Economist: KAREN ARMSTRONG believes that religion “does lots of different things”. It can inspire people to altruism or ruthless cruelty, and can have both effects at different times.
Dissecting this paradox should come naturally to Ms Armstrong. British-born and a former Roman Catholic nun, she has written more than a dozen books on religious history at its broadest, expounding her view that faith is a legitimate, necessary part of human experience, whether or not its claims are true.
In her latest work, “Fields of Blood”, Ms Armstrong does not add to the many existing theories on offer. Instead she presents a vast overview of religious and world history, sketching the early evolution of all global faiths. Then, with giant strokes and plenty of (not totally accurate) detail, she studies the influence of the Christian West on the world over the past 500 years. It is not obvious how all this coheres, until you realise which demons she is fighting.
Ms Armstrong is not trying to prove anything; more to disprove several things. First, the idea that religion is a gratuitous cause of violence, whose elimination would promote peace. And second, the view that Islam is an egregious case of a religion that inspires violence. Her third bogeyman combines the first two: the idea that because the “Christian” West has shed more religious baggage than the Muslim world has, it is a more benign global force and must, therefore, restrain an incorrigibly violent Islam.
All these views exist, so Ms Armstrong has a right to challenge them. As one part of her multi-pronged counter-attack, she denounces violence practised by Western Christians against others, be they native Americans or Indian Muslims. Violence, as she rightly observes, has through history often been legitimised by churches.
In her zeal to play down religion as a cause of war, Ms Armstrong also espouses a kind of technological Marxism. She stresses that certain forms of violence are endemic to conservative agrarian societies, others to industrial societies as they innovate and accumulate. Other sorts of bloodshed occur in transitional periods. The Reformation, she suggests, was a by-product of economic and political change, not a purely religious phenomenon.
Categories: Americas, Answers to Anti-Islam, Belief
There is one egregious example where secularism was far more authoritarian and, in fact, extremely anti-religion (all religions) as a cornerstone of their tenets: That was the former Soviet Union (and Communist states in general). The USSR tolerated no other loyalty or obeisance except to itself and all religions interfered with that, hence they needed to be and were suppressed.