Wishful thinking: Karen Armstrong continues her quest to absolve religion from playing any role...

[trotsky]

(title cont'd): ...in violence.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/the-review/wishful-thinking-karen-armstrong-continues-her-quest-to-absolve-religion-from-playing-any-role-in-violence

In 1095, Pope Urban II asked the knights of France to take on a sacred mission. The Christians of the East had fallen under the dominion of Muslim rulers, as had the holy city of Jerusalem, and it was time to rescue them. It was to be, the pope suggested, “an act of love” where they were to “nobly [lay] down their lives for their Eastern brothers”.

The knights left in the spring, brimming with zeal to win back the Holy Land for Christendom. In Germany, they pillaged and murdered the local Jewish population. “Do we need to travel to distant lands in the East to attack the enemies of God,” wondered one participant, “when there are Jews right before our eyes, a race that is the greatest enemy of God?” After arriving in Jerusalem in 1099, following years of bloody attacks on the local Muslim population, and a five-week siege of the city, the knights gathered at the tomb of Jesus, singing Easter hymns and thanking God for their success. It was the first Crusade. More would follow.

The religious historian Karen Armstrong has set herself a complex and fraught task with her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Surveying the whole of recorded human history, the former Roman Catholic nun seeks to discover the links between religious belief and violence like the Crusaders’. What inspires the faithful to take up arms in the name of God? Is religion, as Armstrong imagines its critics arguing, “responsible for more war, oppression, and suffering than any other human institution”?

...

Religion, as Armstrong argues in the book’s afterword, “does lots of different things”. The Hindu rioters who tore down the Babri mosque may have been as ill-informed about the precepts of their religion as the crusading medieval knights, but to simply excuse them from the charmed circle of the religious elect is insufficient. Dismissing an entire religion because of the horrific acts of some of its practitioners is intellectually lazy; but dismissing those practitioners from their faiths because of the conclusions they reached about what belief meant is intellectually dishonest.

[edhopper]

1. She is right at home

here.

[skepticscott]

2. Yes...knee-jerk apologetics

combined with intellectual puffery.

[trotsky]

3. Sad but true.

And the thing is, are there any atheists here who engage in the opposite? Namely, believing that religion is 100% the cause of all violence and problems in the world? I haven't met one.

Yet the absolute that "heroes" like Armstrong and Reza Aslan defend - that religion is NEVER to blame, that it NEVER plays a role in anything bad - is embraced as some kind of reasonable middle ground.

I don't get it.

[edhopper]

4. This being a relgion forum

There are often stories posted which deal with the less desirable consequences of religious belief.
And how F'ed up some parts of the world are from religion. So the emphasis is understandable.
When other causalities are brought up, I don't need all that they are denied as a factor as well.
There can be a discussion on the main cause, but instead it too often becomes a denial that religion affects people's beliefs, as ludicrous as that sounds.

[mr blur]

5. I don't really think you're meant to get it.

In fact you're not supposed to think about it at all. They expect us to just accept it as fact and not question it because...religious privilege.

There's nothing reasonable about any of it.

[rug]

6. I wonder why he didn't mention Gaza.

But she fails to ask the difficult questions that might unravel her argument in defence of religion, such as why rabidly militant, religiously oriented splinter groups like ISIL have proven so powerful. Why do some violent Muslim groups continue to dream of enforcing religious law on all in their midst, or of restoring a premodern theocracy? Why do 21st-century Hindu religious zealots orient themselves, politically and geographically, around the purported site of an 11th-century massacre by a Muslim sultan? These questions might imply a tilt towards religious scepticism, and are thus avoided. Fields of Blood begins with a conclusion and massages the evidence into place, but for all of Armstrong’s vaunted erudition, the history of religious violence is not so easily summarised, or dismissed.