Religion
Related: About this forumReviews of Karen Armstrong''s Fields of Blood
Is Religion Inherently Violent?EMMA GREEN
NOV 3, 2014
... When people make generalized arguments about the inherent violence of religion .. they're probably thinking of: the unapologetic, triumphalist bloodletting of the Crusades; the decades-long slaughter of the Thirty Years' War; and the dehumanizing murder sprees of contemporary jihad. And it is this kind of argument that motivated Karen Armstrong to write .. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence ...
... Any student of history could point out that conflicts from the campaigns of Genghis Khan to World War I had non-religious motivations. During the talks she has already given about the book, Armstrong told me in an interview, the first person to ask her a question always says something along these lines: No one actually believes that religion is the cause of all major wars in history.
But then for the rest of the talk, Armstrong said, audience members "are insisting that <religion> is the chief cause that is to blame." In her book, she writes that she has "heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics." Religion may not have caused all the wars in history, these people say, but it is inherently violent in a way that has undeniably shaped world history for the worse ...
Although the book is framed as a polemic response to what is essentially a straw-man question, Armstrong has isolated an interesting quality of contemporary discourse about religion: It's really, really vague ... Even posing the question at the center of Armstrong's book assumes that there's a unified thing called "religion" that has stayed constant over thousands of years of human life ...
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struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)By JAMES FALLOWS
DEC. 10, 2014
... The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:
First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was “not because ambitious churchmen had ‘mixed up’ two essentially distinct activities,” she says, “but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance.”
Second, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But — a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times — the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa. This, she says, is because any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, “was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence,” and because “violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence.” The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence — by police within their borders, by armies between them — was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.
Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state. This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: “As an inspiration for terrorism . . . nationalism has been far more productive than religion.” And religions face the dilemma of whether to accept the protection of a state, and the threat of violence that necessarily entails, or to live in hermetic isolation ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/books/review/fields-of-blood-by-karen-armstrong.html?_r=0
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Salley Vickers
Monday 29 September 2014 06.00 EDT
Pity the poor reviewer tasked to do justice to Karen Armstrong’s latest mighty offering. Armstrong is one of our most erudite expositors of religion, famously (or, perhaps, given the background to this book, notoriously) having surrendered the life of a nun to a lifetime’s attempt to make a comprehensive and unprejudiced study of world religions, their roots, practices, philosophy and place in a global culture. The oeuvre is extensive, bringing a rare mix of cool-headed scholarship and impassioned concern for humanity to bear on the vexed topic of religion. And increasingly vexed it is, as recent shocking events on the world stage have grimly demonstrated ...
The probing process is detailed and often riveting. In the first part of the book she undertakes accounts of ancient religions from the Sumerians (immortalised in the marvellous Gilgamesh epic poem) through the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, Zoroastrians, Vedic and Confucian and, foundation stone of western Christianity, the Jewish religions. Armstrong can be relied on to have done her homework and she has the anthropologist’s respect for the “otherness” of other cultures (a position that, if the behest of its founder were attended to at all, lies at the heart of the Christian ethic). A crucial strand in her thesis is that until recent times religion was inextricably bound up with the political and social life of a people. “The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult to appreciate how thoroughly the two cohered in the past… In the pre-modern world, religion permeated all aspects of life… a host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest-clearing, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state-building, tugs of war, town planning, strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare.” And, while she does not specially list this, science has also been inseparable from religion, the cosmic and divine orders, throughout most of human history, being perceived as one.
Because Armstrong’s range is so wide, and her representation of the different faces of religions so assiduous, it is sometimes tricky to trace the bones of her argument, which, if I have it right, boils down to this: violence is hard-wired in human nature, as is our more likable need to seek existential meaning. Therefore human psychology will naturally seek to attribute meaning to acts of violence and in doing so will tend to bestow on what is a universal human trait – often exercised actively in the service of economic or political supremacy, or, more metaphorically, in ritual acts of animal sacrifice – a religious significance. At least in cultures where religion has not been segregated from the rest of social and political life. This also gives rise to the many myths that codify violence in order to imbue it with meaning. The Assyrian king who is ritually slapped by the priest to reassert the inferiority of human power, or the ancient Aryan myth of the king who is sacrificed by his brother the priest for his people, and thus brings order into the world, finds many variants ...
