On Trying To Be Buddhist

Reading A History of God - 2

I may have to eat my words from my previous entry about Armstrong's book  - or at least do something about the background attitude, which was a bit dismissive.  I may actually get many meals off what I said.  Yes, I still think there's confusion in talking about the idea of God within the implicit context of a disbelief in his existence.  But I'm learning a lot in my reading. 

On page 90-93  (of the paperback edition, which is what I'm reading) Armstrong goes into a discussion of what religion meant to people in the first years after Christ.  She says, "Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life.  People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment.  In the Roman empire of late antiquity, people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a diving blessing for the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past."  That's a bit startling - not at all my idea of religion.  For me it has come to mean the more or less institutionalized aspects of the way in which people find meaning in life, a search for the essential truth.  (Armstrong adds that this attitude - of 'comfort religion', as it were,  in fact is familiar today - although I suspect it's not something people would readily admit.)

Startling it may be, but it is also clarifying.  I'd always wondered what the Romans, and those who followed the popular cults of that time were really thinking in their worship.  Their gods seemed so much just projections of human images on a slightly larger background.  How could one worship Mr. and Mrs. Zeus up on Olympus?  Armstrong answers my question - no one is really thinking much at all.  It's just a comforting, stabilizing, ritual.   Does this really work?  Is this how it was?

Reading A History of God

I began reading A History of God quite awhile ago, didn't get far, and have now taken it up again. 

The first thing that strikes me is that the book really isn't a history of God - that's just a good title that grabs peoples attention (in part by its very absurdity.)  The book, rather, is a history of man's idea of God.  A very different and less startling thing.  Armstrong is very straight forward about this in the introduction.  She says:

This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him....The human idea of God has a history...[p. xx]

That's the real subject of the book.  But in fact, Armstrong seems unable to keep her own belief in, and, to some extent, experience of, God's absence or non-existance out of her conclusions.  And once God's non-existance becomes a basic premise, then everything shifts profoundly. 

If there is no God, then the history of the idea of God is the history of God because the idea is all there is, there is no other reality.  Again, Armstrong is quite honest about her own beliefs.  But she doesn't seem to quite recognize these beliefs actually generate a basic premise that determines a lot of her thinking.  Over and over again she draws conclusions and makes points that are valid only if in fact there really is nothing divine, nothing deeply holy; only if the "ineffable reality of God itself" is in fact no reality at all. 

So - that is one serious problem with the book. I'm out of time right now, but I intend to edit this post later and add some examples.  And then I have a good bit more to say.  Because despite what I consider serious flaws, this is a book that sparks insights and stimulates reflection.