The Case for God
by Karen Armstrong
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
... it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and ... we really don’t understand what we mean when we say that he is “god,” “wise,” or “intelligent.”
(ix)
We tend to tame and domesticate God’s “otherness.”
(ix)
Symbolism came more naturally to people in the premodern world than it does to us today.
(x)
Today many are able to own a copy of the Bible or the Qur’an and have the literacy to read them, but in the past most people had
an entirely different relationship with their scriptures. They listened to them, recited piecemeal, often in a foreign language and
always in a heightened liturgical context.
(x)
In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. ... Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. ... Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or “myth.”
(xi)
... in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather, like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way.
(xi)
A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something
that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the
time.
(xi)
Historical figures such as the Buddha, Jesus, or Muhammad were made to conform to this paradigm so that their followers could imitate them in the same way. ... Myth and ritual were thus inseparable. ... Without ritual, myths made no sense.
(xii)
Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did.
(xii)
Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.
xiii)
Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline.
(xiii)
Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under the control of reason, but a delight in unknowing has also been part of the human experience.
(xiv)
... fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition it is trying to defend.
(xvi)
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.
(xvi)
All the world’s faiths insist that true spirituality must be expressed consistently in practical compassion, the ability to feel with the other.
(xvii)
One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of.
(xviii)
... the religious quest often begins with the deliberate dissolution of ordinary thought patterns.
(xviii)
One of the functions of ritual is to evoke an anxiety in such a way that the community is forced to confront and control it. From the very beginning, it seems, religious life was rooted in acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other creatures.
(6)
Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life.
(8)
Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
(8)
In archaic thinking, there is no concept of the supernatural, no huge gulf separating human and divine.
(9)
In the premodern world, ritual was not the product of religious ideas; on the contrary, these ideas were the product of ritual.
(9)
Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic.
(9)
From the documents of later Neolithic and pastoral societies, we know that Being rather than a being was revered as the ultimate sacred power.
There was, therefore, no belief in a single supreme being in the ancient world. Any such creature could only be a being - bigger and better than anything else, perhaps, but still a finite, incomplete reality.
(12)
The ultimate reality was not a personalized god, therefore, but a transcendent mystery that could never be plumbed.
(13)
... holiness was not confined to the gods. Anything that came into contact with divinity could become holy too: a priest, a king, or a temple - even the sacred utensils of the cult.
(14)
The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred “center”that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective.
(14)
Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms.
(15)
No god can survive unless he or she is actualized by the practical activity of ritual, and people often turn against gods who fail to deliver.
(16)
... we are at our most creative when we do not cling to our selfhood but are prepared to give ourselves away.
(17)
In archaic spirituality, a symbolic return to the formless“nothingness” of the beginning was indispensable to any new creation.
(19)
As life became more settled, people had the leisure to develop a more interior spirituality.
(19)
A great deal of the aggression frustration, hostility, and rage that mars our peace of mind is the result of thwarted egotism.
(22)
The ultimate was not alien to human beings but inseparable from our humanity. It could not be accessed by rational, discursive thought but required a carefully cultivated state of mind and the abnegation of selfness.
(26)
In the eighth century BCE, the people of Israel were about to attempt something unusual in the ancient would. They would try to make Yahweh, the “holy one of Israel,” the only symbol of ultimate transcendence.
(26)
Today, because the modern West is a society of logos, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood.
(28)
We can see Adam, Eve, and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity. In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life.
(28-29)
In the ancient Middle East, creation was regularly associated with temple building, and the Genesis myth was closely related to the temple built by King Solomon.
(29)
... the building of a temple was a symbolic repetition of the cosmogony. It enabled mortals to participate in the creative powers of the gods...
(29)
The Edenstory is not a historical account; it is rather a description of a ritual experience.
(29)
Solomon’s temple was apparently designed as a replica of Eden, its walls decorated with carved cherubim, palm trees, and open flower. Its massive seven-branched candlesticks, decorated with almonds and blossoms, were like stylized trees and there was even a bronze serpent. As once in Eden, Yahweh dwelled in the temple among his people. The temple was, therefore, a haven of shalom.
(30)
When people wrote about he past in the ancient world, they were less interested in what actually happened than in the meaning of an event.
(32)
There is no clear, consistent image of God in Genesis.