My own view is that if you take any human ideal – liberty, equality, justice, health, education, parenthood – you will find it being hideously distorted through the deployment of violent means to supposedly “good” ends. We have the French revolution, our own civil war, Stalin’s “purges”, the ducking stool, straitjackets, the whip, the strap, lobotomies, chemical castration – the list, if not endless, should be frightening. We should not blame the current craze (and it is a craze because ultimately it’s crazy) for the jihad on religion. It is a distorted search by the disaffected for meaning in a world that has lost touch with the means of finding deeper meaning, arguably through losing touch with the saner, more creative aspects of religion.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/29/fields-of-blood-review-absorbing-study-religion-violence-karen-armstrong
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)David Shariatmadari
Wednesday 8 October 2014 06.00 EDT
... In her sprawling survey Armstrong shows that doctrine alone cannot give rise to intercommunal strife. Instead, it is usually a reaction to social upheaval and the new forms of structural oppression – gross inequality or overt persecution – that come with it. In the absence of these conditions, religion tends to encourage peaceful coexistence. To blame one or other faith, when the evidence shows so clearly that all types of violence have been committed in the name of all religions and none, is to supply an extraordinarily – you might say wilfully – superficial reading of history ...
Amid the kaleidoscope of examples, the argument solidifies: religious awakening is a symptom of too-quick transition from one kind of society to another. From the nomadic to the settled, from the agrarian to the mercantile, from the mercantile to the industrial. Violence often erupts at these moments. But the link with religion is one of correlation, not causation ...
We know that the slaughter of the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the American civil war, the opium wars, the first world war, the Armenian genocide, Stalin's great purge, the second world war and the Holocaust had little to do with religion. Indeed, much of it was explicitly antireligious. So how on earth have we ended up with the idea – still in evidence in, for example, the comments readers leave on news websites – that religion above all is to blame for human violence?
Armstrong begins and ends her book with reflections on the scapegoat – the animal burdened with the sins of the community and sent out into the desert. She argues that we, in the secular, rational west, have become incapable of properly acknowledging our own ferocious violence. The madmen are the ones who believe in a man in the sky, who strap on suicide belts imagining that they will be rewarded with virgins in heaven – not we, who debate and legislate and only then slam hellfire missiles into wedding parties ...
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/08/fields-of-blood-religion-history-violence-karen-armstrong-review
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Mark Juergensmeyer
October 24, 2014
... Armstrong is strongest on biblical history and the development of the Christian church. She shows that a major theme of the Old Testament is the conflict between an unruly free society and a stern political order imposed by force — by the structural violence of the state. When Christianity emerged, the political order looming over the fledgling church was the Roman Empire, which Christians defied with pacifism. Later, when Christianity became the de facto state religion in A.D. 325, the situation was reversed, and church leaders scrambled to justify the state’s military actions.
One of the church’s bishops, Saint Augustine, elaborated on an old Greek theory of “just war” to explain how Christians could support acts of warfare in certain limited situations. He argued that the early pacifism advocated by the church was the kind of idealism meant only for a heavenly city of God. Down on Earth, where mortals lived in the city of humans, a more realistic ethic was called for, one that occasionally accepted violence to achieve social order. The church has maintained this position — that some violence can be justified — to the present day. Throughout history, however, politicians have exploited this doctrine to excuse their violent exercises of power.
