This book is by Karen Armstrong who, in my opinion, is a superstar author in this genre, so I paid full asking price for this book, when often I would wait (and wait, and wait, …) for the price to come down.
I have only gotten through the introduction and one chapter but have read some disturbing signs. Ms. Armstrong’s thesis is to show us how her god was worshipped way back when to indicate why we are worshipping it all wrong now. Okay, cool, but … some quotes:
“But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways 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.”
“Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action.”
“Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action.”
Gosh could this have anything to do with the revered Paul claiming only faith and not works were needed for salvation?
“Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical Western atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the United States during the modern period.”
WTF? Atheism is a “movement” targeting specific religions to be removed/obliterated and thus is parasitic? WTF? It is true that if theism didn’t exist then atheism wouldn’t also, but to claim atheism is targeting religions for obliteration? And “atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.” So, it had nothing to do with leaders like Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, George Jacob Holyoake, and Robert Ingersoll? She seems focused in on philosophers rather than actual atheist leaders.
“Religious people have indeed committed atrocities and crimes, and the fundamentalist theology the new atheists attack is indeed ‘unskillful,’ as the Buddhists would say. But they refuse, on principle, to dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition. As a result, their analysis is disappointingly shallow, because it is based on such poor theology. In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.”
Again, WTF? Re “But they refuse, on principle, to dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition.” There is a long history of actual leaders debating clerics certainly from Robert Ingersoll’s time but more recently Christopher Hitchens who debated bishops in their turf, churches and cathedrals, for Pete’s sake.
“But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West. People believed that God exceeded our thoughts and concepts and could be known only by dedicated practice.”
Okay, I’ll bite and I will keep reading, but … quotes like these:
“Even though so many people are antagonistic to faith, the world is currently experiencing a religious revival.”
“We are seeing a great deal of strident dogmatism today, religious and secular, but there is also a growing appreciation of the value of unknowing.”
… sound like the are coming from the mouth of an apologist/excusigist, not a scholar of her renown. In this country, the U.S., there is no religious revival unless you count religions hating on other religions, as by Christian nationalists and other Trump supports who bash Muslims, etc., that has revived quite a bit, but the percent of U.S. adults declaring their religion to be “none” keeps rising and if that is a religious revival, then not watching the Super Bowl makes you a sports fan. And the only people showing a growing appreciation for unknowing are Fox News viewers and Trump supporters.
Main Point Ms. Armstrong is throwing out the baby, the bath water, and the bath tub of current religious practice, at least in this country, because her god is transcendent, ineffable.
transcendent (adjective): “beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience”
ineffable (adjective) “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words”
If this god is these things, how does she know anything about it? How does anyone know anything about it? In order to qualify as being ineffable, one would need to know that thing so well to be able to say, “words can’t describe that” but that means it also cannot be transcendent.
I found these last two quotes to be quite disappointing, but I will read on.
Uncommon Sense 