redstar2000
23rd August 2005, 04:33
The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, New York, Knopf, 2000, ISBN 0-679-43597-2
Professor Armstrong, a British ex-nun, has written an instructive if also rather irritating book of some 371 pages.
If you are curious about the details of fundamentalist currents in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, this work would be a good place to start. The one curious omission in what is otherwise an exhaustive treatment of the subject is Catholic fundamentalism...Opus Dei does not appear in the index.
What is irritating about the book are her constant expressions of sympathy for the fundamentalist project -- "saving religion" in a secular age.
She is quite right to emphasize the deep-rooted fears of all the fundamentalist currents -- their primitive superstitions really are under relentless attack by secular views of all kinds.
But why should they not be? Don't those barbarians deserve to be attacked?
Not in her view. In fact, she sympathizes with them so much that she actually says explicitly that secular culture has "a god-sized hole in it".
Phrases like that are scattered throughout the book.
Worse, she drops in occasional but favorable references to the pseudo-scientist Freud -- as if to suggest that secular cultures have their own forms of "unreason".
Naturally, she abjures violence...whenever the fundies kill people, they have "perverted religion".
But you have to "understand", she says, that the fundies are "really scared".
She insists that religion "is not going to go away", that people "want to be religious", etc., etc. One can understand...she teaches at a school for aspiring rabbis.
But she never really explains why she thinks that...we are invited to conclude that "it's just the way people are".
An interesting footnote is the fact that she actually borrows a piece of historical materialism to buttress her work.
Traditional religions, she notes, are products of agricultural despotisms in which people had to be taught to accept poverty, sickness, the occasional famine or epidemic, military catastrophe, etc.
For should people rebel, then those fragile despotisms would collapse and everything would be "even worse".
After 1789, secularists (the rising bourgeoisie) no longer required that kind of "overwhelming" religion...and its radical children no longer required religion at all.
But that's about all the Marx that she wants. :lol:
So there you have it...a scholarly work rich in historical detail that is nevertheless an unsatisfying read.
After the revolution, we shall steal all her research, add a large section on Catholic fundamentalism, delete all her pro-religion comments, and then republish the work under the title The Roots of Religious Fascism.
It would make an excellent textbook.
http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/223.gif
Professor Armstrong, a British ex-nun, has written an instructive if also rather irritating book of some 371 pages.
If you are curious about the details of fundamentalist currents in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, this work would be a good place to start. The one curious omission in what is otherwise an exhaustive treatment of the subject is Catholic fundamentalism...Opus Dei does not appear in the index.
What is irritating about the book are her constant expressions of sympathy for the fundamentalist project -- "saving religion" in a secular age.
She is quite right to emphasize the deep-rooted fears of all the fundamentalist currents -- their primitive superstitions really are under relentless attack by secular views of all kinds.
But why should they not be? Don't those barbarians deserve to be attacked?
Not in her view. In fact, she sympathizes with them so much that she actually says explicitly that secular culture has "a god-sized hole in it".
Phrases like that are scattered throughout the book.
Worse, she drops in occasional but favorable references to the pseudo-scientist Freud -- as if to suggest that secular cultures have their own forms of "unreason".
Naturally, she abjures violence...whenever the fundies kill people, they have "perverted religion".
But you have to "understand", she says, that the fundies are "really scared".
She insists that religion "is not going to go away", that people "want to be religious", etc., etc. One can understand...she teaches at a school for aspiring rabbis.
But she never really explains why she thinks that...we are invited to conclude that "it's just the way people are".
An interesting footnote is the fact that she actually borrows a piece of historical materialism to buttress her work.
Traditional religions, she notes, are products of agricultural despotisms in which people had to be taught to accept poverty, sickness, the occasional famine or epidemic, military catastrophe, etc.
For should people rebel, then those fragile despotisms would collapse and everything would be "even worse".
After 1789, secularists (the rising bourgeoisie) no longer required that kind of "overwhelming" religion...and its radical children no longer required religion at all.
But that's about all the Marx that she wants. :lol:
So there you have it...a scholarly work rich in historical detail that is nevertheless an unsatisfying read.
After the revolution, we shall steal all her research, add a large section on Catholic fundamentalism, delete all her pro-religion comments, and then republish the work under the title The Roots of Religious Fascism.
It would make an excellent textbook.
http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/223.gif