The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A nuanced exploration of the role of religion in our lives, drawing on insights of the past to build a faith for our dangerously polarized age —from the New York Times bestselling author of The History of God

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.  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.”

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Spirituality, Theology, Christianity

406 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and graduated in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.
Armstrong received the US$100,000 TED Prize in February 2008. She used that occasion to call for the creation of a Charter for Compassion, which was unveiled the following year.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poor Karen Armstrong has been ploughing a lonely furrow in recent years, trying to show that there is a valid Third Way between increasingly defensive religious groups and increasingly forthright ‘new atheists’. Neither side thinks much of her. For those of us a bit more detached from the arguments, she often seems like the only one talking any sense.

Her main problem can best be summarised by saying that she and I share almost identical views on religion, and yet I would call myself an atheist whereas she describes herself as a ‘freelance monotheist’. In other words, she succeeds in finding a definition of ‘God’ which I am happy to accept, but only by defining it pretty much out of existence.

The arguments in here build on her extraordinary back-catalogue of books on theological history, two of which – A History of God and The Battle for God – are absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to enter into the debate. This book, which is designed as a sort of ‘comeback’ against the attacks of Hitchens, Dawkins et al., mostly rehashes work from those two masterpieces, so I can only really give it three stars although much of what is in here is brilliantly done.

Again, the point she is keen to stress is that religion and science represent different types of knowledge – what the Greeks called mythos and logos. The latter deals in rational thought and the former in poetic truths. (Thus she immediately sidesteps any claims that religion has to scientific knowledge about the world: she has as much scorn as any atheist for those religious people who think that holy books are records of facts.) She makes a convincing case that, in the pre-modern world, most religious thinkers and mystics saw religion as having symbolic, not factual, importance – hence the bizarre doctrines which to the modern world seem so impossible.

In the early modern period, when the West was developing a wholly rational way of thinking about God and the world, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity. But for the Cappadocian fathers – Basil, Gregory and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329-90) – the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a ‘mystery’ that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way.

Such ideas were thus thought-exercises – like Zen Buddhist koan – designed to free up your mind to think about the impossible. For many of these mystics and religious thinkers, ‘God’ was not some supernatural entity – rather ‘God’ was a sort of codeword for ‘existence’, ‘reality’, or ‘the universe’, a way of contemplating ultimate truths.

The problem came with the Enlightenment, when religions felt under threat from science and tried to argue that they too had scientific knowledge about the world. For Armstrong, this is where it all went wrong: Western Christians became ‘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.’

This doesn't mean that religion is ‘only’ a myth – or rather, it does, except that Armstrong believes that myths, far from being ‘just stories’, are of supreme value to the way human beings experience the world. Here I agree with her, and this is also my problem with the so-called new atheism, which often seems to take a very reductionist and intolerant view of religion. To see a scientist as brilliant as Richard Dawkins reduced to explaining, in book-length form, that the idea of a benevolent omnipotent god is incompatible with such facts as childhood leukaemia or Auschwitz, makes me feel depressed and a bit embarrassed. The point is not that he's wrong, it's that it's so obvious. You'd have thought we'd be beyond this by now.

Armstrong relates a story Elie Wiesel tells about Auschwitz:

one day the Gestapo hanged a child with the face of a ‘sad-eyed angel’, who was silent and almost calm as he climbed the gallows. It took the child nearly an hour to die in front of the thousands of spectators who were forced to watch. Behind Wiesel, one of the prisoners muttered: ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ And Wiesel heard a voice within him saying in response, ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows.’

Two things should be crystal clear reading this. The first is the literal truth that no kindly all-powerful being could watch such scenes take place. But the second is the extraordinary poetic beauty of the response that Wiesel suggests. This, to me, is the power of religion – the same sort of truth as that offered by King Lear or Anna Karenina, something which helps you sympathise with others and which invites you to understand that there is a sense in which all reality is affected by what happens to any one individual.

My only concern is that Armstrong is overplaying the extent to which this premodern view of religion is really representative of the ‘silent majority’ of faithful (I can't remember if she says this outright or just implies it). Certainly there is a huge amount of thought and intelligence behind what's in here, and it succeeds in locating the value in something that many people nowadays find valueless. However, I can't help thinking (not without some satisfaction) that religious believers who pick this book up looking for a quick comeback to a YouTube Hitch-slap might find themselves with more to chew on than they expected.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

With all of the wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, Jihadists, Creationists and the rest of it, God has got a lot to answer for. Armstrong's case for the defence is essentially that people are interpreting religion wrongly: to the founders of the religions faith was about mystery, symbolism, practice and good works. Early Christians, Armstrong argues, looked to the scriptures for inspiration not information, and would be shocked at what religion has become for many people today.

The case opens with a rather long history of Western philosophy focussing on Christianity, but also taking in Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Augustine, al-Ghazzali, Aquinas, Spinoza, Paine, Hume, Kant, Derrida and many more, in which they are shown to have developed variations around the idea that practising meditation and compassion while accepting that you can't know everything can make you a better person, while temporarily shutting off the chatter of your own mental commentary can bring a special feeling of peace and reflectiveness. Well, amen to that. Especially in ancient times before all of the scientific insights we take for granted today, you might reasonably decide to take a poetic view of existence and resolve to live a life inspired by your culture's oldest stories. As an atheist I didn't find much to disagree with, although I felt this this material was covered better in Armstrong's earlier History of God, without the sniping at atheism or overuse of the word "apophatic".

So religion is really meant to be a meditative, allegorical self-improvement programme, but unfortunately today's fundamentalists and (Armstrong claims) atheists fail to realise this and treat it instead as a set of factual claims, leaving us with two warring sides who are both wrong. Even the words belief and faith have shifted in meaning since the Bible was translated into English, from something more to do with trust and belonging, to the modern sense of simply thinking a statement is true. (I remember how as schoolchildren we sniggered when finding the word virgin in crumbly old Latin textbooks, because to us as ten year olds it meant a person who has not had sex - tee hee - while to the innocent author of translation exercises such as 'the virgins carry water from the well' it meant a young unmarried woman. Well, it seems this confusion predates the 1970s and is how the story of Christ being born of a virgin became a miracle.) Armstrong sides with the faithful as they are at least trying, and if only we could get back to taking it all a bit more symbolically again we'd all be better off:

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 a powerful Creator, First Cause, Supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable - is a recent phenomenon.

Except that it is never clear in The Case For God when this golden age of non-literalism took place. The Apostles' Creed from the Book of Common Prayer is quite specific about God being creator of Heaven and Earth with Jesus sitting at His right hand having risen from the dead, so it had already gone wrong by its publication in 1662. However, the Nicene Creed of 325 CE contains most of the absurdities of the current version, so this supposedly modern error of mistaking metaphor for fact seems to have been a problem for religion from its earliest times, perhaps because we humans are only partly rational and have always been drawn to superstition, and of course to any myth that tells us we are better than some other group. I can't help wondering how many of the elaborate spiritual exercises of the great medieval mystics ever filtered down to the ordinary people, lectured from the pulpit about heaven and hell. Were the crusaders, witch hunters and inquisitors simply defending their communities against perceived threats while following their mystical, symbolic traditions? The Case For God didn't convince me. At best, it presents religion as something that may have some value for some people if followed in the right spirit, but which is constantly - inevitably - taken the wrong way with catastrophic consequences for millions.

