A History of God: "Introduction" and initial thoughts

[Everyman]

She goes on to say (on the same page) 'Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human being are spiritual animals. Indeed there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.'   In other words she is postulating that despite science disposing of God and scholars proving that Jesus was not divine', God was not an aberration: 'Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art' and they are 'an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world.' 

Is that enough text for you?

Thank you.  

Yes, that's a nice passage.  But what are we to make of it?   She equates religion and art.   So, what do we know about art?  It is, I think, fair to say that it is entirely created by man.  That the cave paintings of early man were not copied from some external unseeable and unknowable power, but that they were based on the actual physical things that the artists saw around them and how they interpreted those things.  In other words, no humans, no art.

Taking her parallel, yes, I agree that she things mankind is a spiritual being, but that is a totally different thing from positing the existence of an external divinity.  There are many ways of being spiritual without believing in God.  Yet her book is titled "The History of God," not "The history of Spirituality."  She seeks to deal not just with spirituality, but with one specific manifestation of spirituality, which is believe in existent divine beings called gods.

The question becomes this.

In art, no humans, no art.

In religion, no humans no God?  Or God even if no humans?   I don't see that your passage addresses that question at all.  

Or, another part of the passage:  In other words she is postulating that despite science disposing of God and scholars proving that Jesus was not divine', God was not an aberration: 

Isn't this a pretty clear statement that she believes that there is no God outside of human construction?  That there is no external divinity outside of human comprehension.  

Let me put it this way.  It seems to me that she is saying "if the human race becomes extinct as the dinosaurs became extinct, there will no longer be any gods."   Do you agree or disagree with this understanding of her statements, and if you disagree, why?

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Choisya wrote:

...support your position with a quote from the Introduction which offsets her statement that "God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown"?

The key word above is seemed.  KA is not saying that God is an 'aberration, something that the human race had outgrown'.  She is saying that her experiences at the convent and what she learned there, together with her later studies on religion, seemed to point that way, that 'Science  seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus never claimed to be divine'.  She goes on to say (on the same page) 'Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human being are spiritual animals. Indeed there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.'   In other words she is postulating that despite science disposing of God and scholars proving that Jesus was not divine', God was not an aberration: 'Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art' and they are 'an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world.' 

Is that enough text for you?

(BTW yours is the straw man argument. Such an argument is a fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent's (KA) argument.) 

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Everyman wrote:

I find it absolutely bizarre that you came away from the introduction thinking that she was saying humans have outgrown God when she quite literally is saying the exact opposite.

Perhaps you could support your position with a quote from the Introduction which offsets her statement that "God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown"?

Perhaps that is a straw man argument which, in future parts of the book I haven't gotten to yet, she refutes.  If so, we'll presumably get to that down the road.

This particular thread deals specifically and only with the "Introduction and initial thoughts," so that's what I'm discussing and commenting on.  If her thesis develops in other ways later in the book, we can clear this up.  But based solely on the information in the Introduction, what passages can you offer to contend that my interpretation is "bizarre"?

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Message Edited by Choisya on 05-05-2009 01:56 PM

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[Everyman]

Perhaps, Joseph, you will be willing to answer one question about your understanding of Armstrong's position so far, though if you prefer not to, then of course don't.

It is simply this.

In your understanding of her position, if the human race becomes extinct as the dinosaurs became extinct, does she believe that God will still exist, or does she not?  

Using the term God, as I understand she does, to refer to the  Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic  God. 

[Nadine]

Joseph, are you starting a new thread for the next chapter, "In the Beginning..."?

 

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Joseph_F wrote:

A little early, but I may not have time tomorrow morning so here we are.

Couple things to keep in mind:

1. Please keep in mind that with this book there will almost certainly be some disagreement and possibly even some relatively heated discussion. It's the nature of thinking about religion as a group when the group doesn't all share the same religious beliefs. I'd just ask that everyone remain as polite as possible and also try to stick to discussion of the book itself. Tangents are inevitable, but please don't let it get too far removed from Armstrong's actual points. 

2. This book can be tough. It's crammed full with info, sometimes way more than she needed to prove her points or than you needed to know. Don't be afraid to skim. If you try to pick up every date and factoid in the book you will be out of your head by chapter 2. If you find any section particularly dense or dull, just try to get a sense of her basic point and move on.

So getting started for today, a few discussion questions for the Introduction:

1. What do you think of her distinction between "faith" and "belief"? Is it possible to have one and not the other?

2. How does her description of her own struggle with religion affect your view of her? Of her writing? Of her position as a scholar of religion? Have you had any similar experiences?

3. What do you think of the term Homo religious? Is religion the natural state of humanity or something that must be taught to us by Gods and by our culture?

