Homo novoatheiensis
Karen Armstrong is awfully bossy for someone who talks so much about compassion.
Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.
That’s a terrible non sequitur, it seems to me – the quest for meaning continues, so God isn’t going anywhere. Eh? The quest for meaning doesn’t necessarily end up at God; God is not the only kind of meaning there is; one can ‘quest for’ or construct meaning without resorting to God. Besides – if the quest for meaning continues, then God must not be much of an answer to the problem, or the quest would have ended, because meaning would have been found.
Anyway, I always hate those ‘like it or not,’ ‘it’s always been this way and always will,’ ‘you might as well get used to it’ announcements. They piss me off. You don’t know what’s always going to be around, you don’t know what can or can’t be changed, and you don’t get to tell me what to get used to and put up with and quit struggling against. My quest for meaning involves fighting doomed battles, okay? You might as well get used to it.
I like PZ’s take.
In some ways, I’m always flattered by this argument that we need to define humans as a species by their religious beliefs, because I don’t have them…which means I get to claim that I, and my fellow atheists, are a new species. Let us go forth, my fellow Homo smartiepantsius, and take over the hominid niche.
Yeah! I’m a new species! Beats being a new atheist any day.
What has ‘always been around’? Death and taxes perhaps? Look back far enough and not even taxes.
Now for some that have a beginning in time much later than Homo sp:
Civilisation however defined
Writing – essential for the Abrahamic text-based religions.
However we read in Genesis that death was not always around either.
Thus religion (as Armstrong thinks of it, not always around) proves Armstrong wrong, and I rest my case.
I also love the take of the “Jesus and Mo” comic on this: http://www.jesusandmo.net/2009/10/23/
Funny thing is, religion wasn’t about meaning until it could no longer be about ‘the way things are.’ While Armstrong is right to say that fundamentalism is a species of modernism, she’s wrong to suggest that people didn’t think like fundamentalists before. The difference is that religious people, who want to stick with their religious traditions, have to do so in the teeth of the evidence, so of course they will ape science to some extent. What other kind of knowledge is there for them to ape? But the fact that they have to hold their beliefs in defiance of the evidence shows that, whatever meaning they think they have a grip on isn’t working.
And I hate the ‘you better get used to it angle’ too. Was that a threat? Yes, it was. Try to oppose us, and we just get that much more determined to hold on to the idiocies of the past. Remind you of something? Start with Herder in the 18th century, and you can trace the same thing right through until Hitler. Anti-modernism is dangerous, so, yes, it’s a threat.
Amazing, that this woman, the great marshmallow thinker of the time, gets all the big name venues to publish her stuff. Is it really stuff? Don’t put it too near the fire. It’ll turn to sweet, gooey liquid inside, with the thinnest of baked coatings to keep it all together.
It seems to me that Armstrong makes a very big concession in admitting that humans have been making up religions all along and that religious ideas have changed dramatically over time, but for some reason she still uses the word “God” as if it corresponds to something definite rather than merely the current religious ideas which happens to be in existance at the moment. However, given that she is advocating against viewing religion as making any factual claims, she is perhaps unlikely to view the concession that God is a human invention as important as it would only be so if one were interested in factual claims.
If you look at the comments thread the puhters at this big name venue are throwing bottles, and are extremely indignant that the noodler at the open mic has been let into Carnegie Hall. “Marshmallow thinker” is great. Eagleton is fudge, Armstrong marshmallow.
While I agree with your judgement Martin, I think Armstrong shows a remarkable lack of understanding of theology for a theologian.
Eric MacDonald:
Funny thing is, religion wasn’t about meaning until it could no longer be about ‘the way things are.’
You know, I actually have a fair bit of respect for some of those ancient religious thinkers. Sure they were wrong, but they were genuinely trying to figure out what the world was like. God was an empirical question, and they tired to answer it with the best tools they had, inadequate though those tools might have been.
But Armstrong, what is her value proposition? She seems to think of God as some eternal mystery, but a mystery is a fact about your knowledge, not about reality. Armstrong has made a god of her own ignorance and now worships it zealously.
I wish I knew Armstrong’s argument in greater detail. In my head I have a charitable interpretation of her kind of view, an interpretation that is immune to accusations like she’s made a god out of ignorance, but I don’t know if it’s actually her view. Does she really think that religion wasn’t about belief about reality prior to modernity (as I’ve sometimes heard her position described)? It just sounds like the pre-moderns understand faith as belief, while the modern fundamentals define faith as delusion. If so, then it would be clarifying the most ‘offensive’ and arguably obscure part of Dawkins’s argument for him.
