aren’t grounding human rights in the Will of God and explaining why this means they’re limited. We’re also the ones arguing for improvements over Sacred Perfection. We’re also the ones arguing against religion using reason, not force.
There have been horrible regimes run by atheists, but they weren’t motivated by atheism but by particular extreme ideologies regarding class and economics which had nothing to do with atheism. Also, of course, there was the personal megalomania, paranoia and cunning of particular tyrants. Lenin’s brief rule was brutal enough but Stalin took it to far greater extremes. Whether Trotsky would have been any better or worse if he had taken over after Lenin died I wouldn’t venture to guess, but certainly Stalin had a greater talent for political maneuvering and vicious underhandedness to eliminate real or potential rivals.
If someone acts violently to achieve power under the cover of a religious motive, and they wouldn’t have tried that violent act to achieve power without the religious cover, then religion is still at fault for the violence.
IOW, if religion makes a violent method of achieving power more acceptable, then religion has contributed to violence. It doesn’t matter that their goal wasn’t religious in nature, what matters is that religion provided the justification for the violence.
Obama can back peddle on 1 and say that ideologies aren’t necessarily religions but he pretty much painted himself into a corner with 2.
Indeed, Obama’s attitude toward ISIS lacks the kind of courage endorsed by intellectual validity. It is childish too when a ten year old can understand the facts about what identifies religious motivation while the president of the United States stands behind politically-correct-equivocation.
That’s what you get when you’re trying to sell a joint military operation to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
What Would Lincoln Do?
Didn’t Obama also say yesterday that ISIS aren’t true Muslims, because Islam is a religion of peace!
One True Scotsman.
I bet he wears Ys under his kilt. If he wears a kilt at all. Mind you, Kenyans do like their plaids. Masai Kenyans, at least,
I’ve no doubt that if Aztec priests were still tearing the beating hearts out of sacrificial victims atop a pyramid in the centre of Mexico City, Armstrong would find a way to argue that religion had nothing to do with it.
LOL!
Isn’t that special. I was especially interested how she initially comes out and basically states that religion cannot be tied to any conflicts before the modern era. Why? Because there was no distinction between government and religion, per se. LOL, so religion had NOTHING to do with the Spanish Inquisition? Right! Exactly the position I would expect from an ex-nun…
Nunsense?
“Because there was no distinction between government and religion, per se.”
I found this distinction really odd because one of the criticisms of religion is that it’s a potentially-dangerous political force. How can you separate out religion from the politics when religion is political? I suppose you can when you want to deflate criticism by the art of equivocation.
Most people would call such a move intellectually dishonest in any other circumstance, but when it comes to religion such a move is acceptable. Seems similar to the idea that no true Christian puts sugar on his oatmeal.
I would expect most ex-nuns to be somewhat sharper.
If course, my contact with nuns/ex-nuns consists of one cousin and The Blues Brothers, not exactly a wide sampling. 😉
sub
Armed Jihad is not a virtue in Islam!
Yeah, just like:
ritual prayer is nothing like (attempted) magic
religion is utterly different from superstition
Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship
and
god heals amputees.
A comment on Armstrong’s latest book from the point of view of an ex-Muslim: http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2014/09/secularism-and-religious-intolerance—an-ex-muslim-perspective-on-karen-armstrongs-essay
That deserves to be widely read–most apt.
Sub
There is a simple controlled test that can be conducted to test Karen Armstrong’s hypothesis.
Take two Muslims who grew up in the same area and who have had the same upbringing. Then make one an apostate of Islam. Then observe the different in treatment between the two people.
Is one treated badly, shunned, jailed, or even killed?
If so, how does Karen Armstrong explain the difference in treatment? Because of their colonial past? Because of economic conditions? Because of culture?
Or is there some other aspect that might explain the reaction experienced by the apostate…?