4. Is humanism a "religion without God"? 

5. Has the conception of God changed from generation to generation as much as she says it has? If so, is that a good or bad thing?

6. What do you think of her choice to call God a "he"? What do you think of those that choose to call God a "she"? Or how about people who choose to use completely gender neutral language?

Hopefully that'll be enough to get you started. Also feel free to talk about your initial impressions of the book. 

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[Joseph_F]

Nadine, I haven't decided whether I'm starting a new thread for the first chapter. Probably not. In any case, you're certainly welcome to discuss it here for now.

Everyman, if it helps you, Karen Armstrong believes in God. However she is writing an academic text on how humanity's conceptions of divinity have changed in the Western world throughout history, and as such she is writing what is essentially a text that cannot include supernatural explanations. You've already made yourself quite clear that you disagree with the fundemental point of view the book is written from, but you must either accept it for the purpose of reading this book or choose not to read it because it is too incompatible with your own world view to discuss anything else about the book. That's up to you. But the fact that you find it offensive that she posits explanations for biblical acts other than divine ones is not one that you need to bring up any more.

[Everyman]

Everyman, if it helps you, Karen Armstrong believes in God.

It would help me enormously if I could find that clearly stated in the text to this point.  Obviously you consider that point as settled, and that being the case I can see why you aren't particularly amenable to some of my thinking on the text we've been discussing to this point.  However, I haven't found that within the Introduction.  I haven't identified a single sentence or thought that couldn't have been written by an absolute atheist who denied that there was any reality behind the various ways in which humans describe their relationship with the divine.  It would help me a great deal if you could point me to the passages that would clarify that point for me. 

However she is writing an academic text on how humanity's conceptions of divinity have changed in the Western world throughout history, and as such she is writing what is essentially a text that cannot include supernatural explanations.

I understand that she has chosen to write that way.  I don't agree that it is a "cannot;" I can perfectly well imagine an academic text which does include supernatural explanations, at least as I use the term academic (I would consider Aquinas's work to be academic, for example), but I do understand that she has chosen this approach.  Whether it leads to a productive study or to a fairly sterile outcome (sort of like an academic discussing mother-child interactions without accepting that there is such a thing as love, which of course can't be scientifically measured or quantified or isolated and therefore in purely scientific, academic sense can be claimed not to exist) is presumably something we will have the chance to discuss deeper in the discussion.  

I really don't mean to be difficult, though I suspect you think I am.  But I do believe that I'm entitled to approach and interpret the text independently, as long as my analysis is reasonably consistent with the actual text under discussion, which I frankly believe it so far has been. 

[Nadine]

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Joseph_F wrote:

Everyman, if it helps you, Karen Armstrong believes in God. However she is writing an academic text on how humanity's conceptions of divinity have changed in the Western world throughout history, and as such she is writing what is essentially a text that cannot include supernatural explanations. You've already made yourself quite clear that you disagree with the fundemental point of view the book is written from, but you must either accept it for the purpose of reading this book or choose not to read it because it is too incompatible with your own world view to discuss anything else about the book. That's up to you. But the fact that you find it offensive that she posits explanations for biblical acts other than divine ones is not one that you need to bring up any more.

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Yes, Joseph is right. Her biography, The Spiral Staircase, is a personal account as is the Introduction to this book. Beyond that, in THG, she treats the subject more academically. If I might make a final statement on our discussion of the Introduction, or rather let Ms. Armstrong, so I will not seem to be interpreting what she is saying. This I think also makes a good transition into our next discussion -- the beginning and evolution of the idea of God (which, I believe, is what THG is all about). Please remember, what I am quoting below are her personal feelings.

Page 292, The Spiral Staircase (this is after her completion of the present book under discussion, A History of God.)

The reality that we call God is transcendent -- that is, it goes beyond any human orthodoxy -- and yet God is also the ground of all being and can be experienced almost as a presence in the depth of the psyche. All traditions went out of their way to emphasize that any idea we had of God bore no absolute relationship to the reality itself, which went beyond it. Our notion of a personal God is one symbolic way of speaking about the divine, but it cannot contain the far more elusive reality.

Page 294

The personalized God might work for other people, but he had done nothing for me. I was not a chronic failure, but had simply been working with a spirituality and theology that were wrong for me. My approach had been misguided. Because I had assumed that God was an objective fact, I had thought about God using the same kind of logical, discursive reflection that I employed in my secular life. Rational analysis is indispensable for mathematics, medicine, or science, but useless for God. The nuns were not to blame for teaching me to pray in this way, because (I now discovered) the whole of Western theology had been characterized by an inappropriate reliance upon reason alone, ever since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rationalism had achieved such spectacular results that empirical reason came to be regarded as the sole path to truth, and Western people started to talk about God as an objective, demonstrable fact like any other. The more intuitive disciplines of mythology and mysticism were discredited. This was the cause of many of the religious problems of our day, including my own.

