Is Religion to Blame for Violence? Karen Armstrong’s Flawed Case

[trotsky]

http://religiondispatches.org/is-religion-to-blame-for-violence-karen-armstrongs-flawed-case/

Just as I finished Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood, which is a very extended attack on the notion that “religion is inherently violent” or that religion and war go together like a horse and carriage, news broke of the latest atrocity-of-the-day: the beheading of 21 Egyptian men by ISIS, apparently in Tripoli.

...

Such a context makes Karen Armstrong’s job in this book difficult. In the work, she assesses countless such examples, including everything from violence in ancient Sumeria, to the “psychotic” Crusades, to the Thirty Years War, to the Terror in France, to the American Civil War, and finally to the appalling legacy of violence and destruction that characterized so much of the twentieth century.

...

With predictable regularity, defenders of the notion that “X religion is a religion of peace” arise to explain and defend particular religious traditions against what they perceive as appalling misues of it. For example, Mustafa Akyol’s op-ed in yesterday’s Times calls for a “Lockean leap” in Islam. Here again, religion is set apart as a thing that can change with the introduction (or, in this case, revitalization) of a theological concept that has been buried by other, worse, theological ideas. The message is: The religion itself is good; it’s just that people always muck it up.

This piece unfortunately features the traditional mischaracterization of what "New Atheists" say about religion (just check out his fictional "argument" between Armstrong and a "new atheist&quot but given that the author does that, his criticism of Armstrong holds significant weight.

[onager]

1. Thanks. Yeah, that "argument" was a pantload.

Couple of examples:

The problem with those who carried out the actions on 9/11 is precisely how little they knew of Islam, not how much.

Except they left behind detailed personal testimonies about how they were carrying out the will of Allah, etc. This is just a variation of "9/11 carried out by ignorant brainwashed zombies." Yes, if we forget that many of them were educated enough to get into American flight schools. And that the 9/11 attacks were mostly planned in that famous center of Islamic education, Hamburg, Germany.

ETA - And is Armstrong implying she knows more about Islam than people who were raised in the religion? If so, that's some breath-taking hubris.

Defenders: We can blame “religion” more than what? More than nationalism? More than struggles over land, property, and power? More than secular ideologies such as Nazism?

Struggles in which religion was almost always found hand-in-glove with nationalism. Are we supposed to forget all those famous accounts of the Pope blessing various Crusaders, the Tsar blessing his troops as they went off to WWI, etc. etc.

And Nazism was far from a "secular ideology." I believe it was one of the most conservative German historians, Joachim Feist, who wrote about some of Hitler's top lackeys wanting to quit going to church. Hitler absolutely forbade that, and told them to keep attending. Whatever the Nazis really thought, they at least wanted their movement to have the imprimatur of religion.

Then we have all those famous photos of priests/preachers giving the Nazi salute. But the New Atheists probably faked those.

PS - I'm still in Packing Hell and will be moving at the end of this week. So I may not be around much.

[trotsky]

2. "is Armstrong implying she knows more about Islam than people who were raised in the religion?"

Hell, where you been, onager? Plenty of DUers felt quite confident in their pronouncements about Islam following the Charlie Hebdo attacks! They were more than willing to tell the rest of us what Islam really is or isn't.

[onager]

3. I been busy!

Packing. Dealing with the bank on my house sale. ARRGGHH!!! Qualified buyer, big down payment, no problems...but we had a "Too Big To Fail" bank who couldn't manage to finish the paperwork for us mere peasants. Or something. Thanks to my fantastic realtor - she put a clause in the contract fining the bank $100 per day if it missed the escrow closing date. So I collected $1200 from Too Big To Fail. Totally insignificant to the bank, I'm sure, but it made me feel better.

Anyhow, point well taken. I did see some of the Islamic experts holding forth. They all seem to get their info from Useful Idiots like Armstrong, or liberal Western Muslims.

And they always come up with these simple solutions to very complex problems: "Islam just needs a renaissance!"

An asshole like me could point out that Islam's had several Renaissances, going back centuries.

But in modern times...well, the Arabic word for "renaissance" is "ba'ath." As in Ba'ath Party. Just Google the term to see how well that worked out. Hint: it gave us such renaissance-like leaders as Moammar Gadaffi, Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein.

[AlbertCat]

8. Whatever the Nazis really thought,

Well, since Judaism is a religion, not a "race" or even just a "culture", blaming it for the world's problems inevitably and obviously makes religion a major player in their ideology.

[LiberalAndProud]

4. I had the hiccups getting through this.

Paul Harvey's "conversation" was one dimensional and lacked nuance, as you have already noted. I also think it was apparent that he wanted to agree with Armstrong, but couldn't quite get there. Overall, I didn't learn much from the critique.

[onager]

6. Her stuff should be digestible, it's all pap and pabulum.

Though Armstrong never met a god she didn't love, she's blathered a lot about the wonderfulness of IsIam in particular.

So I was just sitting here thinking about how Armstrong might fare if she moved to some Paradise currently under sharia law...

--She's an unmarried woman past childbearing age. So to be blunt, she would have almost zero value to her community. She'd be immediately slapped into head-to-toe black niqab duds.

--Places observing sharia law don't have a great need for free-lance theologians to sit around bloviating on the "real meaning" of the Koran and hadiths. They already know the real meaning: the Koran came straight from god and the hadiths came straight from Mohammed. Case closed.

--The first time Armstrong opened her yap about comparative religion, she'd probably be arrested for blasphemy. She might get off with a jail sentence. Unless she's found guilty of apostasy - leading believers away from Islam. That crime is considered worse than murder and carries an automatic death sentence. Sometimes by stoning, usually by beheading.