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Ek het eenkeer ’n gesprek gehad met ’n redelik liberale teologiese student. Hy het my die boek The case for God deur Karen Armstrong, aanbeveel. Hier volg ’n paar boekresensies om ’n idee te gee wat Karen Armstrong se siening is – dit is ver van Bybelgetrou. ’n Mens kan die vraag vra hoekom sy nog enigsins in ’n god glo? Wat sy probeer is om God af te breek tot ’n vlak waar ateïste ook gemaklik met God kan wees.
Kyk ook heel onder vir ’n paar voorgestelde bronne oor die kwessies wat hier uitgelig word.
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THE CASE FOR GOD
By Karen Armstrong
406 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Douthat-t.html?_r=1
The Bush era was a difficult time for liberal religion in America. The events of 9/11 were not exactly an advertisement for the compatibility of faith and reason, faith and modernity, or faith and left-of-center politics. Nor was the domestic culture war that blazed up in their wake, which lent a “with us or against us” quality to nearly every God-related controversy. For many liberals, the only choices seemed to be secularism or fundamentalism, the new atheism or the old-time religion, Richard Dawkins or George W. Bush.
But now the wheel has turned, and liberal believers can breathe easier. Bush has retired to Texas, and his successor in the White House is the very model of a modern liberal Christian. Religious conservatism seems diminished and dispirited. The polarizing issues of the moment are health care and deficits, not abstinence education or intelligent design. And the new atheists seem to have temporarily run out of ways to call believers stupid.
The time, in other words, is ripe for a book like “The Case for God,” which wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism in an engaging survey of Western religious thought. Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific popular historian, wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. To that end, she doesn’t just argue that her preferred approach to religion — which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness — is compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.”
Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.
These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.
It’s a knack, Armstrong argues, that the Christian West has largely lost, and the rise of modern science is to blame. Not because science and religion are unalterably opposed, but because religious thinkers succumbed to a fatal case of science envy.
Instead of providing the usual portrait of empiricism triumphing over superstition, Armstrong depicts an extended seduction in which believers were persuaded to embrace the “natural theology” of Isaac Newton and William Paley, which seemed to provide scientific warrant for a belief in a creator God. Convinced that “the natural laws that scientists had discovered in the universe were tangible demonstrations of God’s providential care,” Western Christians abandoned the apophatic, mythic approach to faith in favor of a pseudo scientific rigor — and then had nowhere to turn when Darwin’s theory of evolution arrived on the scene.
An Aquinas or an Augustine would have been unfazed by the idea of evolution. But their modern successors had convinced themselves that religious truth was a literal, all-or-nothing affair, in which doctrines were the equivalent of scientific precepts, and sacred texts needed to coincide exactly with the natural sciences. The resulting crisis produced the confusions of our own day, in which biblical literalists labor to reconcile the words of Genesis with the existence of the dinosaurs, while atheists ridicule Scripture for its failure to resemble a science textbook.
To escape this pointless debate, Armstrong counsels atheists to recognize that theism isn’t a rival scientific theory, and that it is “no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth — or lack of it — only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action.” Believers, meanwhile, are urged to recover the wisdom of their forebears, who understood that “revealed truth was symbolic, that Scripture could not be interpreted literally” and that “revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity.”
This is an eloquent case for the ancient roots of the liberal approach to faith, and my summary does not do justice to its subtleties. But it deserves to be heavily qualified. Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre.
[Kommentaar: Dit is duidelik hoe Armstrong aanvaar dat evolusie waar is en dat haar hele punt is dat evolusie geloof verkeerd bewys het soos ons dit altyd geken het. Die waarheid moet simbolies gesien word, wat ’n totale post-modernistiese siening is.]
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http://mccabism.blogspot.com/2009/07/karen-armstrong-and-case-for-god.html
SUNDAY, JULY 05, 2009
Karen Armstrong and the case for God
[Modern theists] give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. (Freud, The Future of an Illusion).
