Going Beyond God.

Salon has a great interview with Karen Armstrong in regards to some thoughts in her new book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions She covers a lot of ground in the interview - including the history of monotheism, why most of what say about God is "unreligious," why the afterlife should be irrelevant, and our misconception of Isalm as a religion of violence [where she notes "that there are more passages in the Bible than in the Quran that are dedicated to violence."]

Stimulating. Thought provoking. Well worth the time.

Here's just a taste of the interview...

Religion is hard work. It's an art form. It's a way of finding meaning, like art, like painting, like poetry, in a world that is violent and cruel and often seems meaningless. And art is hard work. You don't just dash off a painting. It takes years of study. I think we expect religious knowledge to be instant. But religious knowledge comes incrementally and slowly. And religion is like any other activity. It's like cooking or sex or science. You have good art, sex and science, and bad art, sex and science. It's not easy to do it well.

So how should we approach the sacred texts? How should we read them?

Sacred texts have traditionally been a bridge to the divine. They're all difficult. They're not a simple manual - a how-to book that will tell you how to gain enlightenment by next week, like how to lose weight on the Atkins diet. This is a slow process. I think the best image for reading scripture occurs in the story of Jacob, who wrestles with a stranger all night long. And in the morning, the stranger seems to have been his God. That's when Jacob is given the name Israel - "one who fights with God." And he goes away limping as he walks into the sunrise. Scriptures are a struggle.

Is faith a struggle?

Well, faith is not a matter of believing things. That's again a modern Western notion. It's only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don't have it much in Judaism, for example.

But it's not surprising that religion has become equated with belief because these are the messages we hear as we grow up, regardless of our faiths.

We hear it from some of them. And I think we've become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you'd presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They'd have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.