The same religious acceptance of violence in certain political contexts, and the same misuse of this by politicians, is found in Islam. Armstrong shows that the peaceable early Muslims turned to fighting only to defend themselves, and that the notion of jihad is a minor and seldom-mentioned concept in the Koran. Later, the issue of state-supported violence for the sake of political order became a theme in Islam, as it had been in Christianity, when large empires were established. Though maintained by force, the empires kept the peace, preventing quarreling regions from engaging in constant warfare and allowing a diversity of cultures to flourish. Islamic leaders routinely protected “people of the book” — Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians — within their domains.
The third and last part of the book is the most interesting. Here Armstrong focuses on the past several hundred years, when secularism and religion have struggled with each other. Again, there are political issues at stake. At no time is this more clear than in recent years, when terrorism and global jihad have come to prominence, in large part as responses to the widespread perception in the Middle East that the United States and Europe have fostered economic exploitation and cultural colonialism in the region. Armstrong regards the George W. Bush administration’s war on terrorism as itself a kind of terrorism and a battle waged with religious zeal ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-fields-of-blood-by-karen-armstrong/2014/10/23/a098e374-4d90-11e4-aa5e-7153e466a02d_story.html
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)By David Nirenberg
APRIL 29, 2015
Is religion good or bad? This sound bite of a question dominates much of what passes for public discussion of religion in the United States ...
Armstrong’s argument is simple: “From the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft.” By “organized theft,” she means the activities of the kings, aristocrats, warriors, and other leaders of the agrarian societies that began to appear in written records in Mesopotamia in the third millennium bce. In other words, not religion but politics—the struggle for power to seize the fruits of others’ labor—has always been responsible for violence. Yet in making this claim, Armstrong draws the very distinction between religion and nonreligion that she insists cannot be made before the modern period ...
... In the case of France, the revolutionary state mobilized in part because it was attacked from all sides by neighboring powers acting explicitly in the name of religion, among other things. But more generally, it is important to stress—as many theologians, historians, sociologists, and political theorists have done—that the great “secular” ideologies of modernity were none of them emancipated from religion, but were rather willy-nilly its heirs. French revolutionary ideologies, Protestant (“Anglo-Saxon”) liberalism, Marxism-Leninism and Soviet communism, German national socialism, US Cold War political theory—they all translated and transformed religious ideas into new, often apocalyptic idioms and put them to new, sometimes bloody kinds of work ...
If we like, we can choose to dismiss the religious terms in which modern conflicts are often expressed as unimportant or secondary to other interests, economic or geopolitical. But why should we make that choice, which is in no way obvious or necessary? If we want to defend religion against the New Atheists’ attack, it seems oddly partial to do so by minimizing religion’s relevance to the vast questions of violence that confront our world. And if we wish to understand that violence, it is far better to assume that in our complex world, our religious ideas and our interests are interrelated, and that we need to rise to—rather than evade—the challenge of understanding that correspondence. Max Weber noted long ago, in his “Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” that “the ‘worldviews’ which are fashioned through ideas…have often served as switchmen for the tracks on which the dynamics of interests have moved action.” We will never understand how religious ideas affect our interested (and sometimes violent) actions in the world so long as we insist on separating the two ...
http://www.thenation.com/article/power-and-piety/
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Dec 20th 2014 | From the print edition
... In her zeal to play down religion as a cause of war, Ms Armstrong also espouses a kind of technological Marxism. She stresses that certain forms of violence are endemic to conservative agrarian societies, others to industrial societies as they innovate and accumulate. Other sorts of bloodshed occur in transitional periods. The Reformation, she suggests, was a by-product of economic and political change, not a purely religious phenomenon.
Yet another part of Ms Armstrong’s counter-attack stresses the violence which secularist regimes have practised against religion. She empathises with Christian peasants whose faith was assaulted by French revolutionaries or Bolsheviks; and with the humble Muslim in Turkey or Egypt who is horrified by moves to limit the role of religion, whether by indigenous elites or at the behest of foreigners ...
Some of the pathologies of the Muslim world have indeed been exacerbated by Western meddling, from Anglo-French colonialist divide-and-rule to drone attacks on Pakistan. But this language of collective victimhood does not help people (especially women) who are born inside traditionally religious societies, and have to free themselves from the violence, physical or psychological, which they face in their own families and communities.