(35)
Genesis shows that our glimpses of what we call “God” can be as partial, terrible, ambiguous, and paradoxical as the world we live in.
(36)
When something inherently finite - an image, an ideology, or a polity - is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute.
(38)
In Middle Eastern treaties, to “love” meant to be helpful and loyal and to give practical support.
(42)
Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites did not regard the ritual slaughter of animals as killing; sacrifice was universally held to give the beast posthumous existence, and it was usually forbidden to eat an animal that had not been ritually consecrated in this
way.
(42)
The Greeks sensed the presence of a deity in any exceptional human achievement.
(50)
In classical Judaism, revelation would never be something that had happened once and for all time, but an ongoing process that could never end, because there was always something fresh to be discovered.
(47-48)
Because the polis was ruled by impersonal, uniform laws, the Greeks were learning to ferret out abstract, general principles instead of reaching for immediate, short-term solutions.
(50)
The rationalism of classical Greece would not consist of abstract speculation for its own sake. It was rather rooted in a search for transcendence and a dedicated practical lifestyle.
(53)
Socrates did not approve of fixed, dogmatically held opinions.
(59)
It is difficult for us today to appreciate the power attributed to the spoken word in the premodern world.
(59)
Wisdom was about insight - not amassing information.
(59)
The type of wisdom that Socrates offered was not gained b y acquiring items of knowledge but by learning to
be in a different way.
(62)
For his followers, Socrates had become an incarnation of divine beatitude.
(65)
The Greeks had always seen the gods as immanent in human excellence; now the sage would express in human form the rational idea of God that had left the old Olympian theology far behind.
(65)
The Academy was nothing like a department of philosophy in a modern Western university. It was a religious association; everybody attended the daily sacrifice to the gods performed by one of the students , who came not only to hear Plato’s ideas but to learn how to conduct their lives.
(65-66)
Every single earthly reality was modeled on a heavenly archetype in a world of perfect ideas. Plato departed form Socrates in one
important respect. He believed that we did not arrive at a conception of virtue by accumulating examples of virtuous behavior in daily life. Like everything else, virtue was an objective phenomenon that existed independently and on a higher plane than the material world.
(66)
But in the ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to them. It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the “Known” drew one to itself. People said, in effect, “I think - therefore there is that which I think.” So everything that was thought about had an objective existence in an ideal world. The doctrine of the forms was really a rationalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy, in which every earthly object or experience here below had its counterpart int the divine sphere.
(67)
In his later work, Plato’s theology also became more concrete and prepared the ground for the religious preoccupation with the physical cosmos that would characterize a great deal of Western religion.
(69)
Plato had helped to lay the foundations of the important Western belief that human beings lived in a perfectly rational world and that the scientific exploration of the cosmos was a spiritual discipline.
(70)
Aristotelian science was dominated by the idea of telos: like any human artifact, everything in the cosmos was directed toward a particular “end” an had a specific purpose, a “final cause.”
(70)
His writings were simply lecture notes, and a treatise was not meant to be definitive but was always adapted to the needs of a particular group of students.
(70)
Like Plato, Aristotle believed that human intelligence was divine and immortal. It linked human beings to the gods and gave them the ability to grasp ultimate truth. ... by exercising his reason, a scientist was participating in the hidden life of God.
(71)
Like any Greek, Aristotle believed that when he thought about something, his intellect was activated by the object of his thought, so it followed that when he was engaged in the contemplation of God, he participated to a degree in the divine life.
(72)
Even for the down-to-earth Aristotle, philosophy was not merely a body of knowledge but an activity that involved spiritual transformation.
(72)
The Hellenistic era that followed the establishment of the empire of Alexander the Great (c. 356 – 323) and its subsequent disintegration was a period of political and social turbulence. Consequently, Hellenistic philosophy was chiefly concerned with the cultivation of interior peace.
(73)
The Christians, who believed that their teacher Jesus of Nazareth had been the Messiah, had reservations about the temple but still participated in its liturgy.
(78)
The Christian leaders lived in Jerusalem in expectation of his coming, and worshipped as a body in the temple every day.
(78)
After the fall of the city, a community of scribes, priests, and Pharisees gathered there and, under the leadership of Yohanan and his pupils Eliezer and Joshua, began the heroic task of transforming Judaism form a temple faith to a religion of the book. The Torah would replace the Holy of Holies, and the study of scripture
would substitute for animal sacrifice.
