{"id":2685,"date":"2009-09-13T17:21:28","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T01:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2685"},"modified":"2009-09-13T17:21:28","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T01:21:28","slug":"metaphorical-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/metaphorical-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Metaphorical religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins have companion essays <\/a>on the implications of evolution for religion in the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0 I am not very familiar with Armstrong\u2019s writings.\u00a0 I tried her book on Islam and found it saccharine, and I know that supporters of traditional religious belief regard her tolerant relativism with deep suspicion.\u00a0 Her argument here strikes me as so revisionist that it must grow out of some broader intellectual or ideological agenda of which I am unaware.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Armstrong blames the 17th century scientific revolution for the belief in a literal God.\u00a0 Until then, she claims, Christians were highly sophisticated consumers of religious myth, well-aware that<\/p>\n

what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was Newton who made people think that God actually created the universe, Armstrong says, and set them up for unbearable anguish when evolution showed that \u201cthere is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos\u201d and that \u201cGod had no direct hand\u201d in making human beings (Armstrong\u2019s addition of \u201cdirect\u201d to \u201chand\u201d here is\u00a0 supremely disingenuous.\u00a0 Did he have a hand in creation or not?)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea that Medieval crusaders, relic-seeking pilgrims, or Europe\u2019s warring sects possessed an ironic, purely metaphorical conception of \u201cGod,\u201d one requiring scare quotes, strikes me as preposterous.\u00a0 The New Testament purports to be a historical account of a real God incarnate and his miraculous life on earth.\u00a0 The earliest cathedral iconography stressed just those miraculous aspects of the Jesus story, such as the resurrection and Jesus\u2019 faith healing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Armstrong claims that the pre-Christian world also regarded cosmology not \u201cas factual but [as] primarily therapeutic, . . . recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had\u2014somehow\u2014brought something out of primal nothingness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just as the religious construct the God that they want to believe in, it would appear that spirituality fans construct the religion that they want to believe in.\u00a0 Armstrong is surely projecting her own favored understanding of religion onto a phenomenon that doesn\u2019t necessarily conform to her ideal.\u00a0 Perhaps some ancient believers regarded their religion as \u201ctherapeutic\u201d and had no desire to tap into a supernatural power that would respond to their needs, but I doubt whether they represented the majority of believers.\u00a0 Armstrong also embraces what strikes me as a rather literal functionalism:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cNot supposed to\u201d according to whose plan?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dawkins\u2019 essay and Armstrong\u2019s do not immediately seem to intersect.\u00a0 Dawkins concludes, however, by\u00a0 mocking contemporary theologians who are willing to jettison the idea of a literal God in favor of a purely pragmatic one.\u00a0 Don\u2019t think that you are representing actual believers, Dawkins says.\u00a0 He could as easily have directed his critique to Armstrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for Dawkins’ assertion that life in every corner of the universe must always have evolved from simplicity to complexity, is such confidence justified–unless he is not simply stating a tautology?\u00a0 Might there not be realities out there beyond what our own mental capacities can ever hope to grasp or foresee?\u00a0 \u00a0(And I don’t mean “God.”)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins have companion essays on the implications of evolution for religion in the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0 I am not very familiar with Armstrong\u2019s writings.\u00a0 I tried her book on Islam and found it saccharine, and I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[335,334],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2685"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2690,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2685\/revisions\/2690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}