To be fair, in “Fields of Blood” Ms Armstrong does a good job of explaining why people who are deeply invested in traditional beliefs and social systems feel threatened, and inclined to fight back, when outsiders try to “reform” their attitudes and lives. But that does not mean that old-fashioned theocratic societies are generally healthier, and less conducive to violence, than modern ones.
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21636708-secularism-or-religion-more-authoritarian-trouble-and-strife
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)By Brook Wilensky-Lanford
Published 6:10 pm, Wednesday, November 19, 2014
... Why begin with the literal definition of a “scapegoat”? Because Armstrong believes that whenever we say that “religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history,” we do the same thing: place the blame where it does not belong. This argument, most often advanced by New Atheist writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, is simplistic, historically uninformed, and worse — useless.
Armstrong describes “the impossibility of describing any religious tradition as a single unchanging essence that will always inspire violence.” Whether we like it or not, writes Armstrong, religion is inherently political, and vice versa. “Not only does religion affect policy, but politics can shape theology.” The two are deeply embedded, and it’s time we realize it ...
To argue against the tautology that religion causes wars with such a vast, sweeping history seems at first a foolhardy maneuver. To claim, as Armstrong does for Crusader-era anti-Semitic violence, that a given event “was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political and economic elements were also involved,” is not to make that big a claim. Someone who actually believes that religion causes violence is unlikely to sit down and read a 500-page book showing that the reality is much more complicated. To realize that violence is inherent in human nature and that religion, as a human creation, is entangled with violence, as is politics, and every other human endeavor, leaves us at a dead end.
But actually the form of Armstrong’s book is itself the argument. It is more complicated, and we must acknowledge that complexity, and its implications for our shared humanity, before we can have any hope of creating a viable world where we are not trying to destroy each other. How do we do that? We must “take responsibility for the world’s pain and learn to listen to narratives that challenge our sense of ourselves. All this requires the 'surrender,’ selflessness and compassion that have been just as important in the history of religion as crusades and jihads.” We oversimplify the relationship between religion and violence at our peril. That scapegoat, resentful and festering, will turn back to the city that drove it out.
http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Fields-of-Blood-by-Karen-Armstrong-review-5905094.php
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Marcus Tanner
Thursday 2 October 2014
... One chicken-and-egg question thrown up by this mayhem is whether religion is a cover for other motives (in which case the “messages” of the various holy books are virtually irrelevant) or whether the gorier passages in the Bible and the Koran have given people who might have behaved differently a real inventive to turn on their neighbours. If the latter is true, religion is not just an excuse for violence; it’s a key ingredient. Those familiar with Karen Armstrong’s earlier books will not be surprised to learn that she looks coldly on the simplistic but fashionable view that belief in God is the principal factor in a host of wars, past and present. For a start, she doubts the usefulness in this debate of terms like “religion” or “belief”, because the meaning of these words over time has mutated almost beyond recognition ...
The greatest Muslim empire in history, meanwhile, that of the Ottomans, happily accommodated a wide range of religious difference during some periods and was murderously violent towards religious minorities at others. The point here is that these upsurges in violence rarely had much relation to religious activity. When the Ottoman Empire felt politically and militarily confident, it was usually fairly tolerant. When outside powers closed in, it became more suspicious of, and violent towards, potential enemies within.
This is a long, detailed book that tries to cover too much territory ...