And then there are her odd comments about atheism, where the case collapses into ill-considered muddle. Armstrong's claim that atheists' theology - of all things - is poor and that they do not understand what they criticise is one that you will see repeated on Christian websites and indeed book reviews, and I was disappointed to see an academic I used to respect sink to this level. Atheism is a rejection of the idea of supernatural gods, so to argue that sophisticated believers see God as symbolic, while doubtless true, misses the point. Atheists don't have a problem with symbolic gods, just the supernatural ones. And to claim that atheism is fundamentalist is meaningless mudslinging:

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 never seem to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation.

After so many chapters of careful philosophical reasoning, this kind of clumsy point-missing comes as a shock and a disappointment. "Alone in possession of truth"? Is she saying that a fairer-minded atheist than Dawkins would agree that the theists might have a bit of truth to their viewpoint after all? What sense would that make? Does she have any idea of the debate, let alone the repression, persecution and wars, actually going on in the real world, outside her cosy academic ivory tower? Has she ever actually seen a Christian website? Did she just call us fundamentalists?

A 2002 survey found that two thirds of Church of England clergy have no doubt that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead (although naturally the headlines were all about the worrying third of doubters). These are not "religious fundamentalists" in the sense of unrepresentative weirdos, these are the respectable, tea-drinking moderate mainstream, one of whom I might mention announced at my elderly aunt's funeral that she was at that moment renewing her acquaintance with previously deceased friends and relatives. Atheists' criticisms concern what is being said by people living today who think there is an invisible homophobic sky wizard (and witches, and a devil). People who do not think there is an invisible homophobic sky wizard are not part of the problem under discussion. Religion would be fine if people followed it in the way Armstrong describes - as indeed many Buddhists do, Sam Harris among them.

Her unarticulated point might be that many of the "why doesn't God save babies from earthquakes?" type of questions have been asked and answered many times, and theologians groan when they see them and refer you wearily to the standard because we have freedom, because it's complicated, and anyway we must all have faith in something including scientific truth itself set of answers, which may (depending on who you ask) include because God is not a sky wizard but a symbol for indescribable transcendence / metaphor for love / guiding force only appreciable via meditation. This is a favourite trick of theists, to become all philosophical and sophisticated when a debate calls for it, while back in the real world the Pope goes on announcing that Hell is a real place and vicars tell you your late aunt is currently attending a celestial tea party.

The Case for God positions itself as an academic rebuttal to a series of well-written, accessible atheist manifestos by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and others. I am sure many people would be interested in such a book - I certainly would - but unfortunately despite good intentions (Armstrong at least rejects supernatural theism and tries to put fundamentalism in perspective), TCFG is heavy going, makes a weak case, ultimately frustrates more than it enlightens, and uses the word "apophatic" too often. Read her earlier A History of God instead.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armstrong is a scholar of comparative religion. In numerous examples here, she shows how worship in virtually all world religions depends on a foundation of silence, or what she calls unknowing. This is the silence through which one gets intimations of the divine presence. I found the description remarkably like two kinds of Eastern meditation I have practiced over the years. There was no presumption on the part of early theists that they could grasp God. He was beyond human comprehension. Since knowledge was not possible the only alternative was what Armstrong calls kenosis, or self emptying: techniques that led one toward the necessary quiet contemplation. Armstrong is liberal with her examples here and they are all fascinating. In fact, this part of the book is a kind of survey course in comparative religion, but without the other students.

There is a wonderful description, the first I have come across, of the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. Armstrong describes this ritual, emphasizing how inherent in it were two key concepts: "mythos" and "logos." Mythos was a "story that was not meant to be historical or factual but expressed the meaning of an event or narrative and encapsulated its timeless, eternal dimension." Mythos was a teaching tool; one that helped to impart to the initiate or religious a sense of the sacred. The other term is Logos. Logos means "dialogue, speech; reasoned, logical, and scientific thought." In the past, religion was always a matter of practice. Practice is defined as daily ritual. Like the Mass, for instance, in Catholicism; or the five daily prayers in Islam; or the Passover seder in Judaism. Religion was not, she stresses, about "belief." No one was expected to believe in God. In fact, the idea of belief as we know it today did not then exist. There was, too, among all monotheistic religions, a remarkable lack of rigidity when it came to interpreting the holy books (Bible, Talmud, Koran). The object being not to pick interpretations that were correct and inflexible, but to find new and innovative interpretations. In fact, if the initiate was not finding some new twist in the scriptures, some novel interpretation, that person was considered remiss in his or her practice. And practice was the only way to know the sacred.

Then the Enlightenment came along, and with it the scientific revolution. The scientific method taught that facts were right or they were wrong. Either you could repeat the experiment, or you could not. Many early scientists were religious. Newton, for one, but many others as well. Gradually there was a shift from kenosis, from the gentle act of self-emptying for purposes of contemplation of God in silence, to one which began to seek "scientific proofs" of God's existence. For instance, it was at first thought that the incredible detail revealed in microscopic structures was a sign of the divine. How else could these astonishingly minute structures have occurred but through God's hand. This way of knowing God flourished. God thus became an outsize if finite being, to the extent that he was knowable. For a while science continued to provide these "proofs" of his existence.

Then something happened, two things really that threw this approach to knowing God on its ear: the first were certain advances in geology. Geology showed that the earth was not created in six days, as stated in Genesis. It pointed to time spans that were almost beyond human conception. Then came Evolution. Darwin showed us that Man and his fellow creatures were not created all at one time and set down on the planet in their current form. Evolution, in fact, showed us that there was no Intelligent Design, for its process (selection) was not in any way directed. That is to say, it was a geologically slow and muddled process marked by eons of struggle, most of it futile, and mass extinction. Persons of faith, however, were by this time hooked on their concept of "belief," which they had gleaned from the sciences. The silent contemplation of early monotheism--unknowing, kenosis--had been lost in the West. Faith began to be sustained through a literal (i.e. rigid) interpretation of scripture. So here we are in the present day. The Fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Something never required of early worshippers. Somehow, it has come to be thought, that religion must be made to match science, truth for truth. And of course religion can never do that. Historically, it has never functioned in that way. Yet we need it in our lives. Why? Why can't we do away with it as the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.) seem to believe we can? Armstrong quotes Jean Paul Sartre saying that when we do away with religion there is left in the human psyche a "God-shaped hole." Armstrong argues here, makes her case for god, for maintaining touch with the old, kenotic ways of belief. She is very persuasive. I treasure this book and look forward to rereading it.

[Mohamed Osman · Rating 4 out of 5]

من الصعب أن تكتب تعليق مناسب لهذا الكتاب نظرا لضخامة كم المعلومات التي يحتويها والتي يصعب مراجعتها ،بالإضافة إلي القضية التي يتناولها و التي يقترب عمرها من عمر الإنسان علي هذه الأرض .

