Author: Ophelia Benson

I wouldn’t want you to think I’ve forgotten the twins. Chris popped his head around the door the other day to say ‘Here’s another favorable review’ (funny how both of them either ignore the bad reviews or pretend they were good reviews). While he was at it he also said ‘and here’s someone who thinks what we think – no actually he said her comment was ‘revealing’ and then said ‘It seems to me that Hannah is our ally in the cause of better public acceptance of science–and I for one, am glad for it.’ In other words, same old thing: keep ignoring what critics say and keep doggedly repeating what the twins say in the hopes that sheer repetition will convince the unconvinced.

Here’s a news flash: it won’t.

Hannah’s comment goes like so (you could write it yourself without even looking):

[A]theists have as much capacity for creating dogma as do religious folks. That is clearly evident in reading comments here. I will say, once again, that it’s insulting to continually read from progressive commenters here and other places that I must be a “crazy” who believes in “fairy tales”, etc. because I am a Christian. For the record, I have a degree in science (from a highly-regarded state university known for its science programs), have worked as a research assistant, am always trying to learn more about the natural world. The Christian denomination I belong to and many others are not like the fundies, and in fact are appalled at what those folks are doing. Many of us speak out against their un-Christian and other actions that harm their children (re education), the country and the world.

So…she thinks it’s insulting to read that she must be a crazy because she believes in fairy tales because she’s a Christian – but she doesn’t mind calling other Christians ‘the fundies’ and ‘un-Christian.’ What, exactly, is the difference? What is the relevant variable here?

Is it whose ox is being gored? Yes; pretty obviously. So she forfeited her moral standing to complain about being insulted.

But more to the point, it’s a silly complaint anyway. Suppose commenters here and there said that people who believe in Santa Claus or Loki or parking angels are crazy. That would be insulting to such people – and that would be just too bad. If you believe fanciful things for no good reason, then you just have to put up with people in the wider world saying those beliefs are silly. Your best friend may humour you, your siblings and colleagues perhaps will too, but you can’t expect all of humanity to oblige. You just can’t. In the public realm, ideas and beliefs have to stand on their merits. If they can’t – then there’s something wrong with them.

This is obvious in the case of beliefs in Santa Claus and parking angels. Generalized discussion of the absurdity of belief in Santa or parking angels doesn’t generally trigger outrage about militant fundamentalist new aclausists. Christian beliefs, like other religious beliefs, are not fundamentally different from other such fantasy-based beliefs, but people in Christian regions think they are because of long habit and social norms. That’s an illusion. It’s an illusion that ought to be patiently chipped away at until it is gone. It’s not an illusion that ought to be cherished and cuddled and pandered to.

Another comment from Eric.

Based on the linked interview, it seems pretty clear that Karen Armstrong never really left the convent. The mind has mountains, frightful, sheer, no man fathomed, as Hopkins said.

It also has walls. Take her claim that “The golden rule is that you treat everyone with absolute respect and you don’t exclude any creature, even a mosquito, from your radius of concern.” You have to have put up a wall somewhere to be able to say this. These are just empty words, and they reveal something about her use of language. Laurie Taylor says that he noticed “how carefully Karen constructs her sentences, her care with words, her capacity to alight on a perfect phrase with all the effortless delicacy of a sparrow on a washing line.” Well, but that’s not what she does. She sermonises. She uses empty words that “sound good”, that seem to be moved by something deep, but really they skate over the surface of things. I don’t know about you, but I swat mosquitoes! So much for radius of concern.

She sermonises. Every clergyperson has a stock of words and catch phrases that they can use ad libitum whenever the need arises. Listen to a long Baptist prayer, and you’ll hear all the stock phrases making an appearance, and everytime that minister or pastor is asked to say a prayer, the stock phrases are repeated over and over again, through dozens of prayers.

Or take the idea of the Hindus who bow to each other, and thereby acknowledge the divine in each person. It’s like everything that is done by religious people. Whether it has significance or not, it will be given it. Take the use of the word ‘thou’, used traditionally in direct address to God. During the time when liturgies were being modernised, ‘thou’ gave way to ‘you’. People objected, because ‘thou’ speaks of respectful distance. But of course that’s exactly the opposite of what was intended, because ‘thou’ in English is like ‘Du’ in German, used only with your closest friends, and in prayer. It communicated informality and intimacy. But that was only a rationalisation too.

Or take the claim that religious rituals are meant “to remind you that the world is not yours to do with as you choose.” No. The rituals developed because they were believed to be commanded by God. They were acts of obedience. However, environment is in, so it’s in in religion as well. The rituals only make sense in terms of some absolute command. Why would anyone do silly, ritual things otherwise? To remind you that you can’t do whatever you want with the world?

