I'll start by saying that I love Karen Armstrong's books and I considered this one to be a personal favor to me, even though we've never met. With the rise in media coverage of the "new atheism," I was really hoping someone with rock solid credentials would come out with a brilliant and reasoned response. For that you really can't do any better than Karen Armstrong. Now I can have the deep joy of telling anyone who wants to argue religion with me that they should go read this book first.
This is a dense 332 page book with about 60 pages of notes and glossary so I'm going to summarize some of the points in this article, but will also pull out specific themes in later articles to explore in more detail.
God and religion are not easy
Armstrong begins the book: "We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. 'That book was really hard!' readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. 'Of course it was!' I want to reply. 'It was about God.' But many find this puzzling. Surely everybody know what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and that we really don't understand what we mean when we say that he is 'good,' 'wise,' or 'intelligent.' ...
"There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different world-view, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some says the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept." (introduction, ix-x)
Yes, in hundreds of pages of scholarly writing she goes on to show that in fact many people today who are debating God in the media have no idea what they're talking about. They're taking a few years of a conversation that has spanned millennia and every area of the globe and assuming that's the whole thing.
Not only that, but many of us have lost touch with the
unknowable nature of God and religious truth. Armstrong brings back the sense
of awe and ineffability of religious experience.
You must practice religion to understand it
Furthermore, talking about religion and faith, particularly in the way we've been doing it in the modern world, isn't the point. For most of human history "belief" was not the core of religion, practice was.
"Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action. It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. ... There are some things that can be learned only be constant, dedicated practice, but if you persevere, you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible. ...
"Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. ... It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth-or lack of it-only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely." (xii-xiii)
Toward the end of the book, Armstrong likens the task of religion to that of art. It's interesting that although I've seen a lot of bad art-even abusive, manipulative, exploitive art-I've never heard anyone say that humanity should stop making art or even disband the institutions of art. However, people who oppose religion (and granted there are really very few) suggest that the actions of the people who are bad at religions means we should scrap the whole thing.
In my experience, if your art isn't as good as you want
it to be, or your religious experience is not happening, the key is more
skillful practice.
Religion is more an art than a science
In her Epilogue, Armstrong writes, "Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. ... Religion's task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life. Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning power to the limit, stretching language to the end, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage." (p. 318)
Throughout the book, Armstrong talks about the elements
of religion that go beyond reason and beyond our ability to speak about these
experiences. She also covers in detail how the idea of "belief"
changed from one of trust in or loyalty to God to an intellectual idea held in
the mind. I hope to cover that in depth in its own article because this is
already pretty long.
32,000 years of human experience
What about the middle of the book? What happens between introduction and epilogue? In the course of 315 pages, Armstrong takes us through 32,000 years of religious history. If you've read her other books, in particular The Battle for God, The History of God and The Great Transformation, you'll recognize some of this landscape. I've read all three of those and I didn't mind at all revisiting this history through the lens of belief and practice.
This is a book that you need to commit to. It's not a
fast read and you might find you want to go through it multiple times. If you
want something smaller to start, I'd recommend Armstrong's A Short History of
Myth. If you're a fan of audiobooks, the audio version of this book is a joy
because Armstrong reads it herself and you get the benefits both of her British
accent and her clear passion for the subject.
Charter for Compassion
Only mentioned at the very end of the book is this amazing project that resulted from Armstrong's win of the TED Prize in 2008. On the Charter for Compassion website you can see a movement focused on compassion across religions, cultures, interests and other differences. I highly recommend taking a moment to check it out and add your name if you're inspired.
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