Karen Armstrong, in her book, The Case for God, doesn’t do
what you think she does. Armstrong is a religious academic and historian, and a
damn good one at that. She is a religious apologist, but not for the kind of
religion most of us think of when we think of religion. She has just as many criticisms
with religion as most atheists do including, I would say, people like Richard
Dawkins and Sam Harris. Where they differ however is their scope in what they
mean by religion in the first place. Most people’s ideas about religion are
highly reductionist. Questions like “Do you believe in God”, or “Are you a
Christian”, are usually easily understood and answered accordingly through
common connotations and cultural assumption. Religion and God usually mean very
clear things, whether is the Evangelical version or the Mormon version, there
is a level of certainty in making these claims and assumptions. As we’ll see many
atheists and Armstrong could not agree more in their criticism about this sort
of religion. However, most atheists stop here and limit their criticism of
religion to this narrow arena of understanding and praxis.
Generally speaking, mystics, yes even Christian mystics, and
many eastern traditions embrace relative amounts of uncertainty and not
knowing. Religion and God are understood as being metaphorical labels and
symbols for that which cannot be known and cannot be spoken about by limited
human minds, languages and imaginations. They speak of religion and God in a
completely different way, that in Armstrong’s view is more true and authentic.
Armstrong says that what religion truly is and can be is fundamentally at odds
with the majority of its worldly manifestations that cling to certainty and
dogma. In her view, some religion is better than others depending on the level
of embrace of not-knowing. Again, here she will agree with many atheists. I
will present some of her amazing ideas, then offer some of my own, including
criticisms of her work.
Armstrong begins by differentiating mythos and logos. Mythos
was first designed “to help people to navigate the obscure regions of the
psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our
thought and behavior” (xi). Myths were not effective if people simply believed
in them, they were programs of action. Religion was based around mythos. It was
not something people thought but what hey did. Truth was acquired through
practical action influenced by and motivated by mythos.
Religion however, went corrupt when logos began to overtake
mythos. Myth was discredited and the scientific method took its place as the
only reliable means of attaining truth. After this revolution, religious
knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. Belief suddenly became a
fundamental axiom and prerequisite of faith. Because of this transition, today
we speak of believers and unbelievers as if accepting some amount of dogma is an
essential activity (xv). In Armstrong’s view, this is a gross distortion of
what religion is. Many of us have been “left stranded with an incoherent
concept of god” (320).
We have forgotten to value unknowing. It is important to
“recognize the limits of our knowledge, silence, reticence, and awe” (xviii).
Religious practice must naturally entail what she calls ‘esktasis’, which can
be described as a stepping outside the norm, “stepping outside the prism of ego
and experience the sacred” (xiii). It
necessarily involved uncertainty. This unknowing was celebrated and delighted
in. In transcending the ego through religious practice, for example, we
experience sadness directly, “it not longer become my sadness but sorrow
itself” (xiv).
The sacred, or God, is transcendent. In the vain of Tillich
and Heidegger, this is what is called the Ground of Being. The eternal Tao is
the Tao that cannot be named. The Tao has no qualities, no form. It can be
experienced but never seen, it is not a god. It predates heaven and earth. It
is beyond divinity, neither being nor nonbeing. As Armstrong summed up, “it
[is] impossible to define or describe, because Being is all encompassing and
our minds are only equipped to deal with particular beings, which can merely
participate in it in a restricted manner” (11). This ground is a power that is
higher, deeper and more fundamental than our notions of god or gods. It
transcends our limited personalities. In every religious tradition, there is a
“deliberate and principled reticence about god and/or the sacred” (xviii).
Being itself, is not only the ground of being, it is also
the ground of the human psyche. It is neither external nor alien to humanity.
The two are connected. This is the microcosm and macrocosm, the atman and
Brahman. This is how we are able to experience it…we are it! Human beings are
wired to yearn for transcendent experiences, to yearn for esktasis. In this
way, Armstrong argues that religion, as it should be practiced and understood
will never disappear. It is a defining aspect of humanity. She says, “the
desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic” (9).
For Armstrong, this lasted until the rise of modernity, the
rise of logos at the expense of mythos. “Before the modern period, most men and
women were naturally inclined to religion and they were prepared to work at it”
(10). Before modernism, people were not expected to believe in the abstract. Humanity
forgot that “authentic religious discourse could not lead to clear, distinct
and empirically verified truth” (21). Religion is not something provided to the
masses by authority figures, it was not a notional activity. Accepting dogma on
someone else’s authority completely abdicates personal responsibility. Religion
did not require belief in a set of doctrines. She says, “Religious discourse
should not attempt to impart clear information about the divine but should lead
to an appreciation of the limits of language and understanding…it could not be
accessed by rational, discursive thought but required a carefully cultivated
state of mind and the abnegation of selflessness” (26). Faith was a matter of
practical insight and active commitment, it had little to do with abstract
belief. For example, the Buddha had little time for theological speculation and
metaphysical questions. What difference would it make to discover that a god
had created the world? “Pain, hatred, grief and sorrow would still exist. These
issues were irrelevant” (23).