نستطيع أن نقسم الكتاب نصفين النصف الأول خاص بنشوء الوجود الآلهي في الفكر الإنساني وكيفية تطوره وخاصه عبر الديانة المسيحية واليهودية ، بينما يناقش النصف الثاني الاله الحديث وتداخل العلم مع الإيمان وهل مات الاله حقا أم لا .

النصف الأول لم أعجب به مثل النصف الثاني من الكتاب لكن من المؤكد لي أن الجزء الأول لن ينال رضا أو إعجاب الأصوليين من جميع الأديان وقد يشكل صدمة لبعض مما يجعلهم ينكروا الرؤية التي اتخذتها الكاتبة في سرد الأحداث التاريخية.

النصف الثاني هو الأكثر إمتاعا بالنسبة لي ، بداية التنوير وبروزالصراع بين الإيمان والعلم ، مرورا بالإلحاد انتهاءا بخاتمة أعتقد إنها كانت أفضل ما في الكتاب حيث استطاعت أن تجمع ملخص الكتاب في جزء بسيط في الآخر .

ما قد يؤخذ علي الكاتبة والكتاب إنها سارت علي طريق محدد سيفرض عليها أن تأخذ وجهات نظر معينة لتصل إلي الهدف الذي تريده .

في تناولها لقضية الإلحاد تناولت المفهوم الأولي لمعني الإلحاد والذي يقابل الزندقة عندنا وحتي الآن لا أفهم السر في تناول الغرب لتاريخ الإلحاد بهذا الشكل ففي فيلم وثائقي يعد الأشهر في هذا الموضوع
Atheism A Rough History of Disbelief
وقعوا في نفس الخطأ ، من وجهة نظري وجد الكفر يوم وجد الإيمان ، وعلي سبيل المثال لا الحصر طائفة الدهرية لا تؤمن بوجود خالق فهي تتفق مع المعني المراد تمام لكلمة الإلحادأو ما يطلق عليه الإلحاد الحديث ، وأيضا ما يؤخذ عليها هنا اعتمادها في ضرب مثال لإلحاد علي طائفة الملحدين الجدد وتركيزها علي أشخاص بعينها أمثال دوكينز وسام هاريس و كريستوفر هيتشنز
-توفي الأخير قريبا - ، وبرغم استمتاعي بنقدهم لأن عرضت ما يتفق مع رؤيتي لهم في هذا الجزء برغم صغر حجمه واقتضابه مما لم يشبع نهمي، فتركيزها علي طائفة دون الآخري أخل بالحيادية كثير .

من الجميل في هذا الكتاب هو تناولها بالحديث عن الإسلام ليس فقط بحيادية بل بإيجابية ، ومثال علي ذلك أرجعت تطرف الشيخ سيد قطب إلي ما عاناه علي يد زبانية جمال عبد الناصر .

هناك نقطة تؤخذ علي من قاموا بالترجمة ، هناك بعض المصطلحات والتي كان يجب أن يوضع بجوارها النص الأصلي أو الكلمة الإنجليزية فمثال كلمة الامبريقية لن يستوعب الكثير أنهم يقصدون تجريبية و أيضا كلمةالأليجورية والتي يترجمها بعض الأخوة العرب الأليغورية والمراد بها أقصوصة رمزية.

في النهاية الكتاب ممتع وأكثر من رائع سواء اتفقت أو لم تتفق مع ما طرحته الكاتبة ويقرا أكثر من مرة لا ستيعابه ، ويفضل أن تقراه بلغته الأصلية .

كلمة أخيرة لموقف حدث لي أثناء قرائتي لكتاب في المرة الأولي ، في المعتاد احمل دائما معي كتاب لقرائته في أي مكان اذهب إليه ، وقد كان هذا الكتاب معي اقراه يوم محاضرة المشروع وفي المعتاد الدكاترة يتأخرون فاندمجت في القراءة لأفاجئ بوقوف أحد الدكاترة منهم أمامي فأخذ الكتاب مني وقلب صفحاته في ثواني لا تكمل العشرة ليقلب الكتاب في نهايته ونظر علي السعر ونظر لي "ده أنت مسترخص بقي ؟! "
لا أريد ذكر ردة فعلي عليه ، لكن الحال وصل بنا لكي يكون الدكاترة أو الأساتذة الذي من المفترض أن يعلمونا يقيسوا أهمية الكتب والعلم والثقافة بالمال المدفوع في الكتاب .
لا عزاء للعقلاء

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would probably say that this is one of the best books I have ever read--certainly the most important. But also the most dense and difficult to read. It took me about 2 months (and I usually can get through books in a week or two max). I always read this book with a pencil and I think there are whole pages or sections in my book that are underlined. However, this book is not for everyone. If you cannot accept some gray in your religious belief or don't want to read something that will likely challenge your religious understanding, you might want to stay away. Having said that, I was uplifted by the book.

The book is an answer to modern atheists and is a "defense" of God. I have to say that I have read others like this, but this so far surpasses those in breath that I think to say that it is a defense of God minimizes what she is trying to do. Karen Armstrong has done her homework. The book is basically a thorough history of religion and philosophy and science. She claims that modern religion has unnecessarily entangled itself in logic and has turned away from its roots based in "unknowing." That essentially, we have made an idol out of God and have tried to "prove" him through scientific means. And it is this God that the atheists attack. But this is not how religion started. It used to be much more flexible and comfortable with itself.

There are certainly flaws in the book (I think she over-idealizes the past) and there are certainly parts that I do not agree with, but I am so glad I read this book. In the end, it inspires me to live my religion to take the golden rule seriously.

I highly recommend this book. If there is a more important book out there right now, I haven't come across it. Just know though that it is not an easy book to get through and your religious belief will certainly be challenged.

[jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can I really be the only person who finds Karen Armstrong, the author of fifteen books on religion, writing in her latest that one cannot comment on the divine with words but only with silence, more than a little ironic?

To be fair, Armstrong does offer several interesting insights. Her effort to find universal "truths" that run across faiths is worthwhile and thought provoking. One might even imagine that there are many members of exclusivist faiths for whom this would be a revelation, though one can hardly imagine many of them reading Armstrong's work. At the same time, Armstrong offers an intelligent and evocative response to the new wave of atheistic polemicists - Dawkins, Hitchens, etal - and offers a muscular retort to their rather juvenile view of the divine, as almost all of them seem to have decided that they learned all there was to know about religion as teens in Anglican Sunday School. Armstrong deserves great praise for reminding people that theology is an intellectual pursuit, the attempt to seek to understand God, as opposed to what much of religion seems to be today, namely the effort by many to project their own narrow petty views onto the divine.

That said, this work suffers from the same shortcoming of all Armstrong's voluminous work. Were she a theologian, one might forgive her for ignoring all those arguments that ran against her claims of universality, though it would still be intellectually sloppy. However, Armstrong claims to be a historian of religion, and as such she is guilty of appalling sins of omission. When a fact contradicts her thesis, she does not even give it the due regard of inconvenience and seek to reconcile, but simply pretends it is not there. As such, she is not a scholar, but a polemicist, even if a polemicist for a position for which I have sympathy.

