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The Case for God |  | Author: Karen Armstrong
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Seller: treebeardbooks
Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 438
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Stated First Edition
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0307269183
Dewey Decimal Number: 211
EAN: 9780307269188
ASIN: 0307269183
Publication Date: September 22, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?
Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 33
 Astonishing piece of scholarship and erudition on Religion. November 21, 2009
C. DeGetmon (Earth)
Armstrong does it again! This book is a tour de force of astonishing scholarship, depth of insight, while offering a sweeping erudition of religion and the threads that connect the subject to the larger whole.
This book brings logos and mythos together not as a polemic but demonstrates the integral nature which unites the world's great religions.
Further, the author takes on the major issues of separation like the fundamentalist movements tracing their historic roots, mind sets, and psychological underpinnings.
Historically, this book covers the first moments of the human quest to understand one's place in the cosmos as exhibited in the first cave paintings discovered in France at Lascaux, while interpreting rituals of early development of humankind, moving systematically toward the development of organized Religion. Her erudition of the traditional writers of the Hebrew Scriptures offers insight by bringing disparate scholarship together thus illuminating the big picture of a complicated subject.
Furthermore, Armstrong sweeping understanding of her subject, makes complicated issues understandable to the lay reader of religion, or can illuminate complex issues for any professional academic.
In this magisterial undertaking, the author unlocks a deeper code of why the ineffable is, and remains, and important quest for human kind. Her chapter on Greek philosophy is extraordinary in clarifying underlying belief structures by tracing the Socratic Method and its value for human awakening.
As Armstrong moves through the centuries she unlocks complicated issues on the development of the world's three great monotheistic religions taking the reader to the root issues. In other words, it would be difficult to find another commentator with greater depth of insight than Armstrong.
Every page of this book takes human consciousness to another level of awakening and understanding of the human quest to mature in the face of the ultimate questions humans have asked about why their purpose in the matrix we call life.
As someone who was professionally trained in theology, Armstrong stands alone on unlocking these multifaceted issues with depth, clarity, and insight. This book is the best comprehensive book on the subject of religion I have ever read.
Everything this lady writes is soul food November 15, 2009
Cathy S. Pancero (Cincinnati, OH United States)
I am reading this book slowly because everything Ms. Armstrong writes always ends too soon! Her work is educational, spiritually uplifting, and provides comfort and insight. Her works will always have honored space in my reference library.
The Case for God November 11, 2009
Walter A. Lukaszek (Texas)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I appreciated the detailed exploration of the topic, especially the chapter on the Hebrew Scriptures.
The book was in very good condition. Not a mark on it.
A Harsh Scolding Softly Given to Fundamentalists - Believers and Non-Believers November 10, 2009
Joel L. Watts (Charleston, WV)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Reading other reviews, more conservative readers are simply missing the point of this book. Yes, the author is a liberal religionist, but she is not writing a book on theology or attempting to convert the Faithful to her liberalism, or to defend Christianity. She is writing to show the new, militant, atheists who seek to see all religions in fundamentalists (extremely literal) terms are simply and utterly wrong.
To dismiss her work as somehow a theological treatise or as a proof for the Divine is shows the lack of reading comprehension among many today. Her goal, as she restates several times, is
"As I explained at the outset, my aim is not to give an exhaustive account of religion in any given period, but to highlight a particular trend - the apophatic - that speaks strongly to our current religious perplexity." (p140)
In the history of religion, we find different strains. What Armstrong is doing is showing that in many of the world's religions, that while some have taken the more literal approach, many more have taken a mystical, philosophical approach which takes the scared texts of their particular religion into a more symbolic approach to God. While many of us disagree with this approach, our disagreement shouldn't be with the author, nor with history, which is what many see it as. If you take the book as anything but an attempt to highlight a less-than-literal approach to religion and sacred texts, including those of the Christianity religion, then you sorely miss the point. (Christians shouldn't see The Case for God in the same light as The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.)
This book was simply not written to me, for me or about me. Instead, the author has written a compelling argument to those unbelievers who see religion only through the eyes of fundamentalism. Currently, the most militant and loudest atheists, while they don't believe, see religion, especially Christianity, as one does who believes, and stands in 19th century rural America. Everything is extremely literal, with no room for progression in Scripture. No, we no longer kill unruly children. Why? Because in Scripture we have moved past that. Yet, believers and nonbelievers still will focus on the Levitical Law as something which should still be enforced, much to the detriment of the Christian message.
Starting with humanity's earliest attempts at looking to the Divine and traveling right through to the 15th century, the author produces histories of various religions, although she focuses on Christianity more than the rest. Her history of the Nicene Council leaves a lot out, but in the end, her book is not Church History nor a theological treatise, but a study showing that many have taken a different path towards God than which is taken today. She is merely showing that for a wide majority of religious people, sacred texts are a starting point towards God, just as spoken language is, to set the sights upon realizing that describing God is idolatrous. Indeed, what Calvin and the Reformers warred against was the mysticism of the Dark and Middle Ages of Western Christianity when they first started to elevate the Scriptures to the highest place.
There is much to be gained, for the believer, from some of her history on Christianity, but I will leave that to the reader. While she does have problems with her Christian history, her other problem is with Islamic history, completely ignoring Muhammad's propensity of marrying young girls among other actions of the sword. While this is offsetting, this is not the point of her book.