Those most interested in the author’s views on events in the Middle East may wish to fast-forward to the last third, when Armstrong argues persuasively that politics rather than faith is the root cause of much of the recent carnage in the Muslim world. She believes several states that the British and French imperialists established after the First World War are now imploding. These entities, she writes, have never made much sense to people with little sense of nationality. Resting on force, their collapse brings pandemonium with it. A book to annoy neo-cons and liberal interventionists the world over – as Armstrong no doubt intended.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/fields-of-blood-religion-and-the-history-of-violence-by-karen-armstrong-book-review-long-detailed-9770608.html
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)September 26, 2014 5:07 pm
Review by John Cornwell
... From the outset she appeals to a theory proposed in 1960 by the neuroscientist Paul D MacLean. He argued that we all possess a nasty reptilian brain, which disposes us to violence as a fact of evolutionary heritage. MacLean contrasts this with our mammalian “limbic system”, capable of caring emotions, and our human “neocortex”, capable of reason. This may well be a neat way of explaining, or explaining away, human nature and the phenomenon of violence; but most researchers working in affective psychology have long ago rejected Maclean’s “triune brain” as fanciful ...
Armstrong’s narrow view of secularism is clearly evident in her account of fundamentalism, which, again, she sees as a retreat into defensive literalism. The late John Rawls, however, offers a more sophisticated construal, seeing fundamentalism as the pursuit of the good society by the imposition of mandatory beliefs and values. Pluralist societies, in contrast, Rawls argues, allow individuals and groups to pursue their own beliefs unhindered. Episcopalian political scientists such as Glenn Tinder have endorsed Christianity’s contribution to the emergence of pluralism and hence secularism, citing the Gospel ideal of non-judgmental love as a basis for respecting, under the law, all religions and none ...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/154f1b1e-4285-11e4-9818-00144feabdc0.html
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Ferdinand Mount
... Among the many causes advanced for the Great War, ranging from the train timetables on the continent to the Kaiser’s withered left arm, I have never heard religion mentioned. Same with the second world war. The worst genocides of the last century — Hitler’s murder of the Jews and Atatürk’s massacre of the Armenians (not to mention his expulsion and massacre of the Greeks in Asia Minor too) — were perpetrated by secular nationalists who hated the religion they were born into. The long British wars of the 18th and 19th centuries — the Napoleonic wars and the Seven Years’ War — were cheerfully fought by what Wellington called ‘the scum of the earth’ for land and empire, not for the faiths to which they only nominally belonged.
We have to go back to the 17th century and the Wars of Religion to find a plausible candidate. Hobbes certainly believed that the preachers had been ‘the cause of all our late mischiefs’. But modern historians are more inclined to describe the English civil war as the War of Three Kingdoms and/or as a struggle against the autocracy of Charles I. The Wars of Religion on the continent do look like a fall-out from the cataclysmic split of the Reformation, though Armstrong points out that there too dynastic rivalry came to predominate. Pope Paul IV went to war against the devout Catholic Philip II of Spain. The Catholic Kings of France allied with the Ottoman Turks against the Catholic Habsburgs and fought for 30 years on the same side as half the Protestant princes of Germany.
Skipping lightly over the non-religious Wars of the Roses and Hundred Years’ War, we have to reach back seven centuries to the last Crusades to find bloody and unremitting wars that were quintessentially religion-driven, not to mention genocidal (before setting out, the Crusaders usually massacred the local Jews as an hors d’oeuvre) ...
Armstrong starts off, though, on rather shaky ground. She tells us that ‘there is little evidence that early humans regularly fought one another’ ... This is essentially the noble-savage story familiar to us from Rousseau and Margaret Mead, not to mention Marx and Engels. Yet it is now fiercely contested ...
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/fields-of-blood-by-ferdinand-mount-review/
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)FEBRUARY 23, 2015
JACOB J. PRAHLOW
... Overall, Fields of Blood is something of a mixed bag, though this is not entirely surprising given the incredible breadth of the book. This work would serve as an excellent basic introduction to the place of politics and religion in the earliest recorded human civilizations. Additionally, the treatments of ancient India and China are insightful and informative. Armstrong’s treatment of Judaism is academically informed, but perhaps not best-suited for a popular audience. As noted above, the engagement with early Christianity remains severely lacking, although interactions with imperial Christianity more balanced. Christianity in the medieval and modern periods is treated fairly enough, though the historian within me was often hoping for further contextualization and nuance. The presentation of Islam, while not without its occasional oversimplifications, offers much needed insight and nuance into a religion that is too often characterized in totalizing terms as extreme—either extremely violent or extremely misunderstood.
