God Alert
by Michael Valpy
Via Karen Anderson Armstrong.
Armstrong's mission is to educate and warn Americans and the world: Beware of a religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalism. Armstrong speaks of fundamental religions sexism. Karen Armstrong’s journey into religion began in 1962 when, as a bright, idealistic seventeen-year-old, she entered the Roman Catholic convent of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in Britain “to lose my adolescent self in this great fulfilling religious experience and be transformed by God and filled with joy and serenity.” Instead she found herself forced into obedience and senseless man-made rules and taught, above all, never to question.
When her order sent her to Oxford to study to become a teacher, she suddenly encountered professors who insisted she do quite the opposite: criticize and challenge everything around her. In the convent, she had been shut off from the world, removed from newspapers and television and outside friendships. At Oxford, she heard for the first time about Vietnam and the Beatles. She saw long hair, short skirts.
She found Oxford life impossible to reconcile with the rules of the convent when she returned home. She quit the order in 1969, depressed and suffering from anorexia. It took her six years to readjust to secular society. She returned to studies in English literature and had her doctoral dissertation rejected. Like most, Halfhearted attempts at churchgoing soon turned to anger and atheism.
She began making television documentaries on religion that were award-winning but highly controversial. She wrote books: first about her experience in the convent and the trauma of leaving it, then about the crusades, English mystics, religion’s treatment of women, Mohammed, and (in 1993) her History of God. More books have followed: histories of Jerusalem and Islam, a critically acclaimed study of fundamentalism, a life of the Buddha, and another autobiography. The idea that she would find peace and fulfillment in studying religion—and she ended up... rediscover God..which took her by surprise. Human beings, she resolutely believes, are naturally religious. “We are creatures who seek transcendence. We’re meaning-seeking creatures, we fall easily into despair.”
Armstrong wants to proclaim that human religiosity is not dead but that good religion is in danger of being engulfed by bad, and that the problem of fundamentalism must be acknowledged and addressed. Bad religion, she says, is the suffocation of the sacred by dogma, by man-made rules. “Idolatry,” she has written, “is not simply the worship of a false god; it occurs whenever a purely human value becomes the chief focus of religious aspiration.” Bad religion, Armstrong says, is the stifling of the individual’s anarchistic search for transcendent meaning and absolute truth beyond ego. Good religion is the embrace of compassion and confrontation with the “other.
“Compassion is the key to religion, the key to spirituality. It is the litmus test of religiosity in all the major world religions. It is the key to the experience of what we call God—that when you dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put another there, you achieve extasis, you go beyond yourself.”
Fundamentalists in the U.S. are following the pattern of fundamentalists elsewhere in the world. Says Armstrong, “They want a male religion where Jesus ain’t no sissy. To fundamentalists, she says, tolerance of the “other” is a sin. Fundamentalism is a revolt against modernity and one of the characteristics of modernity has been the emancipation of women. Fundamentalists in every religion tend to overplay the traditional role of women as part of their countercultural riposte. They talk in frank ways of feminism’s castrating effect. This goes to the absolute hysteria about the gay syndrome.
Recently, she told a Scottish interviewer, “ I think a lot of people just want to rinse their minds of all this rotten theology they’ve been force-fed that’s been bad and thoughtless and careless and heartless. Here’s the world crying out for religion to be reclaimed from the terrorists—that needs a message of compassion.
Michael Valpy writes frequently on religion and ethics for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto.
Utne Magazine March-April 2005
Utne Magazine is the nation’s leading digest of alternative ideas. Launched in 1984, the bimonthly magazine and has been nominated three times for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Origaillay appeared in God is Big These Days by Karen Armstrong, Shambhala Sun, January 2005. The Shambhala Sun is the magazine about waking up, bringing a Buddhist view to all the important issues in modern life.
Angelfire Home Pages
Free Web Building Help
Angelfire HTML Library
htmlGEAR - free polls, guestbooks, and more!
