“Mark and Bev Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>…
Karen Armstrong, Turn, Turn, Turn
Dave Weich, Powells.com
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Dave: I noticed that you’re wrapping up a month-long tour of America, and I wondered whether you’ve heard particular questions again and again as you travel from city to city.
Karen Armstrong: Apart from the current political situation and Islam and fundamentalism, it’s been “How can we deal with the rising intolerance in this country?” Religious-based intolerance, I’m speaking of: religious certainty. America seems to be very riled up at
the moment about religion. Not just the Al Queda threat, but also Bush
and his politics, his sense of being inspired by God. There’s been a lot of “How do we redeem our religions? What can we do?”
A lot of people have come out of the woodwork and said, “I was in the seminary” or “I was in the convent.” Others, they bear no relation to you on the surface, to my own story, and yet I think the book has helped them find a morphology through which they can look at their own
journey and passages.
Compassion, the meaning of compassion – that comes up a lot. And, “What is the role of belief in faith? Do you believe in God?” I point out that that’s a very Christian question, a very Western, modern question. It’s not actually the proper question, but nevertheless it’s
what people want to know. For them, that is the question.
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Dave: People are desperate for this kind of information: objective, knowledgeable perspectives on other belief systems. You were just seventeen when you joined the convent. You hadn’t yet been exposed to other faiths. Most people haven’t at such a young age.
Armstrong: No, though people are more and more doing it now. Alongside
the sectarianism that is growing, the fact that we are living cheek by
jowl with people of other faiths, the fact that our world has shrunk to a global village, means that for a long time and in a most unsung way people have been spontaneously reaching out to other faiths. More Christians read Martin Buber than Jews. Jews read Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox. And Jesuits have long been learning meditation from Buddhist monks. Because there’s more information now than there was, I
think people are doing it not in a principled way but spontaneously. Rumi, for example: People are reading him in droves in the West. Sufism is very popular. My little book on the Buddha was very popular.
What we need in this world right now is a dose of the Buddha’s good sense, I think: low-key spirituality.
I think this is in the zeitgeist now; people are doing it. Since 9/11,
Americans in particular have become aware that now it’s not just a nice thing to do; it’s imperative to learn. And we’ve got to bring up our children to know about other religions. Everybody, not just the West. When I go to mosques or synagogues, I’ll say the same thing. We’ve got to know more about each other’s religions so we don’t harbor
distorted, inaccurate images. It’s too dangerous.
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Armstrong: Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as I say in that book, working in isolation – and often in deadly hostility to one another – still come up with the same questions, the same values. That tells us something about our humanity, and it is affirming.
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Dave: But in regards to fundamentalism, as differently as it may have manifested in each religion, something all fundamentalists share is the fear of annihilation, the fear that their way of life will not survive. And it’s a legitimate fear.
Armstrong: It’s true. In the Muslim countries, that has been immensely
true. In Judaism, fundamentalism took major leaps forward, first just after the Holocaust, then again after the 1973 war when Israel suddenly felt vulnerable again and felt its isolation in the Middle East. Then look at Muslims whose modernizers were aggressive and mowed
you down in a mosque if you didn’t wear modern dress; or took women’s veils off in the street and ripped them to pieces in front of them with a bayonet; tortured mullahs; abolished Sufi orders and forced them underground. This is experienced by the ordinary Muslim in the street as an assault against religion, and yet what are these modernizers supposed to do? They’ve got to modernize fast. They’ve got
to secularize. Somehow we’ve got to see that this has been counterproductive.
What we know from the past is that when fundamentalists are attacked, whether they’re Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, they become more extreme. Certainly that happened in this country at the time of the Scopes trial. The ridicule they faced at the hands of the secular press led fundamentalists to go from the left of the political spectrum to the right, where they’ve remained.
Dave: You compare the Industrial and now the Technological Age to the Axial Age. Underlying economic and cultural changes are essentially forcing religion to adapt.
Armstrong: Religion speaks to contemporary conditions or it dies. The difference is that in our current pivotal period of major social, technological, and economic change, which has transformed the world, our geniuses have mostly been scientific. We’ve had no spiritual geniuses of the stature of the Buddha or Muhammad or Jesus or Confucius or Lao Tzu or the prophets of Israel.I won’t go on. There was a galaxy of spiritual stars in the Axial Age. We don’t have our own. We still rely on those original insights.
My book, I hope, will be a critique of the way we’re religious today. It often seems to me that in our various religious institutions we’re producing exactly the type of religion that people like the Buddha wanted to get rid of. Buddha and Isiah and Socrates, all these people,
who said, “Question everything. Never take anybody else’s word for it.
Never take anything on faith. If a religious belief doesn’t conform, if it doesn’t work for you, leave it, that’s fine. Question everything, even utterly sacred truths.” Like the prophets of Israel saying that God is not reflexively on the side of the Israel, as he was at the time of the Exodus.
And compassion is the key. No interest in doctrinal formulations, very
little interest in the afterlife.most of those religious leaders were just concerned with living fully. All this is very different from the way people conceive of religion today.
In the absence of religious geniuses, let’s make good use of the ones we had at the time of the Axial Age and try to get back to some of those great insights that in fact chime really well with modernity.
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Dave: What do you want readers to take away from your books? Is there one thing more than others?
Armstrong: The main thing I want them to get is this idea of compassion. That’s what we need now.
Dave: That everything boils down to the Golden Rule.
Armstrong: I’m convinced of it. It’s in all the traditions, and it’s what the world needs now more than religious certainty, more than doctrinal statements or more rules about what people can do in the bedroom and who can get married and who can be bishops or priests. All
this is like fiddling while Rome burns.
All the world religions developed in violent societies like our own. All of them came from societies where civilization seemed on the point
of collapsing under the weight of aggression and violence. Where old values were going out, no new ones were coming to take their place. The first impulse in many of these religions was a revulsion from violence. That’s what we need now, to get back to some of that.
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