The section on violence in the modern period gives readers much to think about, and may serve as a valuable problematization of contemporary conceptions concerning religion. On the topic of religion, Armstrong’s discussion of what exactly may be meant by the term “religion” remains an important conversation that needs to be held on a wider scale. A terminological problem long recognized by scholars, this book should be commended for bringing this conversation to the attention of a more casual reader. Additionally, the ongoing dialogue in this text between what constitutes “history” and what constitutes “myth” highlights the importance of determining which is which; making this conversation more explicit and clearly defined from the beginning would have been beneficial. Of course, highlighting these issues raises an important question, namely, who constitutes Armstrong’s audience for this book. While the writing style certainly suggests a popular audience, the bulk of this work may be daunting for the average reader. Nevertheless, this work offers much to readers willing to traverse its depths.
http://pursuingveritas.com/2015/02/23/book-review-fields-of-blood-armstrong/
rug
(82,333 posts)I still haven't read it yet but she made some good points.
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)1 OCTOBER 2014
John Gray
Not long after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became supreme leader, a US official was heard to exclaim: “Who ever took religion seriously?” The official was baffled at the interruption of what he assumed was an overwhelmingly powerful historical trend. Pretty well everyone at the time took it for granted that religion was on the way out, not only as a matter of personal belief, but even more as a deciding factor in politics. Secularisation was advancing everywhere, and with increasing scientific knowledge and growing prosperity it was poised to become a universal human condition ...
The idea that religion is fading away has been replaced in conventional wisdom by the notion that religion lies behind most of the world’s conflicts. Many among the present crop of atheists hold both ideas at the same time. They will fulminate against religion, declaring that it is responsible for much of the violence of the present time, then a moment later tell you with equally dogmatic fervour that religion is in rapid decline. Of course it’s a mistake to expect logic from rationalists. More than anything else, the evangelical atheism of recent years is a symptom of moral panic. Worldwide secularisation, which was believed to be an integral part of the process of becoming modern, shows no signs of happening. Quite the contrary: in much of the world, religion is in the ascendant. For many people the result is a condition of acute cognitive dissonance.
It’s a confusion compounded by the lack of understanding, among those who issue blanket condemnations of religion, of what being religious means for most of humankind. As Armstrong writes, “Our modern western conception of religion is idiosyncratic and eccentric.” In the west we think of religion as “a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions and rituals, centring on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all ‘secular’ activities”. But this narrow, provincial conception, which is so often invoked by contemporary unbelievers, is the product of a particular history and a specific version of monotheism.
Atheists think of religion as a system of supernatural belief, but the idea of the supernatural presupposes a distinct sort of cosmogony – typically one in which the material world is the creation of a personal God – that is found in only a few of the world’s religions. Moreover, the idea that belief is central in religion makes sense only when religion means having a creed. Until the British started classifying the people of the Indian subcontinent by their religious affiliations, Armstrong points out, there was no such thing as “Hinduism”. Instead there was an unfathomably rich diversity of practices, which weren’t seen as separate from one another or from the rest of life, and didn’t define themselves in terms of belief. The same was true in pre-Christian Europe. “Neither the Greeks nor the Romans”, Armstrong reminds us, “ever separated religion from secular life. They would not have understood our modern conception of ‘religion’. They had no authoritative scriptures, no compulsory beliefs, no distinct clergy and no obligatory ethical rules” ...
http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/09/lambs-slaughter
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)By Graydon Royce
MAY 21, 2015 — 8:29AM
... “There is a lot of strident certainty about the role of religion,” Armstrong said in an interview from her London home. “If we want to be fully informed about the complexity of our position at the moment, we need to be apprised of all these <contributing factors> and not blame everything on religion” ...