(78-79)
Kindness would replace the temple ritual; compassion, one of the pillars on which the world depended, was the new priestly task.
(79)
In Rabbinic Judaism, the religion of Israel came of age, developing the same kind of compassionate ethos as the Eastern traditions. The rabbis regarded hatred of any human being made in God’s image as tantamount to atheism .
(80)
When the Christians discovered that they were attracting gentile converts, many of them already sympathetic to Judaism, this confirmed them in their belief that the old order was indeed passing away.
(82)
After the disaster of 70, Christians saw the destruction of the temple as an apokalypsis, a“revelation” of a terrifying truth. The old Israelwas dead. The catastrophe had been predicted by Daniel, and the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah had criticized the cult and insisted that God wanted the temple to be a house of prayer for all peoples. Now in the new Israel Jews must encounter the Shekhinah, the divine presence formerly enshrined in the Holy of Holies, in the person of Jesus, the christos.
(83)
The gospels were not biographies in our sense but should, rather, be seen as commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.
(83)
The story also shows how the early Christians understood Jesus’s resurrection. They did not have a simplistic notion of his corpse walking out of the tomb. Henceforth, as Paul had made clear, they would no longer know Jesus “in the flesh” but would find him in one another, in scripture, and in the ritual meals they at together.
(84)
When he gave Jesus the title “lord,” Paul did not mean that he was God. ... Even though Paul and the evangelists all called Jesus the “son of God,” they were not making divine claims for him. They would have been quite shocked by this idea. For Jews, a “son of God” was a perfectly normal human being who had been raised to special intimacy with God and had been given a divine mandate.
(85)
Mark takes it for granted that Joseph was Jesus’s father and that he had brothers and sisters who were well known to the earliest Christian communities.
(86)
Like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament records a wide range of views rather than a single orthodox teaching.
(86)
Jesus was not asking people to “believe” in his divinity, because he was making no such claim. He was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in the God who was their father.
(87)
During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word “belief” started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical - and often dubious - proposition.
(87)
... in the ancient world, “miracles” were quite commonplace and, however remarkable and significant, were not thought to indicate that te miracle worker was in any way superhuman.
(88)
Jesus came from Galilee in northernPalestine, where there as a tradition of devout men (hasidim) who were miracle workers.
(88)
The miracle stories probably reflect the disciples’ understanding of these events after the resurrection apparitions. With hindsight, they could see that God had already been working through Jesus to usher in the Kingdom, when God would vanquish the demons that caused suffering, sickness, and death and trample the destructive powers of chaos underfoot.
(89)
The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing.
(89)
Because the word of God was infinite, a text proved its divine origin by being productive of fresh meaning.
(90)
The rabbis believed that the Sinai revelation had not been God’s last word to humanity but just the beginning. Scripture was not a finished product. ... Revelation was an ongoing process that continued form one generation to another.
(90-91)
Religion must be allowed to move forward freely and could not be constrained by misplaced loyalty to the past.
(92)
Religious discourse should not be cast in stone; the ancient teachings required constant revision. “What is Torah?” asked the Bavli. “It is the interpretation of Torah.”
(93)
When Jesus had failed to return, Jewish Christianity petered out, and by the beginning of the second century, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism had parted company.
(93)
Until the modern period, nobody thought of confining their attention to a literal reading of the plain sense of scripture.
(96)
For the fathers of the Church, scripture was a “mystery” not because it taught a lot of incomprehensible doctrines, but because it directed the attention of Christians toward a hidden level of reality.
(96)
Scripture was not just a text but an “activity.”
(96-97)
Judaism and Islam have remained religions of practice; the promote orthopraxy, right practice, rather than orthodoxy, right
teaching. In the early fourth century, however, Christianity had begun to move in a slightly different direction and developed a preoccupation with doctrinal correctness that would become its Achilles’heel.
(102)
Creation out of nothing represented a fundamental change in the Christian understanding of both God and the world.
(105)
Over the centuries, Arianism has become a byword for heresy but at the time there was no officially orthodox position and nobody knew whether Arius or Athanasius was right.