In The Case for God: What religion really means, former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong reiterates a now-familiar line of defence against the new wave of atheism. This generally amounts to the complaint that atheists such as Richard Dawkins have a theologically-uninformed, and mistakenly literalist interpretation of religious scripture. Thus, amongst those of an educated, literary-ecclesiastical background, religion is defended by advocating a metaphorical interpretation of scripture, and an aesthetic-mytho-poetic concept of God.
Wary of the power of science to overthrow religious worldviews, as demonstrated in the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, the modern theist ushers God into an ontological safe-zone, where he cannot be subject to refutation by empirical means. Realising, however, that even this stronghold cannot resist the barbs of logic and reason, God is blindfolded, and bundled unceremoniously into a waiting limousine, whence he is taken at breakneck speed to a supra-logical and supra-semantic realm, beyond all human understanding.
“God is, by definition, infinitely beyond human language,” writes Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. “Yet thanks to the misapplication of science to religious faith, we remain literal-minded and spiritually immature, frightened of the silence and solitude in which the Ancient of Days, the Unnameable, might be experienced, though never understood.
“We need to think of God not as a being, but as Being. Armstrong points us towards a vast tradition in all religions in which, in essence, you can ultimately say nothing about God, since God is no thing. In Islam, all speaking or theorising about the nature of Allah is mere zannah, fanciful guesswork. Instead, try ‘silence, reverence and awe,’ she says; or music, ritual, the steady habit of compassion, and a graceful acceptance of mystery and ‘unknowing’…God is dead — but, Armstrong suggests, all we have lost is a mistaken and limited notion of God anyway: a big, powerful, invisible man who does stuff.”
All of which will come as a surprise to the majority of monotheistic religious believers in the world, who believe that the universe was created by God, that God answers prayers and performs miracles, and provides the means for an afterlife.
Hart’s proposition that God is not a being, but Being itself, is the familiar doctrine of pantheism, which is inconsistent with the personal nature of God enshrined in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The notion espoused by these religions that God is a transcendent, supernatural, personal being, who created the natural universe, is inconsistent with the pantheistic notion that God is an immanent, non-supernatural, non-personal being, equivalent to the natural universe. But, of course, it is precisely the existence of such irritating contradictions which explains the modern theist’s desire to push God into a supra-logical realm.
To propose that the notion of God is beyond all human understanding, language and logic, is to acknowledge that there is no coherent, comprehensible content to belief in God. Not only is belief in God belief without reason or evidence, but it is a belief without coherent content. The proponent of the modern educated defence against atheism is, in effect, admitting:
‘I have a belief, without reason or evidence, in a meaningless proposition.’
At which point, I rest my case.
[Kommentaar: Karen Armstrong probeer geloof in ’n god te verdedig en “aanvaarbaar” te maak vir die ateïs, deur amper God af te breek na hulle vlak. Die rede is weereens om verby die probleem te kom dat God nie in die wetenskap toegelaat word nie.]
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All quiet on the God front
Simon Blackburn discusses the argument that religious experience can’t be discussed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/case-for-god-karen-armstrong
This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.
This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world’s best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can’t you fail. This is Armstrong’s principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect. This is a perversion of anything valuable in religious practice, Armstrong writes, and it is only this perverted view that arouses the scorn of modern “militant” atheists. So Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have chosen a straw man as a target. Real religion is serenely immune to their discovery that it is silly to talk of a divine architect.
So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the “apophatic” tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic. Words such as “God” have to be seen as symbols, not names, but any word falls short of describing what it symbolises, and will always be inadequate, contradictory, metaphorical or allegorical. The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression. The right kind of silence, of course, not that of the pothead or inebriate. The religious state is exactly that of Alice after hearing the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”: “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are.” If Alice puts on a dog collar, she will be at one with the tradition.
Armstrong is not presenting a case for God in the sense most people in our idolatrous world would think of it. The ordinary man or woman in the pew or on the prayer mat probably thinks of God as a kind of large version of themselves with mysterious powers and a rather nasty temper. That is the vice of theory again, and as long as they think like that, ordinary folk are not truly religious, whatever they profess. By contrast, Armstrong promises that her kinds of practice will make us better, wiser, more forgiving, loving, courageous, selfless, hopeful and just. Who can be against that?
