El Cabrero has read (or more accurately listened to) several of Karen Armstrong's books on religion. Some are better than others and some interpretations seem a bit of a stretch but I enjoyed her latest book, The Case for God.
This book was interesting not so much in making a case for God but rather for providing a good survey of religious and cultural history. One insight from the book, however, hit home.
She notes that in the modern world people tend to interpret religious teachings in much the same way they do other kinds of statements, i.e. as more or less factual claims. This kind of literal approach can lead to the impoverishment of religion, either turning in into a kind of fundamentalism (itself a distinctly modern thing) or into something that many people find it easy to dismiss.
Older approaches to religion, on the other hand, embed teachings into rituals, disciplines and practices which place it in a special context.
I've often thought that orthodox Christian teachings separated from traditional practices and viewed as mere statements of historical fact raise all kinds of questions and problems but that these make perfect sense within the context of rituals such as the Eucharist.
Armstrong reminded me that this is the way it was meant to be in older approaches to religion. The modern reduction of religion to textual literalism and merely factual interpretation seems to be a degradation rather than elevation of religion.
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2 comments:
Always thought that to truly understand the meaning of biblical stories a lot of times you had to understand what was going on at the time they were written to truly understand what they were meant to convey.
Rational sceptics tend to understand sacred cultural stories as that, cultural stories or mythos. There are historical sources that support the previous statement as to intellectual elites in ancient Hellenic, Chinese and Indian societies. Yet the ruling class in each of these societies promoted and enforced an orthodox-literalist interpretation of sacred stories. namaste
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