(107)
Eastern and Western Christians would understand the incarnation very differently. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) defined the doctrine of atonement that became normative in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam. Orthodox Christians have never accepted this. The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first human being to be wholly“deified”, entirely possess and permeated by the divine, and we could all be like him, even in this life.
(109)
... human language is not adequate to express the reality that we call “God.” Even words such as “life”and “light” mean something entirely different when we use them of God, so silence is the only medium in which it is possible to apprehend the divine.
(110)
Prayer was not conversation with God or a busy meditation on the divine nature; it meant a “shedding of thoughts.”
(111)
In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life. A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.
(111)
When Moses climbed Mount Sinai and entered the impenetrable darkness on its summit, however, he was in the place where God wad - even though he could not see anything.
(113)
... any attempt to define God clearly “becomes an idol of God and does not make him known.”
(113)
The reason the Trinity is not a logical or numerical absurdity is because God in not a being that can be restricted to such human categories as number.
(115)
The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.
(115)
The Trinity was a “mystery” not because it was an incomprehensible conundrum that had to be taken “on faith.” It was a musterion because it was an “initiation” that inducted Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine.
(116)
Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine.
(117)
... the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.
(122)
Whenever the literal meaning to scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science of he would bring scripture into disrepute.
(122)
Gradually, we become aware that even the most exalted things we say about God are bound to be misleading.
(124)
We cannot even say that God “exists” because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself.
(125)
Because we do not know what God is, we cannot know what God is not.
(126)
... instruction was reinforced by the cult of pilgrimage.
(130)
Instead of being educated in the niceties of doctrine, Western Christians were introduced to their faith as a practical way of life.
(130)
Anselm believed that the idea of God was innate: even this atheist had an idea of God in his mind or he would not have been able to deny it.
(133)
For the monks of medieval Europe, lectio (“reading”) was not conducted simply to acquire information but was a spiritual exercise that enabled them to enter their inner world and there confront the truths revealed in scripture to see how they measured up; Reading - in private or in the communal practice of the liturgy - was part of a process of personal transformation.
(133)
It is always dangerous to isolate religious ideas from contemporary thought.
(136)
Maimonides developed an apophatic spirituality that denied any positive attributers to God, arguing that we could not even say that
God was good or existed.
(139)
Crusading was the first cooperative act of the new Europeas it struggled back onto the international stage.
(139)
We experience being merely as the medium through which we know individual beings, and this makes it very difficult for us to understand how God can be real.
(147)
... we have to slay contradictory things about God in order to break through this conceptual barrier.
(147)
Christ is not the Terminus of the religious quest, but only the“Way” that leads us to the unknowable Father.
(148)
... Ferdinand and Isabella had established the Spanish Inquisition in 1483. Its aim was to enforce ideological conformity as a base for the new Spanish identity.
(162)
The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone religious world; it was a modernizing institution devised by the monarchs to create national unity.
(162)
By the sixteenth century, the people of the West had started to create an entirely new and unprecedented type of civilization that depended on a radical change in the economic base of society. Instead of relying, like every premodern economy, on a surplus of agricultural produce with which they could trade in order to fund their cultural achievements, the modern economy rested on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital, which provided a source of wealth that could be renewed indefinitely.
(65)
A centralized state was crucial to productivity.
(166)
The increasing role of banks, stock companies, and stock exchanges, over which the Church had no control, also roded its power.
(166)
Secularization would be accelerated by three crucial and formative sixteenth-century movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
(166)
The humanism of the Renaissance, for example, was deeply religious.
(166)
The humanists were largely responsible for crating the concept of the individual that would be crucial to the modern ethos.
(167)
The reformers were trying to articulate a religious mood that was strongly fee but had not yet been adequately conceptualized. Their Reformation was just one expression of the Great Western Transformation.
(169)
Luther found salvation in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. ... Our good deeds were, therefore, the result rather than the cause of God’s favor.”
(170)
... all the reformers emphasized the unqualified divine sovereignty that would not only characterize the modern God but also help to
shape the Scientific Revolution.
(170)
... despite its religious motivation, this deliberate desacralization of the cosmos was a secularizing idea that would encourage scientists to approach the world independently of the divine.