For Armstrong, modernity brought a lust for certainty. This
certainty made religion more logos based at the expense of a more transcendent,
unknowning based religion, which is more authentic and transformative and real.
For someone who has much criticism for the reductionism of religion, she is
being highly reductionist in her view of modernism. Modernism can be said in
part to be a response to the tyranny and oppressive authority of religion. Nonetheless,
she elevates the religion of the past and says what we see today is a
distortion of a truth lost in translation.
Secularism for Armstrong has a large negative effect. She
does not see it as the fulfillment of the rational ethos of the enlightenment. Secularism
in her view is creating a violent and oppressive religious backlash. She says a
militant religiosity, will “emerge in every region where a secular, western
style government had separated religion and politics” (292-3). Fundamentalists
feel under threat, they are defensive and are unwilling to entertain rival
points of view be they other religions, or social issues such as evolution,
homosexuality, feminism and abortion. Secularism did not create these
fundamentalists. They are reacting to it.
Using her model, Armstrong critiques most atheists quite
well. She says,
“Atheism is parasitically dependent on the form of theism it
seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image…all three [Sam Harris,
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins) insist that fundamentalism
constitutes the essence and core of all religion” (xvi). This may be true.
However, Armstrong takes her views much further. She says, “Dawkins is not
correct to assume that fundamentalist belief either represents or is even typical
of either Christianity or religion as a whole…he is mistaken to assume that
this is the way people have generally understood the term God (304)…Christian
fundamentalists are convinced that their doctrinal beliefs are an accurate,
final expression of sacred truth and that every word of the Bible is literally
true – an attitude that is a radical departure from mainstream Christian
tradition (294)” Does this woman live under a rock or something? Anywhere from
33% to 62% of Americans think the Bible is the literal truth of God. I know
that’s quite a spectrum, but best-case scenario is 33%. That’s one third of
Americans! And that is no small demographic! Refer to previous blog posts about
the prominence of fundamentalist religion in the world.
I do agree with Armstrong when she says “this type of
religiosity represents a retreat from god” (295). In this way, she completely
agrees with atheists. She says the holy trinity (Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins) present
religion at its absolute worst (306), which is also true. However, she
continues saying that they are not “theologically literate,” and are
intellectually conservative. “They never discuss the work of such theologians
as Bultmann or Tillich who offer a very different view of religion and is
closer to mainstream religion than any fundamentalist” (307). While this is
also true she is false to make the assumption that notknowing religion is
closer to the mainstream than fundamentalist religion. She downplays its
manifestation, its influence and its power and thus undervalues the atheist and
secular agendas. Atheism, for her, is just another divisive theology. She does
not see its importance in the overall debate concerning sacredness. After all,
what can be more sacred than a rational and well thought out critique of
religion and its superstitions and dogmas?
She says the “atheist assault is likely to drive the
fundamentalists to even greater commitment to creationism, and their
contemptuous dismissal of Islam is a gift to Muslim extremists, who can use it
to argue that the West is indeed intent on a new crusade” (308). This may also
be true but it does not mean that atheism should be abandoned or discredited!
Arstrong’s conclusions and calls for action are hard to
disagree with however. We do indeed need to shed a great deal of our knowledge
about religion so that we can move on to new insights. Where she and I disagree
is that atheism and secularism is a necessary player in this process. Faith and
belief, she says, have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness (305).
Belief now exclusively means an intellectual submission to a “somewhat dubious
position.” What it means to be religious or to believe in God no longer means
what it used to. We are stuck in certainty. She says, “to make limited
historical phenomena – a particular idea of god, creation science, family
values, Islam or the holy land – more important than the sacred reverence due
to the ‘other’ is a sacrilegious denial of everything that god stands for”
(322). However, there is an innate desire for ekstasis, for mythos. Armstrong
thinks we are entering a post-secular age. She hopes that atheist and theist
alike should abandon the modern appetite for certainty. “No state of affairs is
permanent, and we are now witnessing the death of the death of god.” She calls
for a “negative theology”, namely a theology based in unknowing. We should
drive our reasoning power to the point where we can go no further, and in this
moment, we should not be frustrated but should experience a sense of
“astonishment, awe and contentment.” We can turn within and become aware of
otherness. Religion should be transformative with a marked effect on the
personality. There is no dramatic “born-again” experience defined by intense
certainty, but is a slow, incremental and imperceptible transformation.
I will return to Armstrong more when I begin discussing Ken
Wilber. Most particularly, his idea of the pre/post fallacy.