Examples are legion. Armstrong claims that no one prior to the Enlightenment no one read the first chapter of Genesis literally. Really? In the Jewish tradition Ibn Ezra did. So did several rabbis in the Talmud. In the Christian tradition one can look to Luther and no lesser figure than Paul. Does that mean that these were majority views? Certainly not in the Jewish tradition, but to pretend that they don't exist is rank intellectual dishonesty and preying on the ignorance of her readers. Likewise, Armstrong's tut tut comparisons between the Crusaders and Jihadists as religiously retrograde, ignores the fact that - certainly in the former group at least - religious warfare was not merely tolerated but extolled near universally through its religious polity of the day as a duty and a path to salvation. By the same method of argument through erasure and faith in her readers ignorance, Armstrong famously whitewashed Muhammad's military career in the efforts to declare him "a great peace maker."

In a recent interview, someone asked Armstrong a question about the anti-Christ. She replied declaring it a "bogeyman" that "isn't even really in the Bible." When the interviewer, plainly ignorant of the bible asked if that claim was true, Armstrong replies "Not really. It's a couple of chance remarks of Saint Paul and then there's the "Book of Revelation." But the whole idea of there being end-time battles reflects a more sort of Zoroastrian view of the world." Oh, just Saint Paul and the Book of Revelations? No biggie.

Of course this isn't my religious tradition, so one might wonder why I would take offense, but readers should beware what any "scholar" has to say who depends mightily on her audiences ignorance in order to succeed in her arguments.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to lie; this was a slog. A breath-taking overview of western religious culture going back to ancient French cave paintings and mentioning every major philosopher, theologian, and scientist since (as well as quite a few minor ones). This reads like a seminary dissertation. Initially I was bored to tears. But in the end, all that history culminates in a forceful argument in favor of the author's premise (as far as I can tell, though I suspect I'm not educated enough in theology or philosophy to be qualified to judge.)

The premise is this: God, whatever that is, is an unknowable transcendence, and religion throughout the ages has been a practice or craft based on ritual and contemplation of myth designed to bring practitioners in touch with the transcendent, a project that was all mucked up in the Enlightenment when religious folks got the idea that their God, just like the universe, was reducible to a knowable notion - a fact - leading to their initial reliance on and eventual antipathy toward science and ending up with the current vogue of religion qua science, an aberrant perversion of both.

There is no inherent conflict between religion and science, she argues, as they are separate magisteria concerned with separate questions. There is more than one kind of truth - science arrives at one while art, literature, and religion arrive at another. Religious people should get back making a commitment to religious practice instead of contorting their brains to accept absurd beliefs.

The ideas are robust. It's too bad the tome probably is above the reading level of most and below the supposed dignity of the rest.

[Bionic Jean]

I must confess that I did not finish this book. Unfortunately every time I tried to read it I felt as if I was undertaking a degree in Theology. It is extremely heavy-going.

Karen Armstrong has written numerous books on comparative religion, and is one of this country's leading writers on the subject. This is a detailed chronicle of faith through the ages, to demonstrate her assertion that atheism has never been lack of belief in the sacred, but always a rejection of a particular conception of God. In this way she seem closely allied to New Age ideology.

She certainly posits interesting ideas. One of the recurring themes in her book is that the meaning of such words as belief, faith and mystery has altered so much over the ages that much of the science v. belief controversy is a misguided view of what these concepts actually refer to. I would have liked to investigate this further, but got bogged down in her lengthy history of belief from 30,000 BCE to the present.

A less academic and more accessible style, an overview rather than a plodding dissertation, plus some judicious editing would have ensured that this book reaches a wider audience.

And I might have finished it.

[Osman · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book can be read in two ways, either as a confused counterblast to Dawkins or as a plea to others of faith to adapt their religious practice and adopt her rather peculiar (almost Atheistic) religious stance.

As other reviewers have noticed this seems at first glance to promise a detailed rebuttal of Dawkins, et al - the derivative cover and blurbs encourage this. Armstrong does eventually get onto this task in the last chapters but first we have to plough through millennia of Christian history, selectively chosen to illustrate her tendentious thesis- that Religion is NOT what the New Atheists (and incidentally pretty much everybody else) think it is.

No indeed. Religions purpose according to Armstrong is a purely practical: it is to turn us into compassionate beings. We get there through meditation on scriptural myths. She maintains that Religious tracts such as the Bible only contain metaphorical stories "Jews, Christians and Muslims all knew that revealed truth was symbolic, that scripture could not be interpreted literally." (pp 310). Religion is to help us with life's problems and to discover and nurture new capacities of human nature such as compassion. It is not (and never has been)a reliance on creed, doctrine or dogma; these elements are not important and it is only through the idolatrous perversion of fundamentalists and New Atheists that anyone ever thought so in the first place.

She seems to be advocating a re-evaluation of religion along radical Don Cupit/ NOMA-esque lines: religion has nothing factual to say whatsoever. One can't even say that God exists, for example on page 291 she takes Dawkins to task for suggesting that god is a supernatural intelligence that designed the universe, you must not think this way she says apparently no religious people do, and they never did!

If you are starting to think that Armstrong is departing from reality as well as mainstream religious thought you would be right; she seems to be blissfully unaware of what the religious believer in the street (and in the Vatican) actually holds. Most Christians (not just Fundamentalists) actually do believe some (at least) parts of the bible; they do believe that God created the universe; they do believe that miracles occur; they do believe that Christ rose from the dead. It's all very well for her to insist that this is a perversion of religion but she seems to be in a minority of one, I wonder what the Pope or The Archbishop of Canterbury would say to the idea that God didn't create the universe. For most believers junking all the truth claims of religion would be the same as junking faith itself with nothing left worth holding on to.

She is right though when it comes to her assertion that this re-write of religious practise will defeat those nasty New Atheists. After all if religion just consisted of compassionate people meditating on old myths with no pretension to truth in the privacy of their retreats (Armstrong used to be nun) there would indeed be nothing much to complain about. Religion isn't this though. It does make factual claims, it always has; it does seek to impose it's will on others, it always has and it is the source of much of today's woes.

She reminds me of a revisionist airbrushing unwanted elements out of history. She has redesigned religion as something so rarefied and thin as to not offend anyone, she has defeated the New Atheists by the simple expedient of becoming an atheist herself. No Christian with anything more than a super-subtle academic veneer of faith will ever adopt her anaemic God-free revision of religion.

[Philip Cartwright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't be fooled by the title; this is not some trite attempt to prove that God exists or that religion is a great thing. Instead, it's a tremendous, sweeping yet detailed account of the changing conception of religion from the dawn of humanity to the present day. Along the way, Armstrong stresses several themes.

For millennia religion was not seen primarily as a series of propositions to which one was required to assent ("God exists", etc). Instead, it was a commitment to a particular way of living. At its heart lay a sense of ineffable divinity - an ultimate transcendence that was beyond understanding, beyond words, beyond even such concepts as existence or omnipotence. This ultimate transcendence was called "God" in the monotheistic religions. Although beyond knowing, some degree of contact with divinity was possible through ritual, symbolism and a variety of meditative practices (not just straightforward meditation as in Buddhism, but also theological reflection, philosophy or even the constant practice of humility and generosity). Contact with the ineffable helped people rise above worldly suffering and adopt a more compassionate way of life; it enabled them to become human in a fuller, richer sense.