The odd thing is that the book presupposes that such desirable improvements are the same thing as an increase in understanding – only a kind of understanding that has no describable content. It is beyond words, yet is nevertheless to be described in terms of awareness and truth. But why should we accept that? Imagine that I come out of the art gallery or other trance with a beatific smile on my face. I have enjoyed myself, and feel better. Perhaps I give a coin to the beggar I ignored on the way in. Even if I do so, there is no reason to describe the improvement in terms of my having understood anything. If I feel more generous, well and good, but the proof of that pudding is not my beatific smile but how I behave. As Wittgenstein, whose views on religion Armstrong thoroughly endorses, also said, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. You can feel good without being good, and be good without stretching your understanding beyond words. Her experience of “Jabberwocky” may have improved Alice.
Silence is just that. It is a kind of lowest common denominator of the human mind. The machine is idling. Which direction it then goes after a period of idling is a highly unpredictable matter. As David Hume put it, in human nature there is “some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent”. So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance.
• Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed is published by Penguin.
[Kommentaar: Volgens Armstrong is geloof ’n tipe kunsvorm en nie ’n verhouding met ’n god nie. Dit kom weereens sterk deur dat jy nie god en die wetenskap/realiteit kan meng nie en daarom maak dit argumente van Dawkins en andere teen God, sinneloos – so verdedig sy geloof.]
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In defence of the true God
Karen Armstrong wages a vigorous war on the twin evils of religious fundamentalism and militant atheism, says Alain de Botton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/19/armstrong-case-god-alain-de-botton
Karen Armstrong is one of the handful of wise and supremely intelligent commentators on religion who has become distressed by the tone of recent discussions of the subject. Her targets are religious fundamentalism on the one hand and militant atheism on the other: in other words, al-Qaida as well as Richard Dawkins. In plain language, and nowhere more eloquently than in this new book, Armstrong accuses both factions of misunderstanding the nature of God and, interestingly, of doing so in similar ways.
Both atheists and fundamentalists take God to be an essentially human sort of figure, a giant Father in the sky who watches over us, punishes the guilty, intervenes directly in our affairs and is entirely comprehensible to our minds. “We regularly ask God to bless our nation, save our queen, cure our sickness or give us a fine day for a picnic.” Fundamentalists commit, in Armstrong’s view, the grave error of presuming to know God’s mind and also of enlisting God on their side against their enemies. Unsurprisingly, militant atheists observe this reductive vision of God and in turn slam religion as a child-like description of the world that cannot compare with the subtlety and practical powers of science. Armstrong’s new book is shaped as a response to these two distortions. She wishes to remind us of the mystery of God. Her sympathy is with the great Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians who have denied that any human attempt to put the divine into words will be accurate. We are simply too limited to be able to know God; our apprehension must hence be suffused with an awareness of our provisional and potentially faulty natures. She writes: “He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God ‘exists’, because our concept of existence is too limited.” Much of Armstrong’s book is spent pointing out the deep-seated needs that religions have traditionally addressed. She begins in the caverns of Lascaux in the Dordogne and argues that the early religious rites to which the famous animal pictures belonged were connected with our ancestors’ wish to atone for the overbearing guilt that came from having to butcher other living creatures for survival. Like art, religion has been a way of containing feelings that might otherwise tear individuals and societies apart. Armstrong leans heavily on the distinction first made by the ancient Greeks between the realms of mythos and logos. Logos is “a pragmatic mode of thought that enables people to function effectively in the world”; it is what we rely on when organising society or planning a journey. However, logos has its limitations: “It cannot assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles.” For this, there is the realm of mythos or myth, to which religion and art belong. Religion offers us moments of what Armstrong calls, using another Greek term, ekstasis, a stepping outside of the norm for the sake of release and consolation.
