Glencoe World History Modern Times, Teachers Wraparound Edition Book

A MAJOR PROBLEM WITH RELIGION

(You may have already thought of a few, but this is my current thing.)

Religious thought is metaphorical and the constant danger is that the unlettered will take the metaphor literally. For instance, the Holy Trinity in Christianity - sorting out a satisfactory formula expressing the relationships between God the Father & Jesus the Son & the Holy Spirit presented hideous problems which took around 300 years to resolve and - it seems to me - the whole enterprise was utterly - utterly - futile because it stemmed from a misreading of a metaphor in the New Testament, i.e. Jesus as Son of God.

You don't need to figure out the relationships between metaphors, but if you think they're actually describing realities, then you do.

Fundamentalists appear to be unable to either grasp the idea of metaphorical language, or, allowing them that degree of intelligence, unable to accept that the Bible is poetry which uses metaphor all the time

- And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and it was not consumed.

And indeed, Christ is a metaphor - that is, the idea of his incarnation, and the idea of him being a sacrifice for our sins, and the idea of salvation itself - all metaphors.

Religion has its educated few and its unschooled many - the elite develop the metaphorical philosophical reading of the text and leave the credulous literal reading to the laity and they bowl along on separate levels, mostly. But then it comes unstuck.

You can see the incorrect understanding of metaphor right there in the New Testament. Various parables of Jesus have been transformed by error into miracles of Jesus - the stilling of the storm, the feeding of the 5000, turning water into wine, and the weird story of the withering of the fig tree - these make no sense until you read them as parables. We recall that Jesus explicitly rejects miraculous acts of this sort in the Temptation:

And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.

And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.

So these mistakes were being encrypted into the canon at the point where the oral tradition was being written down. It was simple confusion, but it sowed the seeds for centuries of wrongheadedness.

Karen Armstrong makes the excellent point that by the time of the Reformation even the learned in the West had become literalistic, and that this exposed their faith to the undermining effects of science as science extended its authority. The Church painted itself into a stupid corner. If it had remained the mystical transcendental Church it wouldn't have had to make any of those numerous embarrassing climb-downs it had to do. But maybe it would have been abandoned by the majority if it had.

A MAJOR PROBLEM WITH THIS BOOK

Karen Armstrong is a poor writer. Other goodreaders say stuff like :



My braincells are rebelling against me for continuing to read this, giving up. It's all the waffle and blather about Ultimate Reality, I just can't put myself through it.

I don't want to say that I have given up on this book. I enjoyed it so far, but I just moved on... It sits here out of my guilt, and becasue I haven't given it up completely. I may go back to it anyday now

haven't picked it up for several months, hope to get back to it someday
I predict that there will be a new religion created by the time I finish this book

Earnest readers drag themselves through this book. That can't be good. She has the knowledge but she is turgid, she has no light touch, no human anecdotes, no humour, okay what was I expecting, Bill Bryson? No, but Karen really got on my wick. She's boring. You have to keep plugging away, then another big thinker from 17th century Lithuania hoves into view and you think... hey, I haven't watched Paranormal Activity 2 yet! I did not read every word of this. i flipped forward, backwards, sideways, hemmed & hawed, put it down for months, walked around it glaring at it, hoped someone would steal it, they didn't, finally took it on holiday where there wasn't a wifi connection, and really, I think the whole thing needed some oomph. It was oomphless. It was an oomph-free zone.

A FAVOURITE ANECDOTE FROM PAGE 431

Speaking as an atheist, I love this story. In fact, I revere this story.

One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over, it was time for the evening prayer.