By around 15000 CE, however, this ancient conception of religion was starting to be overtaken by a new way of seeing things. An increased faith in the power of reason alone to solve all problems helped "literalise" religion. Slowly "belief" changed from a commitment to a way of living to a series of unproven statements to which one assented. Along the way the notion of God changed: he became knowable, describable - a being in the world. Such a notion would've been considered idolatrous by older religious figures such as Thomas Aquinas. It made God a thing.

This new notion of religion, divorced as it was from communal practices which had previously been its life-blood, was vulnerable to attack. As a mere series of statements it could seem unconvincing or even ridiculous. This vulnerability was only increased by religion's attempt to co-opt science as a means of making it more respectable. But as science became increasingly able to describe the natural world without any need for a god (conceived as a super-being that created and sustained the laws of nature)the attempt justification through "natural theology" seemed horribly flawed.

The older sense of an ineffable transcendence has never entirely gone away, however. Armstrong argues that it is a mark of the human condition and as such can emerge in some unlikely places - modern physics, for example. She ends by wondering if the naturalistic turn in religion hasn't now run its course. Perhaps it is time to reincorporate unknowing into our approach to the divine.

This is the third of Armstrong's books that I've read ("The History of God" and "The Battle for God" being the other two). I'd say it was comfortably the best of the three and also, perhaps, the most important.

[Shel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was enticed to read The Case for God after hearing a snippet of the book on NPR that told how mystics of the past reached for God in silence, ritually acknowledging the inadequacy of words to describe deity. Afterwards, an interviewer questioned Armstrong on her views. She promptly corrected him. "It's not just a bee in my bonnet. I've been studying this for 20 years." I was hooked, curious to hear more from Armstrong.

My enjoyment of the work was no doubt enhanced because I listened to the audio book read by the British author. Armstrong's proper, authoritative tone adds interest. Her work, A Short History of Myth (2005), read by an actor, contained many of the same ideas and information as the opening to The Case for God, but lacked the cadence and emphasis Armstrong gives her own words.

The Case for God is a history of mankind from a theological perspective from primitive times to the postmodern era. It includes the thoughts of philosophers through out the ages from Socrates to Derrida. Having read books on physics, which touch on the theological, it was refreshing to read a book of theology paralleling some of the thinking of quantum physicists and theologians.

The case Armstrong makes is for an incomprehensible, mysterious, mythical, ineffable God. She advocates for our acceptance of unknowing. By embracing religion as a practice of compassion not as a means to an end (a way to answer questions about the cosmos or to prepare for an afterlife) people open themselves to transformative experiences which increase enjoyment of the here and now.

The Case for God shines light between the polarized arguments of atheists and theists and recalls the human history of open-minded discourse on mythology, philosophy and religion. Armstrong presents theology as an accessible, intriguing and useful study and portrays spiritual seeking as an expression of the desire for ecstatic experience inherent in human nature.

Pairs well with: Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets, which makes the case that the absence of the mysterious and unknowable in modern culture and American literature fuels, in some, an appetite for science fiction; Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, a study of the texts and early Christianity.

[Derek Driggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a brilliant presentation of how religion and popular notions about God have changed over the centuries, ending with the author’s assertion that, at its core, religion was never supposed to be a vehicle for providing answers, but to help humankind cope with an unanswerable universe. Increasingly, an upsurge in fundamentalism has demanded that science and lived experience move aside so that religion can do the answering, meaning God is no longer about feeling what cannot be explained, but has become instead about explaining what we no longer feel. I resonated deeply with what Armstrong wrote here and thought her research was profoundly well conducted and explained. The only problem is that this is quite a dense book which shouldn’t be sought out for light reading, and it took me some time to get through.

[صفاء · Rating 4 out of 5]

أعتبر هذا الكتاب من بين الكتب المهمة التي تحدثت عن الله وتاريخ اللاهوت
فقد رصدت الكاتبة تاريخ ظهور الدين وفكرة الإله منذ العصور القديمة لحد العصور الحديثة.

الاقتبسات التي أعجبتني:

الإلحاد في رأي جوليان باجيني : التزام صريح دون تحفظ بالحقيقة والبحث والتساؤل العقلاني ولذا فمعارضة معتقدات الآخرين وإظهار العداء والبغض لهم مع قناعة لدرجة التشبت بصحة ما يعتقد به الشخص من آراء مناقض تماما لقيم الإلحاد.


أصر ديكارت، أولا، على أن على المفكر تفريغ عقله من كل ما اعتقد أنه يعرفه، عليه، هكذا أخبر نفسه ألا "أتقبل أي شيء بصفته حقيقيا إلا إذا عرفت بوضوح أنه كذلك أي أن أتجنب بعناية التسرع في الأحكام والتحيز لها، وألا أتقبل منها أي شيء أكثر مما طرح في عقلي بجلاء وتميز بدرجة لا أجد معها أية فرصة أو سبب للشك فيه". كانت تلك صيغة معقلنة من طريق دنيس للإنكار. ينبغي على العالم أن يفرغ عقله من حقائق الكشف والتنزيل والموروثات. ليس بوسعه الوثوق في أدلة حواسه، لأن البرج الذي يبدو مستديرا عن بعد قد يكون في واقع الأمر مربعا. ليس بوسعه حتى أن يكون على يقين من أن الأشياء الحيطة به حقيقية كيف يتسنى لنا أن نعرف أننا لم نكن نحلم حينما رأيناها، سمعناها، أو لمسناها؟ كيف لنا أن نثبت أننا كنا مستيقظين؟ كان هدفه هو العثور على أفكار بدهية، جلية في حد ��اتها وبأسلوب مباشر، فقط الحقائق "الواضحة" و"المميزة" يمكنها أن تمده بأساس لرياضياته الشمولية.

[Chaunceton Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent history of humankind's struggle to define reality by creating and regularly reinventing deity. Karen Armstrong surveys humankind's superstition from 30,000 BCE to the present, and provides interesting context to the creation of the books and beliefs that many humans considered (or still consider) divine. The last chapter was a bit strange. The author clearly had an axe to grind with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, but her attacks on their philosophy seemed out of place and inconsistent with the rest of the book. That said, great book overall.

[Jaylia3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of another book out last year excited me--The Evolution of God--but when I heard the author speak I was disappointed. (There was a lot of talk about zero sum game.) Armstrong's book is what I had hoped for from the other. It covers the changing ways people have viewed God and religion, from 30,000 BCE, when humans crawled deep into caves to cover their walls with paintings of animals and maybe shamans, to the present, when both fundamentalists and atheists insist on a strict literal interpretation of scriptures--a legacy of the modern scientific revolution that has left everyone, including the devout, looking for unambiguous, objective truth derived from some kind of logical deliberation. The modern way is simplistic; Armstrong believes religious life involves hard work, pushing finite hearts and minds to the edges of their understanding, toward the infinite.