Aside from helping us to deal with our feelings of fear, aggression and guilt, religion is also defended by Armstrong as a source of compassion. She recounts the story of a man who once came to see the great Rabbi Hillel and asked if he might undertake a rigorous course of study of the Torah with him. Hillel waved him away: “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go learn it.” Armstrong traces the emphasis on compassion across the major religions. There are fascinating discussions here of the Buddhist state of “anatta”, or no self, a desirable condition that can be reached only through extensive meditation. It can lead us, for brief periods, to look at the world as though we were not ourselves participants in it, and therefore free us from our noxious impulses to pass judgment and to presume that we know why other people have acted the way they have.
The concluding part of Armstrong’s book traces the growth of modern atheism and attributes it largely to religions’ failure to argue for what is most compelling about them. Fatally, religions tried to defend themselves against science by arguing that they knew the truth better than the geologists, rather than presenting themselves (as one feels Armstrong would have wished) as the guardians of mystery and therapeutic manoeuvres of the mind.
A melancholy tone sometimes makes itself felt in this book, as one senses the author defending religion from its own worst impulses. As a former nun, Armstrong’s perspective is unique in its combination of sympathy and lack of sentimentality towards religion’s wilder and more immature claims. She joins Richard Holloway and Charles Taylor as one of the most intelligent contemporary defenders of religion, making a case that scrupulously avoids reliance on the supranatural. As in so much of the rest of her hugely impressive body of work, Karen Armstrong invites us on a journey through religion that helps us to rescue what remains wise from so much that to many in Britain today no longer seems true.
* Alain de Botton’s most recent book is The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Hamish Hamilton).
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http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307269188
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?
Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”
[Kommentaar: Volgens Armstrong is die enigste doel van geloof om ons ’n beter lewe te laat lei: dit gee ons kreatiwiteit, vrede en selfs vreugde.]
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112968197
A former nun, Karen Armstrong left her convent in the late 1960s, and for 13 years she distanced herself from organized religion. She ended up working in television, and on an assignment in Jerusalem she had a kind of epiphany about the similarities among the major world religions. It was the study of those religions that allowed her to revisit her own faith. Armstrong published her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, in 1982. Twenty-seven years and more than 20 books later — including the best-selling A History of God — Armstrong releases her latest book, The Case for God. In it, she argues that religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of the mind and heart.
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Karen Armstrong and the case of the unknown God
By Mark Vernon on Sunday, June 28 2009, 12:56 – Religion – Permalink
Karen Armstrong is always a good read. But I’ve been particularly keenly antici pating her new book because I’d guessed that in it she would address head on what I take to be the fundamental issue in contemporary religious discourse. She does. In The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, she turns her scholarly but lucid prose to the rise of the new atheists – although she does so, not by tackling them directly, but by going back to basics, all the way, in fact, to the pre-history of humanity’s engagement with the transcendent. She tells the story of our attempts to understand the ineffable, stressing that until the early modern period, nearly all religions, most of the time, realised that God, or the Dao, or Nirvana was literally indescribable, and so could be only manifest, if it could be manifest at all, in a way of life.
That last point might be challenged as a question of history. However, the theological point for us now is that an error took hold soon after the Renaissance. This was the conviction that religious truths could be proven by reason, tested by evidence and timelessly captured in a text or doctrine. Hence, the spiritual mess we are in, of which the new atheism is but a part, alongside fundamentalism, and the almost complete loss in mainstream religion of the apophatic – the practice by which any declaration of what God is must be followed by the declaration that God is simultaneously not that too. As you read this story, what’s at stake emerges in a number of intellectual shifts that have taken place. For example, the word ‘belief’ now means a declaration of what is taken to be factually correct, whereas before it meant a whole-hearted commitment to a person or tradition – as in ‘I believe in you.’ Alternatively, religion that is based upon reason (as opposed to using reason as a way of discerning a path to that which lies beyond reason), as well as religion that stems solely from observing the natural world – in other words, deism and pantheism – are bound to be spiritually limited, since reason or nature contains it. Moreover, such approaches lead to atheism, since the theological element comes to seem superfluous – a kind of supernatural extravagance when reason or nature alone will do.