(171)
The success of the reformers was due in large part to the invention of the printing press, which not only heed to propagate the new ideas but also changed people’s relationship to the text. The word would now replace the image and the icon ion people’s thinking, and this would make theology more verbose.
(171)
Printing helped to secularize the relationship of the reader to the truth.
(172)
As the printed book began to replace oral methods of communication, the information it provided was depersonalized and, perhaps, became more fixed and less flexible than in the old days, when truth had developed in dynamic relation between master and pupil.
(172)
The Protestant reliance of “scripture along” dispensed with the Catholic notion of “tradition” that saw each generation deepening its understanding of the sacred text in a cumulative “bricolage.”
(173)
Slowly, in tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctively “modern” notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated, and objective was emerging in the Western Christian world.
(173)
The Protestant reformers may have demanded that Christians be free to read and interpret the bible as they chose, but there was
no toleration for anybody who opposed their own teachings.
(174)
The divisions effected by the Protestant Reformation also helped to accelerate the process of secularization and the growth of nationalism.
(175)
The vast majority probably felt obscurely perplexed at the sudden fragmentation of Christendom without any clear understanding of what was going on.
(176)
The Ptolemaic system was the most accurate account of the data that had been accumulated in the ancient world, when techniques of observation had, of course, been limited and inadequate. The medievals also found it morally satisfying.
(177)
Even though Ptolemy’s system was spiritually uplifting, however, it was cumbersome scientifically. Because the circle was universally regarded as the symbol of perfection, it was taken for granted that the planetary orbits described a perfect circle.
(177)
Most people found the idea of a sun-centered universe incredible. It contradicted not only the standard scientific explanation but also basic common sense.
(178)
Today it is often assumed that modern science has always clashed with religion. Kepler, a mathematician of extraordinary genius, reminds us that early modern science as rooted in faith.
(181)
What Galileo did not seem to have realized was that the political climate had changed. The Vatican no longer regarded theology as a speculative science but was systematically reducing the teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas to an inflexible set of propositions formulated in such a way as to end all discussion and maximize certainty.
(185)
When opposed, Galileo could be just as scornful and impatiently self-righteous as any cardinal.
(185)
The first modern Western atheists, however, were not Christians who had been alienated by the terrible convictions of their clergy but Jews living in the most liberal country in Europe.
(187)
The mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without spiritual exercises. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism that is easily abandoned, as its God is remote, abstract, and ultimately incredible.
(189)
Thomas Aquinas had insisted that we could not learn anything about the nature of God from the created world; now the complexity that scientists were discovering in the universe had persuaded theologians that God must be an Intelligent Designer.
(193)
Descartes’ ideas were formed on the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War.
(194)
The internal experience of doubt itself revealed a certainty that nothing in the external world could provide. When we experience ourselves thinking and doubting, we become aware of our existence.
(195)
The modern mind was solitary, autonomous, and a world unto itself, unaffected by outside influence and separate from all other beings.
(195)
Doubt reveals the imperfection of the thinker, because when we doubt we become acutely aware that something is missing. But the experience of imperfection presupposes a prior notion of perfection.
(195)
God was absolutely necessary to Descartes’ philosophy and his science, because without God he had no confidence in the reality of the external world. Because we could not trust our senses, the existence of material things was “very dubious and uncertain.”
(196)
In time of frightening political turbulence, a universe that ran as regularly as clockwork seemed profoundly attractive.
(197)
Spinoza’s God was the sum and principle of natural law, identical with and equivalent to the order that governs the universe. God was neither the Creator nor the First Cause, but was inseparable from the material world, an immanent force that welded everything into unity and harmony.
(200)
Democracy was found to be essential to the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Countries that democratized forged ahead; those that tried to confine their wealth and privilege to the aristocracy fell behind.
(201)
God had been reduced to a scientific explanation and given a clearly definable function in the cosmos.
(204)
God had become a mere force of nature.
(207)
In reducing God to a scientific explanation, the scientists and theologians of the seventeenth century were turning God into an idol, a mere human projection.
(207)
God was no longer transcendent, no longer beyond the reach of language and concepts.
(208)
Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism. ... Deists were passionate about God and al most obsessed with religion.
(211)
Science could not explain its findings without God; God was a scientific as well as a theological necessity. Disbelief in God seemed as perverse as refusing to believe in gravity.
