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The Case for God: What Religion Really Means |
Why has the modern God become incredible? Has God a future in this age of aggressive scientific rationalism? Karen Armstrong suggests that if we draw creatively on the insights of the past, we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarised world. Answering the ‘new atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, she argues that faith still has a fundamental role in the modern world. This is an essential session for our times.
Links
Click here to read reviews of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God.
Karen Armstrong is one of the world’s leading commentators on religious affairs. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun in the 1960s, but then left her teaching order in 1969 to read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1982, she became a full time writer and broadcaster. She is a best-selling author of over 15 books, including A History of God, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, Buddha, and The Bible: The Biography, and she is a passionate campaigner for religious liberty.
Armstrong has addressed members of the United States Congress and the Senate, participated in the World Economic Forum and has been awarded the Franklin J. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal for her work on religious liberty and a TED prize.
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July 9th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
To those of us who have given up trying to control the universe ourselves and who have declared for the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), this is a most beautiful way to live. It is a way of relaxing in and being buoyed by the love of God, of knowing that there is light at the ends of all long dark tunnels, and of faith that death is not the end. Having faith in God is a risk with no bad consequences. It is not ultimately provable by rational means, so if there is no God, and when we die, we have lived wth a beautiful joy. If there is a God, and when we die, we enter into a beautiful after life. Either way, heads we win and tails we win. We live always in a beautiful light.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
I’m sorry Carol, but what if you’ve plumped for the wrong god?
Allah is not going to be too impressed when he finds you’ve been worshipping the prophet Jesus(poobah) as a false idol.
Considering the huge amount of gods around – odds are you could spend an eternity trying to figure out from the paucity of evidence which one is correct, best see it for what it is, wake up and realise you only get this one go round, time is short, best make a good go of it.
Nobody needs to take control of the Universe – just marvel at it’s incredible beauty and marvel at having in effect won the lottery thousands of times over with every single ancestor of yours and mine back to the start of life having been fit enough for it’s environment to survive long enough to have sex (or the earlier forms of reproduction)
July 9th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Oh, and by the way, apparently, according to one of the book reviews I’ve read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/07/karen-armstrong-case-for-god
Karen Armstrong has little or nothing to say about eternity or an afterlife, rather, she just has a rather nice wooly view about nice religion in temporal affairs, whilst evading her eyes from the bad consequences of professing to the world that there is a creator, who apparently in some peoples eyes wants me to bury adultresses up to their necks in the desert sand and then throw medium sized stones at her head, not large stones which might knock her unconscious, until she is dead, or, in the triune faith that you are professing, to tell homosexuals that according to the creator, their actions are an evil sin an they must repent or burn in a place the new testament of Jesus introduced, called Hell.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
..for all of the eternity you were just talking of.
July 10th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Steve,
Firstly, I read that article in the Guardian and its not really a review, but a sarcastic and knowingly oversimpified attempt at humour. It made me chuckle (a little), but I don’t think it pretends to be a fair-minded assessment.
Secondly, I’m fortunate enough to have read the book and I can tell you its not a “nice wooly view” at all. She doesn’t dodge the horrors produced by fundamnetalists or historical atrocities like the crusades, she just argues that these people are doing religion wrongly. I’m an atheist, but this seems a reasonable point to me. I can see the terrible consequences of a certain type of politics and criticise it without requiring the abolition of all politics.
You are correct in saying that Karen Armstrong is not that interested (at least on the evidence of this book) in the afterlife, but I think that’s because she sees her type of religion as a practical way of dealing with this world and too many conjectures about such things can take one’s eye off the ball in dealing with it’s trials and tribulations.
It would be interesting to hear your views once you’d read the book Steve. These posts stay open for a very long time an I hope you write something then.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:49 am
“She doesn’t dodge the horrors produced by fundamnetalists or historical atrocities like the crusades, she just argues that these people are doing religion wrongly.”
That is one of the main problems with religion, for all the people pleading for people to ‘do it right’, it is virtually impossible to argue against the people who think the way to do it best are the ones calling to go back to the scriptures, partly because e.g. if you ‘re-interpret’ the adam & eve story as ‘just a story’ it buggers up the need for a jesus to come along and ‘suffer for our sins’, and puts you in a quandary.
Thank providence at least that the christian religion was malleable enough in being an ‘inspired by’ scripture rather than ‘direct words dictated through the mouth of the final prophet’.
“I can see the terrible consequences of a certain type of politics and criticise it without requiring the abolition of all politics.”
I’m pretty hard-core anti-theist, but I certainly don’t hope for abolition of all religion, however well-meaning it would be guaranteed to turn into a monstrous Stalinist project!
No, Secularism is the best of a bad lot, just like Democracy or Capitalism, but they just won’t stay in their box will they! It really doesn’t help when you have a Pope who comes out condemning Secularism.
July 11th, 2009 at 2:09 am
Sorry that was me tearing my bloody hair out and thinking I’d deleted a section of text there.
Ignore one of the NNGGRAGHS.