Or again: it is commonplace now to view God as a kind of supreme being. ‘He’ is taken to be like us – in goodness, powers or knowledge – only infinite in capacity. Such anthropomorphisms, though, were anathema to the great theologians of history, from Augustine to Aquinas, as well as their equivalent theological giants in other traditions. At best, we can speak of God provisionally and analogically, for God is no being at all.
Perhaps the most common mistake today is to view religion as primarily an individual affirmation of metaphysical beliefs, rather than to understand it as a way of life that is practiced with others. It is within and from such practice that any beliefs emerge, those beliefs being incomprehensible aside from the way of life. There is nothing mysterious in that, per se; it is not a kind of intellectual avoidance strategy. Rather, the point is that it is the way of life that is the primary source of the insights, the metaphysics being an always inadequate attempt to distil them – though metaphysics in itself is a vital exercise in discernment.
Authentic religion, then, is characterised by being kenotic – that is other-oriented and self-emptying; unknowing – like Socrates who did not seek to prove anything but to bring about a change of mind based upon a realisation of wise ignorance; and spiritual – in the sense of being a labour of love through which someone comes to see the transcendent in the everyday.
Of course, religion has always led to bigotry too, particularly when it has been aligned with political power, which invariably corrupts its way of life. But today, in particular, Armstrong’s argument is that we need to rediscover the agnostic joys of intuiting that which is ultimately beyond us. You do see it, in fact, in the writings of some physicists like Paul Davies, for whom the unfolding mysteries of the cosmos yield ‘astonishment.’ Or the words of some philosophers like Karl Popper, who derived great happiness from the occasional glimpses of truth his intellectual struggles afforded. Or the poems of the Romantics like Wordsworth, who came to ‘see into the life of things.’ Today, Armstrong concludes, we collectively might be entering a kind of cloud of unknowing about those things that have traditionally been captured in the best myths and practices of religion. It’s the perhaps inevitable result of the ‘knowing’ produced by science, which though invaluable in its own way, has unbalanced us. This is, therefore, a dangerous time. It is hard to give up on the lust for certainty. Violence – physical and intellectual – is a constant threat.
But these are fascinating times in which to live too. Although the religious impulse has been profoundly challenged by modernity, so much so that even religious people systematically forget that God is not God if not unknown, writers like Armstrong – and the fact that she sells books by the bucket-load too – suggest it never quite died. Thank the whoever for that.
[Kommentaar: Volgens Armstrong is alle gelowe maar familie van mekaar.
Sy redeneer ook dat die rede hoekom geloof in ’n gemors is, is omdat mense dit wetenskaplik wou bewys. Dit is egter nie waar nie. ’n Mens sal God nooit wetenskaplik kan bewys nie (kyk “Voorgestelde bronne” heel onder), maar ’n mens sal ook nie evolusie, wat sy omarm, kan bewys nie. Daar is egter ’n baie sterk saak vir ’n Intelligente Ontwerper (kyk Design Features Questions and Answers), wat sy lyk my nie erken nie.]
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The case for God – what religion really means.
Karen Armstrong
’n Resensie deur Samuel Pauw in Die Kerkbode, 16 April 2010
Die gesprek oor God het in die eerste dekade van die 21 ste eeu meer intens as ooit geword. Die wat die bestaan van God afwys, het dit al meer sonder skroom begin doen. Dikwels met argwaan en sarkasme. Een van die stemme wat orals gerespekteer word, is die van die briljante denker en skrywer-teoloog Karen Amstrong. Haar jongste boek, The case for God – what religion really means, is een wat groot belangstelling uitlok. Samuel Pauw gee ’n kort opsomming van die inhoud van die boek.
