Religion is not the problem, it's the user. One of the great example I give is NUCLEAR POWER, like religion it is beneficent in the right hands and deadly in the wrong hands.
Religions is an intangible thing, you cannot beat, hang, shoot, kick or bury it to fix the world problems, then why bark at it? The criminals need to be punished to restore faith and trust in the society.
Mike Ghouse
www.MikeGhouse.net
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Karen Armstrong's thinking shifts on religion and violence
Buddhists speak of the "third half of life," and at age 70, Karen Armstrong
is well into what might be called the third half of her career. First was a time
as a member of a Catholic religious order — a nun — in England and as a student
at Oxford. Next was a period when she served as the host of documentaries about
religion on British television and the author of their tie-in books. And then
came the impressive run of work she began with "A History of God" in 1993: big,
clear, learned, opinionated books about religion, in which she at once cherishes
the religious outlook and laments the abuses of religion, whether by churches,
states or individual fanatics.
Such a book is "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence"
(Alfred A. Knopf: 512 pp., $30). Since 9/11 the conventional wisdom has insisted
that religion and violence are inextricably intertwined. But Armstrong, who has
never failed to call out religion for its failings, proposes that "modern
society has made a scapegoat of faith."
As in "The Battle for God" (about fundamentalism) and "The Great
Transformation" (about the beginnings of the world religions), she moves
confidently from one faith tradition to the next — and touches down on their
encounters with violence: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion
following the Protestant Reformation, the bombings of the Boston Marathon. Her
aim is to complicate the simple idea that religion has sponsored violence from
its very beginnings.
She spoke in the lobby of a hotel in Washington, D.C., before giving a
presentation about the book at a synagogue that evening.
When "A History of God" came out, you seemed to
take a prosecutorial position toward organized religion. Now you seem much more
religion's advocate. Is that true, and if so, what accounts for
the change?
Yes, it's true. The change began while I was writing "A History of God." I
expected it to be like its predecessors: a rather smart, clever thing where I
showed how people just "rejigged" the idea of God to suit their purposes. But
things started to change there. I started seeing in depth how inadequate my idea
of God had been. As a young girl, and a young nun, I thought of God as "up
there." Then reading all these people, Maimonides, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, all
the great voices of the monotheistic tradition, and hearing them say that all
our ideas of God are man-made and can't possibly measure up to who God is — this
was a start of the deepening of my understanding.
I tended to favor the individual and the mystical over the organized. But
one of the things that I've learned is that religion is largely about community.
People before Luther simply didn't experience God in an individual way. You did
it by living with the idea of God in community and acting kindly and
creatively.
In my TV years I worked on a series in Israel about the Crusades and the
jihad. I had already started to think about both the current problems and the
old problems but in a superficial way. And I deepened my thinking with my books
on Jerusalem and then the book on fundamentalism, "The Battle for God": Every
single one of those fundamentalist movements is grounded in a sense of fear and
a fear that could harden into rage. I'd also been disturbed by the anti-Islamic
bias in Western culture, which goes back to the Crusades.
I wrote my book on the prophet Muhammad in the middle of writing "A History of God." It was the time of the Salman Rushdie crisis. I hated the fatwa, of course, and I actually quite liked "The Satanic Verses." What troubled me is the way his liberal supporters in the press moved from a condemnation of the fatwa to a condemnation of Islam as a violent, evil, bloodthirsty religion. I had an inchoate dread that this was something very dark. I understand how you feel when your creativity, your very life, is threatened. But I thought that we couldn't afford this kind of rhetoric after what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It was this kind of bigotry that made the concentration camps possible.
So this book about the relation of religion and violence was begun
as a way to write against the very idea that the one causes the
other?
People start off these interviews by saying, "Of course nobody thinks that
all wars are caused by religion" — and then they spend the rest of the interview
trying to insist that it really is all about religion. I'm not saying religion
is not implicated [in violence with a religious dimension]. But if we blinker
ourselves and don't look at all the other factors, we're not seeing our
situation straight.
The book is mostly devoted to the ways religion has sanctioned
state violence and political violence. What about individual violence?
The United States is said to be a notably religious
society and a notably violent society. Is there a link?
In the West, the big thing that is pushing all this [violence] is a sense
of meaninglessness — that life has no meaning. The men who arranged the bombings
at the Boston Marathon were religiously nonobservant: They never went to the
mosque. In surveys done of young men held up on terrorist charges since 9/11,
only about 20% had had a religious upbringing. Many of them were nonobservant,
or converts, or self-taught — like the young gunman in Canada, or the Nigerian
converts who killed [British soldier] Lee Rigby in London.
Did you think of giving more attention to voices against violence
in religious traditions?
Throughout the book I've tried to show how the various traditions devised
ways to help people get over violence. How Jewish rabbis actually completely
revised their interpretation of the Jewish scriptures to take the violence out.
How the ideal of ahimsa took root strongly in India. And how Jesus, who
was an excitable man, says that extraordinary thing: Love your enemies.
We're living in a globalized world, and the great theme that religion can
give us, and perhaps national mythologies cannot, is that we are profoundly
interconnected. Our histories are intertwined; economically we're absolutely
bound up with one another; what happens in Syria has a blowback in Canada. So
what the religions have insisted is that you cannot confine your benevolence to
your own group. You must love your enemies and reach out and practice what the
Indian sages called equanimity: You cannot prefer one being to another. You
cannot put yourself on a privileged pedestal, because that is no longer a
rational response to our globalized world.
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