Posts Tagged Karen Armstrong
Karen Amstrong, Ross Douthat, and the Functions of Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on September 24, 2010
My post on fake myths has generated some good discussion, and our future podcast guest Daniel Horne pointed me to a nice concise New York Times review by Ross Douthat of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, which prompted my line of thought about myth.
Douthat’s review presents a much better summary to the book than my preliminary attempt, and makes the overall point, which I agree with, that her argument ultimately doesn’t save the what the average Joe considers religion to be.
In short, she thinks what’s valuable about religion is its fulfillment of a spiritual need, and that fulfilling this need doesn’t require making specific metaphysical assertions. So, we should read scriptures allegorically and should be pluralist and open-minded about the many historical attempts to reach the divine, which is essentially inexpressible though not on that account entirely unknowable.
Read the rest of this entry »
Armstrong on Approaching Religious Texts
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on August 19, 2010
This clip actually addresses my concern about the political vs. the philosophical. It describes Armstrong’s intellectual evolution from skeptic to sympathetic historian.
-Mark
Armstrong on Dawkins and Harris
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on August 17, 2010
This is a follow up to my last post, which you should look at the comments on for some good comments by Wes. I’ve now read the part in Armstrong where she addresses Dawkins directly (from p. 304 of “The Case for God”):
For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood the term” God.
In discussing Sam Harris, she says:
Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he defines faith as “belief without evidence,” an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. It is not surprising, perhaps, that he should confuse “faith” with “belief” (meaning the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) because the two have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness.
Armstrong and Dawkins
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on August 16, 2010
Continuing my independent (i.e. not directly for the podcast) reading into the atheism debate:
Nearly done with the Karen Armstrong book. This is a good bit of secondary literature, with short summaries of the views re. God of a really impressively wide range of historical figures. Her overall view is that of apophatic, or negative theology, which is to say that an essential part of our experience is that language has limits, and that it helps us to get through life’s hardships if we can engage with this pull within us towards transcendence through devoted practice of some sort (ritual) and symbolic gestures (myths) towards this unknowable. Religious dogma and literalism entirely miss the point, and consequently atheistic attacks on these weak “fundamentalist” positions also miss the point. I’ve not sorted out exactly what I think about this but now have a number of potential authors for us to look at to explore this position.
I’ve also started a book Wes likes to bash, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I am initially pretty amused by it: a great work of original philosophy it is not, but it’s more thorough than I expected (given that he’s a non-philosopher!), and given that I’m sympathetic with the position on a political level, it doesn’t make me gnash my teeth in the way that a pro-religion book of equal erudition might. (And if anyone wants to recommend such a book to me, I might take a look…) Read the rest of this entry »
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