Karen Armstrong was in haar jeug ’n non. Daarna het sy vir jare geen erg aan godsdiens gehad nie. Sy het hierna met ’n omvattende studie van die drie monoteïsmes en Oosterse godsdienste begin. Vanuit die wye verwysingsraamwerk het sy oorspronklike en verrassende insigte ontwikkel. Haar jongste boek, The case for God (2009) is, soos haar ander werke, dig geskryf en deeglik nagevors met meer as 70 verwysings per hoofstuk. Die sagte aanslag van die boek val op. ’n Sokratiese benadering is merkbaar; daar is min aggressie, eerder sagte en oortuigende argumente om andersdenkendes te oorreed tot ’n herwaardering van hulle standpunte. Die boek behandel onder andere die volgende:
Logos en mythos
Vanaf die vroegste tye was die twee begrippe ’n wesenlike deel van menswees. Armstrong se ondersoek begin by die grotskilderye van Lasquax, ongeveer 30 millennia gelede. Die misterieuse het duidelik hier ’n belangrike rol gespeel. Die Grieke en Romeine het albei begrippe, logos en mythos, as geldig aanvaar en gemaklik daarmee saamgeleef. Vanaf die “moderne” periode – die skrywer kies 1492 vir die begin hiervan – het logos (die rede, rasionaliteit) al sterker op die voorgrond begin tree. Feitelike kennis wat noodsaaklik vir voortbestaan was en is, het die maatstaf geword. Mites, waarvan die volle betekenis nie onder woorde gebring kan word nie, is as blote stories beskou en aan onwaarhede gelykgestel. Die verband en balans tussen logos en mythos is ’n deurlopende tema in die boek. Dit is twee afsonderlike terreine wat verkieslik nie op mekaar inbreuk behoort te maak nie. Wetenskap en godsdiens is ook afsonderlike terreine wat elk ’n bydrae tot ’n sinvolle leefwyse maak: Die wetenskap kan byvoorbeeld kanker diagnoseer en soms gesond maak, maar dit kan nie die angs wat so ’n diagnose veroorsaak, aanraak nie. Godsdiens kan wel sulke angs besweer. Armstrong bepleit ’n herwaardering van mythos; baie dele van die Bybel behoort volgens haar hiertoe. ’n Groter klem op mythos kan gelowiges vandag help om met meer vrede, vreugde en kreatiwiteit te leef.
Godsbegrip
Vir Armstrong is dit ’n onderskeidende kenmerk van die mens om na die spirituele, na dit wat verder en dieper as die werklikheid lê, te soek en dit te ervaar.
Sy praat graag van homo religiosus, wat so ’n soeke en ervaring verbeeld. Die soeke is nimmereindigend ook omdat dit in kommunikasie onder woorde gebring moet word en taal het grense wat nie oorskry kan word nie. God is onsêbaar (ineffable). God is meer as wat ’n mens onder woorde kan bring en is sonder twyfel nie net ’n “hy” nie.
Een ingeboude skeet van monoteïsme is ’n neiging tot afgodery, om God as ’n meer en groter beeltenis van die self te sien. Voorkeure en afkeure van ’n bepaalde groep word dan aan God toegedig wat tot ’n afwysing en selfs uitdelging kan lei van diegene wat nie aan die maatstawwe voldoen nie. Die tweede helfte van die boek fokus op die “moderne” God in besonderhede. Kopernicus, een vader van die wetenskaplike revolusie, het in 1543 ’n heliosentriese kosmologie voorgestel wat reelreg met Bybelse uitsprake bots. Logos het die mythos van die Bybel weerspreek. Sedert die Verligting het die rede al belangriker geword en godsdiens het óf gekwyn óf probeer om meer rasioneel voor te kom (byvoorbeeld die rasionele klem in die belydenisskrifte).
Geloof
Geloof word nie net in die kop beoefen nie. Dit is ’n leefwyse waarin die hele mens betrek word. Eensklapse bekering het nie die waarde van ’n langdurige en toegewyde ingesteldheid nie. Armstrong beweer dat die credo “ek glo” afgelei is van cor do “ek gee my hart”. Om jou hart te gee is nie eenmalig nie, maar voortdurend.