Armstrong entered the convent at 18 and left seven years later, disillusioned and wounded by what she called its “cruel regime.”
She graduated from Oxford and taught prep-school English, but her religious inclinations led her to write articles and eventually books. “A History of God,” in 1993, put her on the radar of many.
She lectures regularly and has drawn sharp criticism from the left and the right. Atheist and activist Sam Harris said he feels Armstrong is an apologist for Islam, which he calls a violent religion. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has slammed Armstrong’s ideas about God’s nature.
http://www.startribune.com/karen-armstrong-looks-at-myth-and-reality-about-religion-and-violence/281848501/
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)By Randy Dotinga
OCTOBER 28, 2014
... Whether it's weak or strong, the state has a duty to protect its people from threats and perhaps expand. That's where crusading warriors come in. But they're not always crusading to conquer. As Armstrong notes, warriors often fight to stop the oppression of their own people – violence to stop violence. And the state always has its own interests separate from anything that has to do with sacred writ; faith may have nothing to do with decisions that seem motivated by religion.
And, of course, there's a strong thread of nonviolence in the annals of religion. What are the Golden Rule and the admonition to "turn the other cheek" other than appeals for peace? Then there's the nonviolence of Buddhism. Armstrong notes that skeptics like to pretend Buddhism isn't a religion when it threatens their arguments about the violent nature of faith.
Armstrong, a former nun, dismisses the idea that non-religion is an easy fix to the problem of violence. "There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought," she writes, as "so-called humanists" conveniently decided that certain people didn't count as full citizens of society. (Think slavery.)
Now, modern society is much less religious than in the past, but humans are still violent, and secular leaders often create violent backlashes when they blame and oppress the faithful ...
http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2014/1028/Fields-of-Blood-asks-if-religion-fuels-violence
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Guy Stagg
March 15th, 2015
In 1899 an international peace conference was held in The Hague to decide the laws of war. One topic discussed was the devastating armaments being used by European armies to subdue their overseas colonies, such as the Armstrong gun and the Shrapnel shell. Sir John Ardagh, a conference delegate, defended this practice. “The savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded,” he argued. In other words, mass slaughter was more humane. Fifteen years later the same weapons were tearing up the Western Front.
Fields of Blood: Religion and the history of violence is filled with stories like this, stories of such casual horror, and after a while they lose their sting. As Sir John’s defense showed, secular values worked just as well when trying to justify these horrors ...
... Throughout Fields of Blood, Armstrong tries to show how the exploitation of the productive majority by the spoiled minority can be just as damaging as cut-and-thrust conflict. She goes on to argue that structural violence is the real reason behind much of the hostility blamed on religion. Scratch the surface of religious violence and you will always find a deeper injustice or inequality. For her, structural violence in the Middle East — a consequence of the historic abuses of colonialism, the shoddy settlements left by outgoing empires, and the subsequent meddling of anxious superpowers — largely explains the terrorism that troubles it today.
Armstrong is right to criticize the scapegoating of religion, to emphasize the political basis of terror, and to recognize that the rich and powerful bear some responsibility for the aggression of those they oppress. However, in doing so she makes another scapegoat out of structural violence — and that’s something even more elusive than religion. To suggest that there is some equivalence between a drone attack and a terrorist attack is morally sensitive, but to equate economic exploitation with suicide bombing is ethical nonsense. This would have been prevented if Armstrong had laid out some basic political principles. Instead, Fields of Blood raises hard questions without answering them: In what cases can violence be justified? Is structural violence preferable to all-out war? And are mainstream religions in any way liable for the fundamentalists who commit violence in their name? After all, these are not abstract questions, not philosophical parlor games, but our most serious foreign policy challenges ...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/bloody-affair/
Yorktown
(2,884 posts)Karen Armstrong: good data collection skills, fair ability to write,
so far out people forget to notice her outlandish non sequiturs.
I started annotating her 'Case for God', then gave up: too full of nonsense to be fun.