(212)
This emphasis on proof was gradually changing the conception of belief.
(212)
The scientific assumption that matter was inert and passive and could be set in motion only by a higher power was associated with
policies that sought to deprive the “lower orders” of independent, autonomous action.
(213-214)
In England, Newton’s cosmology would be used to endorse a social system in which the “lower” orders were governed by the “higher” ... Central to this political vision and Newtonian science was the doctrine of the passivity of mater, which needed to be activated and controlled by a higher power. People who challenged this orthodoxy were associated with radical movements.
(216)
Unlike Europeans, Americasdid not regard religion as oppressive but found it a liberating force that was enabling them to respond creatively to the challenge of modernity and come to the Enlightenment ideals in their won way.
(220)
The Romantic poets revived a spirituality that had been submerged in the scientific age.
(230)
Rooted in eighteenth-century Pietism, Evangelical Christianity led many Americans away from the cool ethos of the Age of Reason to the kind of populist democracy, anti-intellectualism, and rugged individualism that still characterizes American culture. ... the new genre of the gospel song transported the audience to ecstasy, so that they wept and shouted for joy. Like some of the fundamentalist movements today, these congregations gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited a means of making their voices heard by the establishment.
(236)
America was the new Israel, insisted Timothy Dwight, president of Yale; its expanding frontier was a sign of the coming Kingdom, so to be worthy of their calling, Americans must become more religious.
(237)
In America, Protestantism empowered the people against the establishment, and this tendency still continues, so that today it is difficult to find a popular movement in the United Statesthat is not associated with religion in some way.
(239)
The injustice of capitalism had produced a God that was simply a consoling illusion.
(241)
Western Christians had become addicted to scientific proof and were convinced that if God was not an empirically demonstrable fact, there was no sense in which religion could be true.
(245)
Darwinian theory not only undermined the design-based theology that had become the mainstay of Western Christian belief, but
repudiated central principles of the Enlightenment.
(246)
Darwin’s discoveries accelerated the already growing tendency to exclude theology from scientific discussion. ... science now rejected any hypothesis that was not based on the human experience of the natural world and could not, therefore, be tested.
(246)
By making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves.
(256)
Observing the similarity between religious rites and the obsessive rituals of some of his patients, Freud concluded that religion was a neurosis that bordered on insanity.
(258)
... Freud’s critique was flawed by a rather unscientific view of the female as homme manqué: religion was a female activity, while atheism represented the postreligious, healthy masculine human being.
(259)
Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry. They revealed the inherent destructiveness of all idolatry: once the finite reality of the nation had become an absolute value, it was compelled to overcome and destroy all rival claimants.
(263)
Human beings never achieve perfect knowledge, because anything we know at any given moment is invariably revised later.
(267)
The logical positivists - as these philosophers became known - were attempting to return to irreducible fundamentals. Their stringent position also revealed the intolerant tendency of modernity that would characterize other types of fundamentalism. Their narrow definition of truth entailed a wholesale dismissal of the humanities and a refusal to entertain any rival views.
(269)
Pentecostalists were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech.
(270)
With the Great War, an element of terror had entered conservative Protestantism in the United States. Many believed that the catastrophic encounters at the Somme and Passchendaele were the battles that, according to scripture, would usher in the Last Days; many Christians were now convinced that they were on the front line of an apocalyptic war against Satan.
(270)
Fundamentalism - be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim - nearly always begins as a defensive movement; it is usually a response to a campaign of coreligionists or fellow countrymen that is experienced as inimical and invasive.
(271)
Like many fundamentalist disputes, the Scopes trial was a clash between two incompatible points of view. Both Darrow and Bryan represented core American values: Darrow, of course, stood for intellectual liberty and Bryanfor the rights of the ordinary folk, who were traditionally leery of learned experts, had no real understanding of science, and felt that sophisticated elites were imposing their own values on small-town America.
(273)
During their time in the political wilderness, the fundamentalists became more radical, nursing a deep grievance against mainstream American culture. Subsequent history would show that when a fundamentalist movement is attacked, it almost invariably becomes more aggressive, bitter, and excessive. Rooted as fundamentalism is in a fear of annihilation, its adherents see any such offensive as proof that the secular or liberal world is indeed bent on the elimination of religion.