I took a long time to read this book and as soon as I finished I started reading it again. There is a lot to absorb and a lot that challenged my unexamined beliefs, a mind-blowing experience that's my drug of choice. As an an agnostic leaning toward a non-belligerent atheism, reading is almost my religion, so when Armstrong wrote convincingly about the printing press's drawback of moving learning and religion in a depersonalized and inflexible direction, leading in religion's case to ridiculous disagreements over finer and finer dogmatic distinctions, I was shocked into a speechless, apophatic state. One of many I experienced while reading her book. Which is maybe, or maybe not, ironic because that apophatic experience I got from reading is the right place, Armstrong believes, to begin transcending our everyday world and experiencing God. Religion, Armstrong writes, historically has been and should be more about practice and experience and less about blind belief in particular doctrines. Sounds great to me.

[Ericka Clou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, that explains everything.

I've read other Karen Armstrong books, but this goes in a different direction. She reviews the history of God and the relationship between philosophy, science, and religion in different cultures and times. She uses all this history to make a very compelling case for God generally, but also for the merits of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. She also makes a compelling case against positivism, "the belief that science is the only reliable means to truth." She doesn't do this lightly, she understands the importance of science today, and she discuss scientific progress from Copernicus to the modern debate in physics about string theory.

She also discusses what she believes are the origins and causes of our modern religious conflicts. She recommends solutions that make a lot of sense.

Karen Armstrong is a powerhouse of religious knowledge and practice. And she clearly also did a lot of research about science. This book is long, sometimes repetitive, and sometimes difficult to understand. I feel like I came to this book at a good time: after having learned about the practice of meditation and the debates about string theory. However, there's a lot more background I wish I brought to the book in the realm of philosophy, history, and religion.

Despite the challenge, or because of the challenge, I think it's well worth it for the religious and non-religious alike. It did for me what I hope every book I open to will do for me- change the way I see the world.

[Phyllis Duncan) · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this were a text book for a comparative religion course, I'd likely give it four or five stars, but Armstrong states that she wrote this tome to counter recent books by atheists Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris. I'd suggest, then, she actually read their work instead of basing her research on sound bites from Fox News. So-called modern atheists don't seek to tear down religion or suppress others' beliefs. We simply don't want those beliefs forced on us at every turn, in public, in private, and, heaven forbid, in government. She hasn't bothered to understand this, and that makes this book deeply flawed. Nothing she's written in here makes a case for god to me; rather, it just emphasizes to me that humans created religion to address what they didn't understand. We've entrenched it so much in our lives, then, we find it hard to move on from primitive worship of an amorphous, supernatural entity, especially one who apparently sits back and lets bad things happen to innocent people because it's part of his/her plan.

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not actually a case for belief in God. Armstrong thinks that both the New Atheists and the Christian Fundamentalists misinterpret the religious tradition they're arguing about. In her view, all religions, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are attempt to give voice to something ineffable and transcendent by means of allegories and symbols whose real meaning can only be grasped in sustained religious practice. Concerns about the literal truth of doctrines are, according to her, a distinctly modern phenomenon. Armstrong's erudition is considerable and her writing is engaging. At the same time, though, her thesis requires her to play really fast and loose with the hsitory. It's one thing to say that the only rationally tenable religious faith is a kind of allegorical mysticism. It's quite another to claim, as she does, that that's what it's really been all along.

[Jon Stout · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong sounds like a religious apologetic or polemic tract, but it is not that at all. It takes a much more detached and scholarly viewpoint, and could function as a history or survey of how people think about God. I approached it from the context of a faith vs. scientific method debate that I have carried on for years with some of my friends, but one could also approach the topic out of a concern with the dangers of religious fundamentalism, or out of an interest in the common grounds of the world religions.

Karen Armstrong came to my attention when she was paired with evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins in a debate in the Wall Street Journal. Armstrong characteristically started off by agreeing with Dawkins about the impact of Darwinian thought on religion, but took issue with the concept of the God the existence of which Dawkins denied, saying that it was a modern distortion of religious thinking throughout history. Her book fleshes out the history of religion in a way which would support her claim.

Her review of history is too exhaustive to summarize, ranging from Biblical origins to postmodern criticism, from the Abrahamic faiths to Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. She often uses the phrase, “Brahman, Nirvana, God, and Dao,” emphasizing the commonality of religious experience. ”Her basic point is that our experience of God is “apophatic,” wordless, silent, pointing beyond itself to what cannot be expressed in language, but rather must be understood through symbol, myth, ritual and commitment to a way of life. She argues that the logos of science and the mythos of religion deal with different domains, and thus should not be in conflict with each other.

Armstrong sees fundamentalism and atheism as being equally distortions of the religious impulse, in which both claim an absolute knowledge inconsistent with the humility required by religion. She quotes with approval the Italian postmodernist Gianni Vattimo, “When somebody wants to tell me the absolute truth, it is because he wants to put me under his control.” Rather than being apologetic or polemic, Armstrong’s book is a gentle and scholarly reminder of the varieties of ways people have felt religiously and talked about it.

[Jafar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought my review of this book would be about how persuasive I did or did not find Armstrong’s arguments about God. But there’s not much to agree or disagree with in this book. It’s almost entirely history – mostly history of Christianity and its development. Armstrong is obviously very well-read and learned in her subject matter, but I felt she was being downright deceitful by naming this book The Case for God. Most people would expect something else of a book with this title. Armstrong already has a book called A History of God. I don’t know why she wrote another one about the same thing. (On a second thought – thanks god this book wasn’t really about making a case for God. I’m not sure I would have liked that any more.)

The only “case” that Armstrong seems to making for God (if you’re patient to first read 300 pages of densely-written religion history) is that the “modern” God is not the same as what humans felt and needed through the previous millennia. Religion is not supposed to provide guidance where reason can; it’s not supposed to provide a factual account of creation; scriptures are not to be taken literally; there is no single True religion or god; etc. These are all modern notions that have contributed to making God unbelievable. Religion is there “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” Apparently God is supposed to be a piece of poetry and we’ve been taking him too seriously as of late. Well, that may or may not be true, and you can believe in that sort of God if it suits you, but how does it matter now? We live in modern times and are stuck with a “modern” God. We can’t go back now to Greek mythology and the paintings in Lascaux Cave, can we?

Armstrong doesn't like the modern God, and the irony that her own interpretation of God and religion is very post-Enlightenment and modern completely escapes her.

[Repix Pix · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bazofia.

[Scott Hotes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armstrong makes a compelling argument against what has been called the "new atheism". Debunking the use of a literal interpretation of the Bible as something wholly modern and something that would be completely surprising and foreign to followers of the Christian faith up until at least the Enlightenment, she argues that instead religion is not an intellectual concept or dogma, but rather it is something you do. That without an active involvement, religion loses its essential value.

I find this to be a striking counter-attack to the rather tired arguments made by the new atheists, and one I'm not entirely clear how to address. From a second perspective the argument may be made this way: the act of devoting oneself actively to the pursuit of a particular religious faith, through things like prayer, meditation, and the willful act of separating oneself from a purely rational approach to understanding this world we find ourselves in may in fact have the potential of exposing us (in a mental sense) to something that we could not otherwise approach through purely rational thought. In my mind this is an argument not easily reckoned with or pushed aside.