July 11th, 2009 at 2:23 am
My best guess is that poor old Anne isn’t the slightest bit homophobic in her heart, and couldn’t give a toss either way about homosexual acts, but she’s just stuck – put on the spot and trying her best to ‘do religion rightly’
July 11th, 2009 at 2:59 am
..and the stuckness that Anne suffers from is trying to run two completely incompatible sets of software concurrently through the same section of brain-matter – trying to stuff the straight from her heart stuff through the extra ‘what she’s supposed to say on behalf of her sect’ filter.
July 11th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Steve,
You certainly won’t find me me defending Anne Widdecombe!!!
However, before you went on about her self-deceptive intolerance (which I’m inclined ti agree with you on), your first argument had a good point – many of the wrongs perpetrated by religions have been because one group thinks the other is doing it incorrectly, or believe the wrong things. However, I think it would be a mistake to equate this rigidity of belief with what Karen Armstrong argues when she think people practise religion “wrongly”. She argues that if someone persecutes someone else in the name of religion, then that is using religion for something it wasn’t meant for. Arguing for a type of religion is not neccesarily wrong, whilst doing so without tolerance and compassion is very wrong indeed.
July 11th, 2009 at 11:51 am
“She argues that if someone persecutes someone else in the name of religion, then that is using religion for something it wasn’t meant for.”
I’m sure she does, which makes her a very dangerous lady indeed!
A former nun… who hasn’t read the old testament???
Give me a break!!
July 11th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I am sure that Karen Armstrong means well, but why argue for a specific version of religion (particularly Trinitarian religion with its very serious flaws), rather than for spirituality or religion in general?
People like Steve Murray (comments above) have an excellent point about fundamentalists and persecution. It’s worth pointing out that atheists have persecuted adherents of religion, and that not all the effects of religion are negative. I suspect that if there wasn’t a category of activity referred to as religion, people would just persecute others in the name of sport or politics or whatever, instead. Some people persecute others because they don’t like people who are different from them.
What we need is religions and spiritualities that celebrate diversity – diversity of belief, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, gender, hair colour. In my opinion, mainstream Christianity is broken because it cannot accommodate other belief systems in its world-view. Unless that can be fixed, it cannot survive in a pluralist society.
Tolerance and compassion are human virtues that we all need to cultivate – and they are not unique to any one belief system. In fact Christianity and atheism are the only world-views that get massively hung-up about belief – most other religions (e.g. Paganism, Unitarianism, Buddhism, Taoism) focus on practices and values – practices such as meditation, and values such as compassion, which help us to become calmer and more tolerant people.
July 11th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
” I am sure that Karen Armstrong means well, but why argue for a specific version of religion (particularly Trinitarian religion with its very serious flaws), rather than for spirituality or religion in general? ”
Spirituality, well ok, but religion?
Why argue for a philosophy that trains you from the start to have to pretend to believe what children can see from the start (if not cut off from information) is a load of illogical rubbish. It’s the ‘ask no questions’ group pretending that is the root of the harm. It instils dishonesty.
“It’s worth pointing out that atheists have persecuted adherents of religion”
Can you be more specific about when and why you think this has happened, because it does not make sense.
“I suspect that if there wasn’t a category of activity referred to as religion, people would just persecute others in the name of sport or politics or whatever, instead. Some people persecute others because they don’t like people who are different from them.”
Obviously.
That’s human nature. But religion has proved to be by far the worst flag of in-group/out-group identity for a whole host of reasons.
“What we need is religions and spiritualities that celebrate diversity”
Why? You talk as if the system is broken and needs fixing!
The philosophical background of the systems we enjoy now in the west, drawn mainly from the enlightenment, have been serving us pretty well, & I can tentatively include the fairly neutered C of E in that.
Where would you prefer to live – where has better values?
“Christianity and atheism are the only world-views that get massively hung-up about belief”
What??
Can you run that past me again?
Where have you been for the last thirty years – Islam is currently tearing seven shades of shit out of itself and catching the whole world in its crossfire.
And it’s mainly because the leaders of your sect say the 7ers or the12ers are ‘doing religion wrongly’.
July 12th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Yewtree,
I’m not sure she does argue for a specific type of religion, but more for a way of doing it. Obviously her background is Christian, but she draws much inspiration from the eastern philosophies, especially Buddhism, seeing in it a concern for practical ways of living overriding a concern for dogma or robust theological definition. This latest book is by far her most personal (apart from her autobiographies) but after reading it I still find it difficult to discern if Armstrong is a Christian, so much does she draw from other traditions and philosophies.I would even go as far as to say she finds it unimportant what religion one practices, what is important is how it is done – with thought, analysis, compassion and tolerance.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Just thought I’d post my feelings of the lecture the other night.
One of the great things in the BFOI’s ability to attract the top people in their fields is that they are generally confident and practised speakers. Armstrong was no exception and I thought she was amazing. Her delivery hardly had a lull and I felt the whole auditorium (what a great venue St Georges is, by the way) was enjoying it as much as me. I was in the fortunate position of alrady having read the book and, although the subject of the talk was the same, she did much more than just go through the motions of explaining it or reading from it and I felt it really reinforced my understanding.
So, thank you Karen Arnstrong for a challenging and enjoyable evening and thank you BFOI.