[Joseph_F]

Thank you Nadine. As far as I'm concerned, Armstrong's personal beliefs have little to do with the validity of the content of her book, but she is, in fact, a monotheist.

And Everyman, this is the last time I'll say this: you have made it clear that you object to and are offended by her tendency in this book to offer causes for religious and divine history that are natural or human-created. That point has been thoroughly gone through by you, and it is done now. If you cannot discuss this book without bringing up the fact that you want her to offer more supernatural possibilities or that you are offended by her persistence in not doing so, then please do not discuss this book. 

[Adelle]

Still, the simple fact that others agree does not make it so.   [  Others may not agree with me]    I happen to agree with Everyman:  KA writes, "As an epileptic, I had flashes of visions that I knew to be a mere neurological defect.."   To me, it seems clear that she is saying that she thinks her visions were a result of some defect caused by epilepsy.   I don't recall if the phrase "mental illness" was actually used earlier.  But KA did use the phrases "mental quirk" and "neurological defect."  

I very much look forward to reading the rest of the book and following the discussions.  It has been quite interesting.

[Everyman]

And Everyman, this is the last time I'll say this: you have made it clear that you object to and are offended by her tendency in this book to offer causes for religious and divine history that are natural or human-created.

That is not what I have been saying.  Apparently you understand my view no better than you think I understand Armstrong's. 

But I will not try to clarify it further, since you apparently only want the discussion to proceed along lines that match your understanding of the text.  I will accede to your dictate in this matter and will no longer try to make my view on this point understood.  

I will accept that for the sake of the discussion of this book, God does not exist, no interactions that any people have described with what they consider supernatural forces or powers can be considered of any significance or value, and we will be looking solely at how people have invented and created their concepts of God for whatever reasons they find appropriate.  

I trust that this is acceptable. 

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Joseph_F wrote:

Thank you Nadine. As far as I'm concerned, Armstrong's personal beliefs have little to do with the validity of the content of her book, but she is, in fact, a monotheist.

And Everyman, this is the last time I'll say this: you have made it clear that you object to and are offended by her tendency in this book to offer causes for religious and divine history that are natural or human-created. That point has been thoroughly gone through by you, and it is done now. If you cannot discuss this book without bringing up the fact that you want her to offer more supernatural possibilities or that you are offended by her persistence in not doing so, then please do not discuss this book. 

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[Peppermill]

I will accept that for the sake of the discussion of this book, God does not exist.

I do not consider that hypothesis as necessary for the discussion of this book, nor do I consider it to be the one the author necessarily makes, although I do perceive that Armstrong attempts to make distinctions between humankind's perceptions of God and that ineffable reality that is God, regardless of whether or not those perceptions are formed by obvious divine intervention or through more mundane human interactions for acquiring knowledge.

[Peppermill]

 Joseph -- I hope that you will consider creating new threads for each chapter or groups of chapters on Armstrong's book, or perhaps a thread for roughly every 60 to 100 pages.

As a reader/poster, I find such groupings very useful.  If one is behind or has an idea on an earlier section, one can link it with similar material.  One can also deal with smaller chunks of postings -- threads with 30+ posts daily can be hard to catch up on if one has a busy day or two where one cannot sign on.  

Just my view, Pepper 

[Choisya]

Good idea Pepper.  In case Joseph is busy, I will create a thread for Chapter 1 -3 as he has already suggested that we begin discussing Chapter 1 - In the Beginning.  (Hope that's OK Joseph - if not please delete the thread.)

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Peppermill wrote:

 Joseph -- I hope that you will consider creating new threads for each chapter or groups of chapters on Armstrong's book, or perhaps a thread for roughly every 60 to 100 pages.

As a reader/poster, I find such groupings very useful.  If one is behind or has an idea on an earlier section, one can link it with similar material.  One can also deal with smaller chunks of postings -- threads with 30+ posts daily can be hard to catch up on if one has a busy day or two where one cannot sign on.  

Just my view, Pepper 

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[ler2009]

1. What  do you think of her distinction between "faith" and "belief"? Is it possible to have one and not the other?

Belief is a feeling that something exists or is true, especially without proof.

Faith is when you have complete trust or confidence in someone or something.

I may beleive in God but do I have complete trust or confidence in him? A person may beleive in God but may not have faith. So, yes, it is possible to have one and not the other.