Nonsense. Listen to what she says: “Writing and study are my prayers.” It’s a way of “going beyond” and bringing “about a state of ecstasy.” She’s now like the Jews, because this is what they do when they study. No, it isn’t, because Jews do it because they are studying the words and thoughts of God, and this brings on ecstasy. The recitation of the Koran, says Hitchens, seems able to bring on exalted spiritual states. Yes, not because of the Arabic, though, however beautiful and mellifluous, but because it is thought to speak the words of a god.

“Karen Armstrong is a persuasive talker and writer.” Yes, she means to be. She’s a preacher. She’s picked up the smooth effortlessness of the born preacher, the cadence, the repeated catch phrases, the platitudes. She picked it up in the church. And yes. Of course she’s persuasive. But it doesn’t take us beyond, because it is focused on itself. Going beyond is the illusion of all effective preaching, an illusion of all effective religious language. That’s why changing it is so challenging to the religious. It bursts the bubble of illusion. Karen Armstrong knows the secret.

You can even square the circle and seem to be making sense. Consider her claim that “doctrines are a peculiar disease of western Christianity.” First, this makes a nonsense of her claim that religious beliefs are the effect of modernity. But, second, trinitarianism, christology, and the relationship of the persons of the Trinity were thrashed out in the east, with people like Gregory of Nazianzus, Athanasius, Arius, etc.., in an argument that was scarcely understood in the west. How christology was understood did derive in large part from the way that Christ was adored in popular devotion and liturgy. But the heart of the argument was ontological, and how the being of God and the being of Christ and the being of the Spirit were understood. It is ridiculous to suppose otherwise, and to say that doctrine was a particular concern of the west is nonsense (as Bentham might say) on stilts!

I was doing some research for an article earlier and found an interview of Karen Armstrong from a few years ago.

“I’m off to America tomorrow. I have a little book on the Buddha coming out in paperback, so I’m going to a literary festival to talk about it. Which is a nice rest from Islamic fundamentalism.” Was she regarded as an expert on Islam in the States? “Well, it has turned out a bit like that. I was supposed to be flying to America to take up a post at Harvard on September 12 in 2001 and was actually packing when the terrible news came through. So, when I got to Harvard I never even had a chance to set foot in the library. I was continually on the radio and writing articles. Vanity Fair and GQ and Time wanted huge articles on fundamentalism. I had to give two talks to the American Congress, to Senate and to the UN. Suddenly people wanted to know what Islam was.”

And the only person who could tell them was Karen Armstrong? Because Karen Armstrong is the only English-speaker in the world who knows anything about Islam, and there is no English-speaker in the world who knows more about Islam than Karen Armstrong? No, and no. Why was everyone demanding her then? Who knows – number of sales, name recognition, the thing where if you talk on the radio once then you become the person who talks on the radio every time after that – something along those lines. Whatever it is, it’s irritating. It’s especially irritating that even the US Congress and the UN couldn’t do better.

But that’s just a warm-up – the really irritating part comes later.

I don’t, though, think of myself as an ambassador for Islam. What I really want to do is make a plea to my own culture. And that began a long time ago during the Rushdie affair when I noticed that some of the liberal defenders of Rushdie segued very easily from a denunciation of the Ayatollah to an out-and-out denunciation of Islam. I began to think that we had learned nothing from the 20th century because it was that sort of cultivated inaccuracy that led to the death camps.

Notice the way she simply assumes (and assumes that Laurie Taylor will also assume) that ‘denunciation’ (which being interpreted means criticism) of Islam is bad and wrong and illegitimate. Then notice that she compares rabid loathing of Jews to criticism/’denunciation’ of Islam – as if they were exactly the same kind of thing and led in exactly the same direction. On the one hand a group of people, on the other hand a religion with its attendant ideas and rules and taboos.

But the tendency to read the Bible or the Koran as though they were literal texts, holy encyclopaedias where you look up information about God is an unfortunate offshoot of modernity…Religion is an art form. And it has always turned to art when it wants to express its truths, to architecture and music and poetry and dance. Theology should be poetry…[I]t should also fill you with the same sense of wonder and the same intimations of transcendence as when you read a great poem. Like poetry, religion is an attempt to express the inexpressible.

Yes, in Armstrong-land, but in the real world, that’s not what most believers mean by religion, to put it mildly.

Laurie Taylor suggests that that is a brand of self-serving nonsense that clerics and apologists fall back on when talking to skeptics. Armstrong is unmoved.

But religion was not about beliefs until the 18th century. That was the time when faith started to be equated with believing things instead of putting your trust in something. Until then religion had always been about doing things rather than believing things.

Really – then what was the Inquisition all about? What were the wars of religion about? What was Luther so agitated about? What were the post-Luther popes so worked up about? Why was there an Albigensian crusade? Why was there an Index?

Laurie Taylor asks related questions, but he claims to find Armstrong persuasive anyway. Well not me.