(274)
Before Scopes, evolution had not been an important issue; even such ardent literalists as Charles Hodge knew that the world had existed for a lot longer than the six thousand years mentioned in the Bible.
(274)
Most fundamentalists we Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science became the flagship of the movement.
(274-275)
The shocking discovery that six million Jews had been systematically slaughtered in the Nazi camps, an atrocity that had originated in Germany, a leading player in the Enlightenment, called the whole notion of human progress into question.
(275)
Far from being in conflict with the rational pursuit of well-organized, goal-oriented modernity, the hideous efficiency of the Nazis was a supreme example of it.
(275)
To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management.
(276)
At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre-Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood.
(276)
The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern god - conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable - is a recent phenomenon.
(278)
A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing.
(278)
A God who interfered with human freedom was a tyrant.
(281)
An atheism that passionately rejected a God that had been reduced to a mere being was a religious act.
(282)
Fundamentalisms too can be seen as part of the post-modern rejection of modernity. They are not orthodox and conservative; indeed, many are actually anti-orthodox and regard the more conventional faithful as part of the problem.
(293)
All are initially defensive movements rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, which causes them to develop a paranoid vision of the “enemy.”
(293)
Because fundamentalists feel under threat, they are defensive and unwilling to entertain any rival point of view.
(294)
Fundamentalists are convinced that they are fighting for God, but in fact this type of religiosity represents a retreat from God. To make purely human, historical phenomena - such as “family values,” “the Holy Land,” or “Islam” - sacred and absolute is idolatry, and ,as always, their idol forces them to try to destroy its opponents.
(295)
... the mosque was often the only place where people could express their discontent.
(297)
Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of the Higher Criticism.
(303)
It was only in the modern period that theologians starred to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept.
(305)
The new atheists all equate faith with mindless credulity.
(305)
Proselytizing atheists present religion at its absolute worst.
(306)
The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms.
(307)
Religious fundamentalists also develop an exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil.
(307)
Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate.
(307)
Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality.
(308-309)
... the danger of this secularization of reason, which denies the possibility of transcendence, is that reason can become an idol that
seeks to destroy all rival claimants.
(309)
Human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve.
(311)
The ideal society should be based on charity rather than truth.
(314)
Of its very nature, desire is located in the space between what exists and what does not.
(315)
We pray for what is “to come,” not for what already exists.
(316)
Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. That was the role of logos. Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to livecreatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve; mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.
(318)
Religion is a practical discipline, and its insights are not derived form abstract speculation but form spiritual exercises and a dedicated lifestyle.
(318)
Aggressive logos, which seeks to master, control, and kill off the opposition, cannot bring this transcendent insight.
(319)
Many of us have been left stranded with an incoherent concept of God. We learned about God at about he same time as we were told about Santa Claus. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our theology remained somewhat infantile.
(320)
There can be only one absolute, so once a finite idea, theology, nation, polity, or ideology is made supreme, it is compelled to destroy anything that opposes it.
(322)
... if it assumes that a man-made idea of “God” is an adequate representation of the transcendence toward which it can only imperfectly gesture, a great deal of mainstream theology is also idolatrous.
(322)
The quest for truth has become agnostic and competitive. When debating an issue in politics or in the media, in the law courts or academe, it is not enough to establish what is true; we also have to defeat - and even humiliate - our opponents.
(322)
Religious truth has always developed communally and orally; in the past, when two or three sat down together and reached out toward the “other,”they experienced transcendence as a “presence” among them.
(323)
Religious truth has always developed communally and orally; in the past, when two or three sat down together and reached out toward the “other,”they experienced transcendence as a “presence” among them.
Revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human
ingenuity.
(324)
We tend to assume that “modern” means “superior.”
(325)
Instead of using scripture to help people to move forward and embrace new attitudes, people quote ancient scriptural texts to prevent any such progress.
(325)
... our modern understanding of religion as something that we think rather than something that we do.
(326)
Today, when science itself is becoming less determinate, it is perhaps time to return to a theology that asserts less and is more open to silence and unknowing.
(326)
An intelligent atheistic critique could help us to rinse our minds of the more facile theology that is impending our understanding of the divine.
(327)
The point of religion was to liveintensely and richly here and now. Turly reiglious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture andinsight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world.
(329)