[Asim Bakhshi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, a very lucid and readable book. Armstrong's case is primarily built against the newage militant atheist as well as postmodern religious fundamentalist but in doing so she obscures further - perhaps inadvertently - the nature of ultimate reality we call God.

She successfully traces back the roots of post-renaissance apophatic theological shift in antiquity and medieval religion. However, her version of God presents another problematic of reducing God to a mere abstract symbol or a set of symbols. In my humble view, Armstrong's thesis is apt to question a theist's conviction as much as it helps in countering the thesis of an atheist.

Any one interested in broad historical currents of theological metaphysics related to God must not miss it. Perhaps better than many of Armstrong's other books as far as asking the right questions is concerned, but if you are thinking to counter Dawkins and Hitchens, Armstrong's case is not more than a starter.

[Tom LA]

One of my very few DNF. Armstrong starts very well, then drones forever about excruciatingly small details about ancient rites and religions. Not good. When I realized she fully embraced the idiotic “BCE” and “C.E.” acronyms, I stopped. They are typical Politically Correct material: they pretend to be “inclusive”, while in reality they are anti-Christian. What does “Common Era” mean, anyway? Just stupid. They will tell you that C.E. and BCE have been around for 2 centuries, and that it’s simply a matter of choosing them or “AD and B.C.”, but the simple truth is, they hate Christianity. Including Armstrong, who apparently is now Muslim.

[Cheryl Gatling]

You see that stack of books on the cover? That's what you're in for. Karen Armstrong has read just about everything every written on the history of religion, from the beginning of time until now, and she is going to share it with you. The book is dense, and at times dry. Fortunately, when Armstrong has a point, she repeats it, so you can remember. Here are her points. Today's atheists reject a concept of God that is not correct. Many of today's believers support a concept of God that is not correct.

Here's how that happened. There are two kinds of thinking/communicating/experiencing the world, which Armstrong calls logos and mythos. Logos is the language of facts, science, and practical matters. We use it to figure things out and get things done. Mythos is the province of our emotions, our subconscious. It is the stuff of art, music, and the deep yearnings we can't express easily in words.

For most of human history, religion was "done" using the mythos-language of symbolism, ritual, mystery, and wonder. Then came the Enlightenment and the scientific religion. People became so enamored of the successes of logos-thinking, that they began to apply logos-thinking to religion. Whereas in the past the scriptures were always interpreted in a symbolic way, they came to be seen as textbooks of literal truth. Whereas in the past, to "believe" in something meant to join the team, so to speak, to place one's self in the care of something or someone, it came to mean a purely intellectual exercise of checking off a list of statements and saying, "I agree, I agree, I agree."

Armstrong argues that God can never be known by intellectual means. God can only be known through the practice of spiritual exercises, prayer, meditation, rituals of communal worship. People who devote themselves over time to spiritual practices come to experience transcendence, something that is beyond easy understanding or description, but that evokes in those who experience it peace, compassion, a detachment from personal desires, and profound joy. Instead of being convinced that he has absolute truth and everyone else doesn't, the religious person realizes how much he does not know, about the mystery of God, and about everything else, and he is humbled. So the strident, self-righteous religious fundamentalists are wrong, and the strident, self-righteous atheists are also wrong.

Armstrong calls this sense of not knowing "apophatic." She quotes many ancient philosophers and doctors of the church who were proponents of apophatic theology. She hopes that we may move in that direction again, and that people of diverse beliefs may be united, because science also, especially contemporary physics, also has come to the realization that the universe is full of mystery and wonder, and we don't really understand it.

[Asmaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"ان الاله رغبه ماوراء الرغبه"
يحاول الكاتب للبحث عن سؤاله من خلال التركيز علي اكتر من اتجاه من العصر البدائي ولحد دلوقتي، وايه هي التطورات اللي مر بيها الإنسان لغايه ماكتشف اهميه او موت الاله في حياته، في البدايه سرد التفاصيل من خلال اعمال فرويد الطوطم والحرام او قصه الحضارة لديورانت عن اهتمام الانسان البدائي بخلق الكون، وظهور اليهوديه ومحور تطورها منذ تعاليم عزرا وطلبه من اليهود الالتزام ببعض القواعد التي لم تورد حتى في تعاليم موسي القديمه حتي سؤالهم نهايه المطاف اذا كان يوجد اله فلمَ لم يحمينا من المحرقه!
وبالتالي خاصيه الاضافه مهمه في الاديان انها دائمه الاجتهاد ، انتقل الكاتب لدراسة التغريق بالنسبه للديانات ونظرتهم لنشاه الكون ووجود العديد من الالهه ووجود محاكم التفتيش خاصتهم التي ظهرت قبل القرون الوسطى في اوروبا وهذه ايضا من الخصائص المهمه في الاديان فالحل دائما محاربه اي شئ لا يفكر بنفس تفكيرها ومنطقها الاعوج، الانتقال الي المسيح والوهيته، وعدم التطرق الي غرابه ولادته بعيدا عن تشابهها مع كثير من الميثولوجيا القديمه ولكن العامل الاساسي عند اليهود هو الكثير من الغموض عند الكثير من الولادات الاخري والتي تؤكد نظريه الميثولوجيا ان ولاده البطل لابد ان يتم اختراع المزيد من المعجزات، والانتقال الي بودا حيث أنه اتبع منطق عدم مناقشه وجود الاله او حتي تسميته لكي لا يتم التحول الي ديانات الوثنية ومناداه الالهه بأسمائهم، ثم دمج الروحانيات والدين دائما ماكانت ترتبط بالحياه اليوميه لكي لا يتم فصل الدين عن الحياه.
الانتقال الي الرب الحديث وبعد اكتشاف كولومبوس اصبحت قضيه توافق العلم مع الدين تمثل مشكله، حيث ان فرض الدين علي العلوم جعل هناك دائما طائفه متمرده من الملحدين لابد من استخدام الأساليب البدائية معهم مثل محاكم التفتيش، مثل وجود الله في جاذبيه نيوتن!
بعد الثورة الفرنسية الكثير قد رأي انها بمثابه الفوضي وكسر القيود وبالتالي حدث الخوف ومنها ما كثرت حالات الالحاد ايضا، مما قد سبب وجود الالحاد بين الكهنه ايضا! فالطبيعه قد حلت مكان الاله في كل شئ.
بعد الثورة اصبحت هناك القواعد والقوانين التي يسير عليها الانسان ويبحث عن حقوقه وواجباته بدون اللجوء الي الكنيسه لأنها فطرة لدي الإنسان، فالحديث عن الدين هذه الايام اصبح صعبا حيث ان اول سؤال يطرح هل يوجد اله!! بالرغم من ان الكاتب لم يتحدث عن الإسلام سوي في اخر 50 صفحه الا ان الخصائص السابقه لا يخلو منه بالاضافه الي علاقه المسلمين مع الغرب التي كانت دائما مليئه بالاحترام الي ماقبل الأفغاني وبعدها ظهور الارهاب وتفشيه ورؤيه الإسلام المختصرة في ان كل مسلم صحيح وعاقل لابد في ان يصبح مقاتل، فهل مات الاله؟

[JCJBergman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been flicking through this for a few weeks here and there for nuggets of information to help formulate my thoughts for my recent dissertation on the death of God. It is rather dense (which is not entirely a bad thing) and the title is somewhat misleading, but Armstrong makes some worthy observations throughout. I especially appreciate her calling out the superficial "New Atheists" for their lacklustre contributions to the God conversation.