While her first part of the book dealt primarily with the inability of humanity to come to terms with a transcendent God, bumbling through the centuries with rituals and language barriers, the second part of her book deals with humanity's failed attempt to remove the transcendent God.
Starting with a brief overview of the Reformation, she almost proposes a new reason for the Reformation, and that of Rome's inability to accept new scientific analysis and the hardening of its own theology in regards to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. It was Calvin, returning to Augustinian Science, who opened the door for a merger of religion and science. Something which will be disconcerting to atheists will be the very real fact that it was the Protestants who first led the way into science and indeed, into biblical criticism, against the march and might of Rome.
She is doing this, to counter the extremely fundamentalist position of the atheists, and indeed, of religionist, who believe that Religion and Science have always, and will always, be at odds, at each others' throats.
One of her underlying points, perhaps unintentionally, is that with the Protestant Reformation came the loss of religious rituals in Europe. She has spent a lot of time developing the idea that 'faith' and 'belief' means more than an abstract hope, but a commitment. So, if some one has faith in Christ, it is not that they believe that He existed, but that they have a commitment to Him and His teachings. For Armstrong, the former nun, rituals were important, across the millennium, in connecting people to their cultural gods, and no less when it came to connecting Christians to God. With the loss of the 'real presence' in the Eucharist, it become a theological symbol, a mere memorial, which allowed people to become further disconnected from the theology of the Cross.
It might be said, from reading Armstrong, that in a round about way, she blames atheism on the Reformation. Whether right or wrong, the loss of rituals have added to the erosion of Christianity in the lives of many people. There is no longer a 'constant doing' in the Christian life, but a mere 'wait and see' attitude. There is no commitment, but an abstract hope.
Moving through the ages of the Enlightenment, which was led by at the very last, Deists, she shows the long strides that both Science and Religion have taken to continue hand in hand. Religionists where scientists and scientists where Religionists. The same fact which is found in Christianity (Jonathan Edwards) is the same fact found in other religions as well. While Science could provide cold, hard facts - the how - religion move to answer those things left unanswerable by science - the why. Yet, in the 19th century, when deism started to give way to pre-atheism, fundamentalism arose.
The author makes the point, as so many have recently, that fundamentalism arose as a reactionary measure against what many felt like attacks by pre-atheists. When many in the public square called for the separation of Science and Religion, leaving Religion behind as an antiquated method of, well, destruction human appetites and moral control, which left so many questions seemingly unanswered, their arose a rejection, complete rejection, of science. Suddenly, biblical inerrancy took on a new layer, in that - unlike Augustine and Calvin - every fact, whether astronomical, geological, or physical had to be true of the entire bible and scope of Christian history was false. No more did segments of Christianity see that it was human wisdom that was lacking in understanding the bible, but that it we knew full well what the bible said and regardless of scientific evidences, everyone else was wrong. Fundamentalism become the extreme reactionary backlash against the scientific communities insistence that it alone held the absolute truth to the workings of the universe.
However, moving through the modern era, when the Newtonian God has been debunked, and that there is no real unifying theory of science, the once absolute truths of science provide more questions than answers. Now, when science is becoming less sure of itself, a sort of fundamentalist atheism is arising which is ignorant of the whole of religious, and indeed, Christian history. What Armstrong has done, is to put the atheist on the same level as the fundamentalist - regardless of religion - and scolded them harshly, but in a manner that it might take a while to sink in.
Her theology and Church history is aberrant to me (why is it that everyone thinks Athanasius was the first to declare Christ God?). Her acceptance of the good in all religion stands squarely against my belief in the exclusivity of Christ. Her belief in a transcendent God does not sit well with my reading of a deeply personal God which I find in the bible. Further, the mere fact that she is a woman schooling some of us might not sit well with some.
However, Armstrong has created a masterful work showcasing the pitfalls of extremists views, and indeed, that the history of religion is nothing of the sort, but one which attempts to lifts humanity to the Creator, giving the answers of 'why' and generally ignoring the 'hows' as an idolatrous attempt and claiming God for our own.
Can conservative Christians gain from this book? Of course, but they must first know how to approach this book. This book will not cite examples or proofs of God, and doesn't attempt to in any way prove that God is, so don't expect that. Expect, instead, a discussion, harsh sometimes, on the history of human religion which at one time looked to God, and left Him Alone to Speak, but now, we demand what we want from Him, whether we believe or do not.
Karen Armstrong's Dogma November 8, 2009
E. Schubert (Yuma, AZ United States)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
"The Case for God" is a refreshing review of human intellectual and spiritual history, informed by Karen Armstrong's contempt for the dogmas of religious fundamentalism, as well as those of contemporary atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins, et al).
On the other hand, she has her own dogmas: one of which is that literal belief misses the point of religious mythos. Discussing the Resurrection of Jesus, for example, she informs us that, "His disciples had visions that convinced them that he had been raised by God..." (p.82)
It is one thing to say that the Resurrection should be interpreted symbolically, quite another to misrepresent the basic tenets of a religion: the Gospels clearly represent the Resurrection as a literal event, not a vision, and her footnote at the end of the quoted sentence refers to I Corinthians 15: 3-8, which affirms the literalness of the miracle.
Similarly, in discussing Isaac Luria's Kabbalist cosmogony, she states: "Nobody understood this strange story literally..." (p. 164). Really? Nobody? No footnote here, just Armstrong's (for lack of a better word) dogma.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 33
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