Even she doesn’t pray to it
Just what I keep saying – Karen Armstrong’s ‘God’ is all very well but it’s not what most believers mean by ‘God’ – to put it mildly. If a ‘United Church of Christ and American Baptist minister’ (you’re allowed to ride two bicycles like that?) doesn’t buy her version of god, why should anyone else?
[H]er pastiche construct of the divine, intended as a greater god, reduces the divine to an ethereal “it” describable in ethics as compassion and as transcendence in metaphysics, but unrecognizable in any of the world’s living religions as God. Even she doesn’t pray to it.
Just what I keep saying. Yet Armstrong is pretty emphatic that her pastiche is the real ‘God,’ is ‘God’ properly understood, is the One True Scotsman.
And even if she were right it wouldn’t make any difference. The god that matters now is the god that people believe in now and for most people that is not Armstrong’s pastiche, or any other ‘sophisticated’ abstraction, whether Terry Eagleton’s or Paul Tillich’s.
The United Baptist American of Christ minister likes Armstrong in other ways though.
The virtue derives from her giving God some needed press-coverage among the chattering classes…As a public intellectual in media coverage, Armstrong is a refreshing counterpoise both to old literalists (who confuse words with truth) and to the so-called New Atheists (who narrow truth down to facts)…providing some needed public-square intellectual respectability to religious thought.
Bollocks. Needed press-coverage among the chattering classes? Needed public-square intellectual respectability? Please. God gets plenty of press-coverage among the chattering classes and public-square intellectual respectability. Plenty. Look where this very article appears, just for a start – it’s in the regular ‘faith’ column in the Washington Post. There is no regular atheism column in the Washington Post! How much more press-coverage and intellectual respectability does Willis Elliott want? All God all the time?
This is pure bilge water! Did it never occur to people that they’re just making it up as they go along? Just consider. Here’s someone taking Armstrong to task, but, at least she’s on the right team! Give me strength! There either is, or there isn’t, something called God, and if there is, surely there should be some basis for the claim that this or that description captures this thing’s essence, or at least comes reasonably close. But no. Anything will do. Even Armstrong, in a pinch! Does this guy really believe anyhing? What would it mean to say that he does?
And, just in case he really didn’t know, the first edition of the Origin does not have the word ‘creator’ in the last sentence, and the breath is not God’s.
Yes, I thought the ‘her god is all wrong but what a good thing she’s peddling her all-wrong god to the pesky chattering classes’ was pretty funny. Contradict yourself much? Square the circle much?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend perhaps?
Yes, that’s pretty much what he says. She irritates him, bad, but she irritates the chatterers too, good.
I found Susan Jacoby’s take on Armstrong much more substantial and plausible (Thanks for providing the link to that in News, OB!), but Willis Elliott’s take on Armstrong is much, much funnier.
I never realized there were such riches in theistic comedy! Perhaps it’s my fever, but I really am finding the spectacular unselfawareness of the pious hilarious today. (Surely there’s a better word for it than unselfawareness, but I can’t think of it ‘cuz my head’s full of ick.)
G Felis, it’s that staggering lack of self awareness that means many religious never appreciate irony I suspect.
OK, the best word I can come up with for unselfawareness is unconscious. They just aren’t conscious of what they’re crapping on about.
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
Gotta love Darwin Online.
Karen seems to be carving out a lazy career of limp accomodationism that neither justifies itself to the rational enquirer, nor provokes an allergic reaction amongst the deluded.
“Just” enough to be able to string out her pathetic nonsense (literally, in both adjectives), to be able to coast from paycheck to paycheck.
I really don’t think that she wants to think about her thinking, for fear that her safety-bubble of “hermeneutic” mind-armor against rationality might burst against the minor pinpricks of logic and reality.
“Yes, I thought the ‘her god is all wrong but what a good thing she’s peddling her all-wrong god to the pesky chattering classes’ was pretty funny.”
No publicity is bad publicity, you know? Karen’s job is to keep sending a few volts through the old corpse to keep it twitching; the priest class can correct her twaddle about the Big Mysterious Mystery Behind All Mysteries later.
No, dzd, I think we’ve got that one all wrong. Christianity, at least, has had nothing to say in the secular sphere for going on five decades, maybe longer, but certainly since the sixties. We misunderstand Armstrong, and others like her, if we think that this is something that will be all straightened up later. It won’t be. It’s all being thrown into a great pot and called Christianity. And practically anything qualifies, from down and dirty creationists, to the puff the magic dragon religion of Karen Armstrong and Bishop John Shelby Spong. That’s all there is standing at the gates, and the other side of the gates are Muslims who have never given in to the cultural pressures of modernity, and laugh at our pretence of religion. Islam is thick and brutal. It doesn’t ask questions or have doubts. It stands there defiant against all the solvents of modernism. And until we get some idea of how to deal with this standoff, and recognise that Western liberalism, without the religious top dressing, is worth fighting for, Islam is going to win, hands down. And no one that I can see recognises that we’ve really got a problem, because Western Christians are afraid to defend Western liberalism, since so much of it is anti-Christian, and Western liberals, of whatever stripe, are afraid to stand up to Islam, for fear of being thought racist, colonialist, or some sum of nasty un-PC ideologies that no one wants to acknowledge anymore. And until we’ve figured out that this is a cultural conflict, in which atheism and its defence is only a tiny part, we’re going to go on being just as ineffective as we have been for the last ten years or so, maybe longer. The twaddle is not going to get corrected, because the twaddle is the only thing standing between us an the next Islamic dark age – unless Western liberalism, including Christianity, decides to stand up and defend itself. That, by the way, is why Gilders is right and wrong at the same time. He recognises the basic issues involved. He just thinks he has to be a jerk to stand up for what counts. He doesn’t. But he knows there’s something pretty desperate going on, and, he’s the voice of the future in Europe unless someone can get out there and make sense of things in another way. There, now I feel better.
Fellow Sunday-school teacher Arthur Compton! Darwin aficionado Eric Evans in his Petts Wood (Greater London) home!
I hate weaselly name-droppers, as I was saying at Michael Caine’s dinner-party just last week, as he offered me more port. Do you know Michael?
Come on, the comic potential of this article is immense. Willis Elliott’s had seven different jobs (couldn’t he hold one down?). If the English in his “six books” is anything like this, well I can’t wait not to read them.
It’s often said, but bears repeating, that one of the glories of Darwin’s works is how well he writes, as compared, for example with this nincompoop Elliott. I agree with Eric MacDonald that his article is meaningless.
[The joke about weaselly name-droppers is totally stolen from I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue on BBC Radio 4.]
I loved that line, “New Atheists (who narrow truth down to facts)”.
Well, yeah.
Yes so did I.
But we’re deluded! There’s a higher warmer softer better truth!
Once again, Shuggy makes a trenchant comment on Armstrong’s apophatic maunderings.
http://modies.blogspot.com/