The following are some key quotes I found contemplative:

“It is in this context, perhaps, that we should discuss the vexed question of Jesus' miracles. Since the Enlightenment, when empirical verification became important in the substantiation of any 'belief', many people — Christians and atheists alike — have assumed that Jesus performed these miracles to prove his divinity. But in the ancient world, 'miracles' were quite commonplace and, however remarkable and significant, were not thought to indicate that the miracle-worker was in any way super-human. There were so many unseen forces for which the science of the day could not account that it seemed quite reasonable to assume that spirits affected human life, and Greeks routinely consulted a god rather than a doctor. Indeed, given the state of medicine before the modern period, this was probably a safer and more prudent option. Some people had a special ability to manipulate the malign powers that were thought to cause disease, and Jews in particular were known to be skilled healers. In the ninth century BCE, the prophets Elijah and Elisha had both performed miracles similar to Jesus', but nobody ever suggested that they were gods.” (p. 91)

“After Einstein, it became disturbingly clear that not only was science unable to provide us with definitive proof, but its findings were inherently limited and provisional. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated the Principle of Indeterminacy in Nuclear Physics, showing that it was impossible for scientists to achieve an objective result because the act of observation itself affected their understanding of the object of their investigation. In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906-78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that were not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could only be proved or disproved by input from outside. This completely undercut the traditional assumption of systematic decidability. In his 1929 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) argued that Descartes' quest for certainty could no longer be the goal of modern philosophy. Heisenberg had liberated us from seventeenth-century mechanics, when the universe had seemed like a giant machine made up of separate components, whereas this new generation of scientists was revealing the deep interconnectedness of all reality.” (p. 253-4)

“[T]here is an inherent contradiction in the new atheism, especially in its emphasis on the importance of ‘evidence' and the claim that science always proves its theories empirically, As Popper, Kuhn and Polyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this. Dawkins' hero Darwin admitted that he could not prove the evolutionary hypothesis but he had confidence in it nonetheless, and for decades, as we have seen, physicists were happy to have faith in Einstein's theory of relativity, even though it had not been definitively verified. Even Harris makes a large act of faith in the ability of his own intelligence to arrive at objective truth — a claim that Hume or Kant would have found questionable.
[…] Religious fundamentalists also develop an exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This tendency makes critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth.
[…] Nor, like Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the resources to create a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work.
[…] Typical of the fundamentalist mindset is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition and aesthetic vision as well as on reason. The physicist Paul Dirac has argued that 'it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment'.” (p. 292-4)

“From almost the very beginning, men and women have repeatedly engaged in strenuous and committed religious activity. They evolved mythologies, rituals and ethical disciplines that brought them intimations of holiness that seemed in some indescribable way to enhance and fulfil their humanity. They were not religious simply because their myths and doctrines were scientifically or historically sound, because they sought information about the origins of the cosmos, or merely because they wanted a better life in the hereafter. They were not bludgeoned into faith by power-hungry priests or kings: indeed, religion often helped people to oppose tyranny and oppression of this kind. The point of religion was to live intensely and richly here and now. Religious people are ambitious. They want lives overflowing with significance. They have always desired to integrate with their daily lives the moments of rapture and insight that came to them in dreams, in their contemplation of nature, and in their intercourse with one another and with the animal world. Instead of being crushed and embittered by the sorrow of life, they sought to retain their peace and serenity in the midst of their pain. They yearned for the courage to overcome their terror of mortality; instead of being grasping and mean-spirited, they aspired to live generously, large-heartedly and justly and to inhabit every single part of their humanity. Instead of being a mere workaday cup, they wanted, as Confucius suggested, to transform themselves into a beautiful ritual vessel brimful of the sanctity that they were learning to see in life. They tried to honour the ineffable mystery they sensed in each human being and create societies that honoured the stranger, the alien, the poor and the oppressed. Of course they often failed. But overall they found that the disciplines of religion helped them to do all this. Those who applied themselves most assiduously showed that it was possible for mortal men and women to live on a higher, divine or godlike plane and thus wake up to their true selves.” (p. 315-6)

[Muhammad Arqum · Rating 4 out of 5]

One might expect this to be somewhat of a critique on God which is followed by a scholarly explanation/reasoning which would essentially entail the primary discourse of this book. This is quite different than that. Karen starts off with way back to the earliest notions of God and then slowly unfolds the history of different religions of the world. Somewhere in the middle she delves into a rather dense polemic strictly pertaining to christianity, which I thought was a bit too technical and detailed for someone like me. That part probably makes this book primarily about history of God but its movement in Christianity as its main subject. It does not touch upon the evolution of Islam all that much. In fact it merely scratches the surface when it comes to both Judaism and Islam. One can argue that it is a fairly decent introduction to history of philosophy in the domain of religion as well. Which would be quite true. I enjoyed how Karen has taken so much and still managed to explain it in quite a lucid way. The central theme of the book is that religion is not merely an idea. The cognizance of the almighty is a matter of disciplined practice, not merely dogmatic clarity. Religions back in the day clearly had a disctinction between LOGOS and MYTHOS. Two different realms of understanding that did not require overlapping. And the fact that the truths of religion only became certain when an individual understood the tenets of that religion and also practiced its rituals with conviction. Only then were the truths about God and religion opened up to them. Religion does not require reason. "The heart has a reason of its own!"
An interesting book. Anyone who is interested in the subject should most certainly pick it up.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Case for God provides a great survey of the history of religious thought since Christ and puts in context the polarized fundamentalism and atheism of today. As someone who has never taken a religion course or read much about theology I found The Case for God to be very enlightening and thought provoking. The book at times is a dense read, particularly in the first half, but gains momentum as it progresses to modern times. For those not interested in devoting the time to reading the entire book, I highly recommend the epilogue, which stands well on its own.

[Mohamed Aboulazm · Rating 4 out of 5]

أعد هذا الكتاب من أروع الكتب التى قرأتها فى تتبع تاريخ الله والأديان، وفي نقد الأصولية والإلحاد. الكاتبة تملك من أدوات المعرفة الكثير، وتعرف كيف تستخدم أدواتها لعرض الأفكار بصورة واضحة وميسرة، رغم أن الأفكار التى تناقشها تبدو معقدة، فمن نظريات الإيمان البدائية حتى نظرية موت الإله ثم إله مابعد الحداثة، وهى أمور معقدة وأضاع الفلاسفة أعمارهم لشرحها، ومع ذلك تمكنت كارن أرمسترونج من عرض هذه الأفكار وتتبعها وتقديم رؤية جديدة للإله وللأديان.
رؤية تدعو للسلام ونبذ العنف، للروحانية وليس التعصب، للعقلانية وليس الخرافة.
كتاب رائع جدا .