Reflections on The Case For God by Karen Armstrong

I have been inclined to agree with the argument that all religions essentially preached a similar (if not the same) message of compassion, and more importantly that their founders were all inspired by the same experience. This is an idea that many liberal-minded intellectuals, artists, and spiritual authorities like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu seem to advocate. But I was always troubled by it; without absolute certainty, it seemed like wishful thinking. There was always an irrational fear at the back of my head and the bottom of my heart that what if maybe, just maybe, one of these many many fundamentalist sectarian groups are right, and the rest of us are all right screwed? Again, it's an irrational fear, but it was there nonetheless. Even if they're not, how could anybody prove that the religious figures of the ancient world thought in these high-minded terms that we yearn for today? After all, Yahweh, the God of the tribe of Israel was just another tribal deity competing for mastery over the cosmos in the pantheon of Middle-eastern believers; a symbolic measure taken by these people to galvanize themselves as a nation. Pragmatically speaking, what did it matter whether it was true or not, as long as it got the job done? What this book illustrated for me was that in fact these religions were indeed inspired by a similar spiritual experience, and there is more historical evidence for it now.

The main points I learned in this book are as follows:
-our concept of God as we know it is a modern construct
-our understanding of the words 'belief' and 'faith' is also a modern construct
-literal interpretation and fundamentalism is a modern construct
-Armstrong employs the ancient Greek idea that all methods of understanding used by human beings fall under the categories of logos and mythos. Religion, like art, falls under the latter, and the reason why people misunderstand it is because they misplace it in the former.
-religion is something that you do, and that it takes practice and skill like anything else. Rather than a set of arbitrary laws and abstract concepts, it is a technique to unlocking a person's faith and spirituality, and if any method fails to do so, if it fails to yield practical results, then it is not doing its job. Armstrong explains that this is how the believers of the ancient world thought about religion, and seeing as they are chronologically closer to the wellspring of these spiritual ideas, their opinion does carry a lot of weight for me today. Any of the rituals that religious people partake in would seem absurd and abstract if observed from the outside with a logical mind. A religious experience for the people of the ancient world evoked a sense of Mystery, a "Cloud of Unknowing" as Armstrong puts it, a depth that cannot be explained rationally and has its place in our world, even though crusaders of Reason try to eradicate it.

Probably the most radical effect that Armstrong's arguments have is that they completely changed the way I think about the words 'belief', 'faith' and 'God'. Armstrong states that our understanding of these words are all the product of our modern age, which began some 500 odd years ago. Belief, she says,did not always mean assenting to something and accepting it as true. The word might have had a completely different connotation in the ancient world. Belief is related to the word "lief" which is related to the word "love". The Latin word for believe is "credere", which meant something else as well. To say credo, "I believe", it actually was closer to "I engage myself","I commit", "I trust". So from this we can deduce that at no point does the Bible ask us to believe in the modern sense, which is to accept as true. Rather, what it asks us is to commit ourselves and invest ourselves in the words of the text. Belief to the people of the ancient world, was not blind faith. If anything it was closer to wrestling with God the way Jacob did. It required study, testing, and if necessary, doubt. It needed thorough scrutiny, a delving into the subject to reach a higher plane of being. The pre-modern Christian thinkers tried to understand their God through apophatic methods, which is the knowledge of God gained through negation. Rather than come to a conclusion about what God was, they would set up a concept, and then knock it down, saying God is not this, God is not that. The exercise was to demonstrate that human language could not accurately explain who or what God is, and the exercise culminates in a loss of words and a religious silence. And this inability to put one's finger on it did not frustrate these practitioners. They were alright with the feeling of uncertainty which Modernism seems to abhor. In fact, they delighted in it. Reaching that awed silence was the whole point.

Religion for the pre-modern world was something that required exhaustive creative work for it actually pay off. It was based on practical solutions to problems that arose in those particular moments in time and space. The pre-Rabbinical Jews went to the Temple to re-enact the creation myth in order to become closer to their God. It was never meant to be a literal account for how the world begun.

the concept of 'God' as we most traditionally know it, is also a modern construct. It came out of peoples' desire for absolute certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. The Scientific Revolution was in full swing, and it seemed that as Reason became the great beacon of light in the world to yield hard, tangible facts, peoples' concepts of religion had to keep up. Religion as an institution had to keep up, because the Church was a player that had to remain in power. In time, religion melded with science, and people tried to argue with Reason to prove the existence of God. As a result, the word 'belief' turned into the acceptance of something being true, and logic was what everything hinged upon. God became an idol of the vanity of human beings, a larger more powerful version of ourselves, and just another creature in all of creation who could killed with enough effort.

Fundamentalism as we know it today came out of post-revolutionary America as a political and cultural fight for survival, while the God of the modern age became something that people could disprove as easily as prove. Armstrong chronicles how atheism in the modern sense, the wilfull denial of a God came into being. Today, atheism has taken on a guise not unlike fundamentalism. Individuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens launch an assault on religion and God and claim that these are responsible for so much bloodshed in the world. While they're not entirely wrong, Armstrong asserts that they are missing the larger picture, not just in the way that most religious people aren't as crazy as the Taliban and the hell-fire preaching Televangelists, but also that the whole notion of God that they are attacking is inaccurate. She also says that there are less staunch Atheistic thinkers out there from whom religious people would benefit in an open dialogue, and that they too play a part in our spiritual evolution.

Armstrong basically does a broad sweep of the history of Western religious thought, beginning in the Paleolithic era, steering eastward to the early Indian philosophy which the Upanishads were based on, back west to the roots of Jewish religion, to the Greek philosophers, to the early Christian Church, to Islam, to the Middle Ages, and up to the Modern Age that began in the 16th century to the Enlightenment, and culminated in the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, looking at post-modern philosophers as well. Among the people she cites are the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Augustine, Muhammad, Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, Luther, Calvin, Hegel, Voltaire, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, Heidegger, and even Richard Dawkins! She points out all the places where religion was warped for political and tribalistic agendas, from the Crusades up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. It also illustrates the different religious experiences that people had all over the ancient world, and the striking resemblance they all had with each other, even though they were culturally and geographically worlds apart. The whole book is thoroughly researched and brimming with insight. It felt like a story as well, with a soaring narrative that brought me along with its key characters as I skipped across the history of Western civilization.

I knew that God was an idea that evolved throughout time and was subject to change based on the Zeitgeist of society at any given point. This troubled me, because I wanted a more concrete idea, somewhere along the road that I could pinpoint and say "there! That's what it's all about!" I knew that Jesus was a man, and it troubled me deeply because I so badly wanted a Son of God but knew better. But now I feel like my intellect and my non-rational need for faith are not irreconcilable. Peoples' ideas about God are the product of their time, and not from divine intervention, and I'm okay with it now because I don't have to relinquish my yearning for God because of it.

This understanding I've gained from reading this book hasn't made me a better or happier person, nor has it really changed the things I hold to be true in my life. It hasn't solved the question of whether there is a primordial, Unmoved Mover of the universe, and whether this universe is ruled by fate or chance, and I have not subscribed to a particular faith. But I think it has caused a slight shift in my way of thinking, which although is small now like a slight change in degree, may prove significant and radically alter things further down the road. Of course, it is too soon to say. Ultimately what this book did for me was release me from the need to be certain for the time being. It has also given me a LOT to think about for a long time to come, and I feel incredibly happy and relieved for it.

She obviously goes into waaay more detail and covers way more subjects then I mentioned here, so please go read it. It's very well written, and I highly recommend it, whether you're a theist, atheist, agnostic, or are simply curious about the subject.