From OB’s Armstrong link:
“To recover from the ill effects of the last year, we may need exactly that conquest of egotism that has always been essential in the quest for the transcendence we call ‘God.’ Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.”
Reading through Armstrong’s article, I was frankly surprised to find that she nowhere in it accords God an existence independent of the human mind. God is a search for meaning or for ‘transcendence’, however one may choose to define the latter.
I cannot escape the conclusion that Armstrong is arguing that while God may be a myth, ‘he’ (as Armstrong sets up God’s personal pronoun) is an essential myth to the humanity that created him and keeps reshaping and recreating him in accordance with its changing situation and needs.
As I recall, Plato took much the same attitude in his ‘Republic’; religion can remain the porridge for the masses, but philosophy will be the banquet for the elite.
Armstrong’s beef with Hitchens, Dawkins et al seems to be that they are arguing that neither her way of viewing God, nor the traditional way, are the only ways.
Where Armstrong argues an elitist view that God is an essential myth, they argue in a more egalitarian and democratic fashion that ‘he’ is not essential at all. Yet, as the above quote shows, Armstrong views religion as a force in opposition to egotism and selfishness, and for a more humane humanity; in my view a position in contradiction with itself.
Publishers of Ms. Armstrong’s insipid mental vomit are like charitable shelters for mentally or physically incapable animals: they care for the poor bastards until they die, and allow them to futilely bark at the normal canines on the other side of the asylum fence.
People stop and watch these pathetic imbecilic creatures to take pity.
They may well read the advertisements in passing…
Benjamin. Basically, Armstrong is saying that practically all faith traditions (at least monotheist ones) thought of faith as reaching beyond the limits of language until the modern age, when faith was assimilated to scientific ways of knowing about things “out there”. (This is clearly expressed in her book “The Case for God”.) She claims to find this everywhere she looks, and, of course, she is right on one count. There have always been those who have looked to faith as mystical experience, as a non-cognitive encounter with the “holy”. So, she won’t have any difficulty finding expressions of this understanding of faith no matter where she looks. But what she can’t find is a complete, qualitative break between the pre-modern and the modern age when it comes to the understanding of faith. True, science has given a hard-edgedness to ideas of objectivity (which is why some believers are so pleased with chaos and string theory, which seems to give them back some of the wooliness they were accustomed to), and this, coupled with the really outrageous things you have to believe if you want to go on believing in the old way, has made religious faith look silly and be dangerous (of course, it was always the latter). But it has not changed faith altogether. Yes, modern fundamentalism is a product of the modern age. No, fundamentalism is not toto caelo different from the kind of faith which came before. The difference is quite simply that before the modern age, what looks like fundamentalism today, looked reasonable then. Just read Aquinas and find out.
Eric, thanks. I haven’t read The Case for God, though eventually I will.
I’ve seen the “Case for God” in bookstores in the local shopping center. I just can’t bring myself to buy it. I don’t have the constitution I think. From all reports, I’m not missing anything. I also see Francis Collins’ book in the religion section. The Dawk’s books are the science section. mmmmm, what’s that telling me?
Well, I do think the search for meaning will always be with us–and I don’t think it would be good to lose it. But what on earth makes her assume the search for meaning must be tied to faith?
Oh, right, she’s re-defining “God” as synonymous with “meaning” so a searching for meaning must be a search for God. Got it.
I actually find it interesting that you don’t like “like it or not” statements, because I think there are a lot of really good arguments for atheism and against religion that are based on “like it or not” propositions about human nature.
E.g., like it or not, religious hierarchies are either instrumentally or inherently abusive (usually both) and faith can have a deleterious effect on people’s thinking and compassion. Even if the oh-so-meaningful religious types that Armstrong hails don’t wish this to be true, it is.
Hmm. I should have made the three phrases one long phrase – because it’s not the ‘like it or not’ by itself that I object to, it’s the ‘it will always be like this so get used to it and quit trying to change it.’ Religion could be different, and I would dislike it a lot less if it were. For instance if it started right out from the awareness that nobody has the faintest idea what any putative god is like or wants from us – then it would be both less dangerous and less presumptuous, and I would mind it far less.