Dit is belangrik om die eie ek op die agtergrond te skuif en hartelik meelewend (compassionate) met ander om te gaan. Die goue reel: Doen aan ander wat jy wil hê ander aan jou moet doen, geld deurgaans en behoort elke dag heeldag toegepas te word. Dit kom volgens Armstrong in al die wêreld-godsdienste voor.
Sy beweer dat geloof meer ’n kunsvorm, ’n vaardigheid, as ’n wetenskap of filosofie is. Die kuns en vaardigheid groei met verloop van tyd en ’n gevoel van agting en wonder ontwikkel hieruit. Sulke verwondering is nie iets wat net enkele kere in ’n leeftyd voorkom nie. Klein “ekstases” kan daagliks ervaar word deur gelowiges wat ontvanklikheid aankweek. Geloof vra vir ’n luisterende benadering en ’n oop hart.
Ateïsme en fundamentalisme
Armstrong beskou die benaderings as twee kante van dieselfde munt. Ateïsme parasiteer op en beveg ’n bepaalde teïsme wat dikwels fundamentalisties van aard is. Een rede hiervoor is dat sulke rigtings op onbekwame (unskillful) godsdiens geskoei is met twyfelagtige “sekerhede” en ’n verskraalde geloof as grondslag. Fundamentalisme is op vrees vir die onbekende gebou en val daarom terug na bedenklike fondamente. Deur die Bybelletterlik te verklaar, word die ryk diversiteit van die versameling boeke ontken. Dit is dan maklik vir die ateïsme om die oenskynlike teenstrydighede aan die kaak te stel. Ateïsme is ’n teenaanval sonder ’n toekomsvisie. Dit neig om humanisme, rasionalisme en naturalisme te bevorder en sodoende geloof in die onsienbare af te kraak. Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion) beweer byvoorbeeld dat altruisme geneties vasgelê is. Godsdienste neem altruisme egter ver verby die wat dit beoefen se voordeel, net soos die gaarmaak van kos wat histories vasgelê is, in haute cuisine kan ontwikkel.
‘n Alternatiewe paradigma
Die vorige eeu is gekenmerk deur twee denkpatrone. Die wetenskaplike patroon het aan die begin van die eeu onstuitbaar voorgekom; gegewe genoeg tyd sou kennis só uitbrei dat alles verklaar en verstaan kon word. Teen die 1960’s is besef dat dit nooit haalbaar is nie en die postmoderne paradigma het ontwikkel. Dit het egter ’n lang voorgeskiedenis, tot so ver terug as Lasquax. Nie-sekerheid (not knowing) het absolute rasionele wete bevraagteken. Veral die Christendom het terugverwys na die pre-moderne en daaruit waardevolle insigte geneem: Tekste het meervuldige betekenis; konteks verander insig. Die rabbi’s het gevra: Wat is Torah? Hulle antwoord: Dit is die interpretasie van Torah.
Subtitel kan mislei
Die boek se subtitel, What religion really means, kan misleidend voorkom, so asof die geheim van godsdiens hier onthul word. Armstrong beweer egter die teendeel. Geen godsdiens het die aller-antwoord nie, die ware betekenis van godsdiens is verskuil en ’n persoonlike beoefening daarvan bly ’n lewenslange taak. Sy beoefen godsdiens in die studeerkamer en as spreker op die verhoog. Die kerk speel vir haar nie ’n deurslaggewende rol nie, dit funksioneer ten beste as fasiliteerder en versterker wat die gelowige help om ’n hegter band met God te sluit.
~ Samuel Pauw is ’n afgetrede argitek van Pretoria.
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Kyk ook:
- Karin Armstrong se “Charter for compassion” – goeie idee of verskuilde agenda?
- Karen Armstrong: A Critique
Voorgestelde bronne:
- Countering the Critics Questions and Answers
- Is there scientific proof of the existence of God? (Hoogs aan te bevele!)
- Design Features Questions and Answers
- Philosophy Questions and Answers
- God Questions and Answers
- Christian Apologetics Questions and Answers
Spesifiek oor postmodernisme: