Genre: NonfictionAuthor: Karen Armstrong
Pages: 128 pages
Year of Publication: October 2019
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Synopsis:
What is this thing, religion, supposedly the cause of bloodshed and warring for centuries? What is ‘God’ and do we need ‘Him’ in our modern world? Karen Armstrong looks again at these questions in a refreshing and startling way. God is not to be ‘believed in’ as a child believes in Santa Claus; religion is not a story to be proven true or false, but a discipline akin to music or art that answers a deeply human need, and can teach us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.
Selected from A Case for God, Fields of Blood and The Lost Art of Scripture.
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“What we regard as truth, therefore, is inescapably bound up with a world that we construct for ourselves.” -pg. 22
The name of Karen Armstrong is not unfamiliar to me. A History of God, one of her books, is often displayed to bookstores and book festivals I went to. However, as much as I am so interested in the topic she talked about, I was hesitant to read her books. I did not have any preconceived knowledge on the topic she talked, hence, I postponed reading her works. Luckily, Vintage Minis decided to publish mini-books that summarize the ideas of great writers such as Armstrong. When I saw this book at a bookstore, I quickly brought it into the cashier.
There are four chapters in the book. The first one, What is Religion, Armstrong explained briefly the history of religion from a sociological and anthropological point-of-view. The entangled and, often, the inconclusive debate around religion convinced Armstrong that “despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive (pg.2).” A notion that I agree because I see how some religious people have lost their ability to critically think a simple question: does this religion/value work for me with this current challenge? To this, Armstrong answered that for one to reach enlightenment about the world, one has to have the “..willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of (pg. 16).”
The second chapter, God and Man, as the name implies, deals with the relationship between God and Man by drawing explanation from historical point-of-view. Armstrong explained how a great amount of religion have changed meaning as time goes. She started this section by saying that the origin of the word “religion”, religio, which comes from Latin is obscure. Yet, the word acquired a new important meaning, thanks to the early Christian theologians. This is proven by how St. Augustine (c. 354-430 BCE) saw religio as “a personal encounter with the transcendence we call God as well as the bond that unites us to the divine and one another (pg. 18).”
The third chapter, God and Knowledge, explains how the concept of God is slowly eroded by human’s endless quest to knowledge and certainty. In this section, Armstrong went to such length as to explain notable scientific discoveries and philosophical musing by modern thinkers from as early as the 18th century. Additionally, she also revealed how historical events, particularly the World Wars, changed people’s view of religion and the concept of God. These pieces of information that Armstrong gathered further show how religion and our reaction to it are embedded with quandaries and contradictions. One passage caught my attention when Armstrong cited Paul Tillich’s statement (1886-1965), an army chaplain in the First World War that later became a professor of theology in Frankfurt:
“We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: ‘Does God exist?’ Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.” -pg. 67
In the final chapter, Death of God, Armstrong discussed the rise of secularism and the decline in religion in the modern era. Additionally, she also lay her criticism of the Death of God movement on how it is flawed. Further, she identified the rise of fundamentalism in this current age, which has become the target of critics from atheist figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.
Reading Religion was a meditative experience for me as I am embarking on my own spiritual journey. Armstrong invited me to question again to define what religion, is and look like to me, in the modern world. Before reading Religion, I read Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think of These Things that touch on some topics around religion and being religious. As I compared Armstrong and Krishnamurti, I see that Armstrong is in the same boat as Krishnamurti. In Think of These Things, Krishnamurti said that being religious is being able to be sensitive to reality, being watchful and alert to how the world and your mind work in daily life. Armstrong is able to understand that by saying:
“Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve.” -pg. 91.
Further, I like how Armstrong acknowledged on the bias of the modern education that prizes highly on scientific rationalism and abandon the humanities, in which I am sure that those who are in humanities can understand. Not only that, Armstrong explained the physiology of our brain hemispheres, associating our human quest with mythos and logos. However, I am well aware that there was an amount of overgeneralizing statements. As I am still a novice in discussing theology, this just leads me further to immerse myself in books about theology and philosophy.
In the end, I would recommend to anyone interested in religion and theology to read this short introduction by Karen Armstrong. After reading this, I am more than eager to read another book by Vintage Minis as this one was insightful read to me.
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