E-mail a friendKaren Armstrong
airdate October 9, 2009
Karen Armstrong is one of the English-speaking world's leading commentators on religion. She was one of three intellectuals invited to speak in the U.N.'s first-ever session devoted to the subject. Since September 11, she's become known for her work on Islam and fundamentalism. A former Roman Catholic nun, the British scholar has written numerous books, including the international best-seller A History of God and The Case for God. In '08, she was awarded the TED Prize and is working with TED on a Charter for Compassion.
Armstrong discusses the practice of compassionate selflessness. (1:45)
Full Interview (10:56)
Karen Armstrong
Tavis: Karen Armstrong is an acclaimed religion writer whose many notable books include the best seller, A History of God. Her latest is called The Case for God. Karen, nice to have you on this program.
Karen Armstrong: It's great to be back.
Tavis: Good to see you again. Let me start by asking why we feel at this point in history that there needs to be a case for God? Put another way, what's happening with this onslaught of books by and in defense of atheism? Why do we need to make a case for God?
Armstrong: Well, there has been a difficulty in religion in the modern period. During the 17th century, we changed our conception of God really quite dramatically in the Western world. We started thinking about God as something we could prove as a being. We stopped thinking of God as a symbol that pointed to something beyond itself, what theologians called "the God beyond God", and turned that symbol into hard fact.
Then, of course, science comes along and seems to disprove the reality of this being. So people, I think, are confused. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, we often think about God and they're remarkably undeveloped, even a primitive way.
Tavis: So God then, as we sit here now, is under attack?
Armstrong: God is under attack. I'm not happy about the kind of viciousness of a lot of our debate about religion because one of the things that I've found after 25 years of studying religion is that to quarrel about religion is counterproductive. It imbeds you in a kind of egotism and all the spiritual writers in all the major traditions tell us it's ego that keeps us back from an apprehension of the Divine.
Tavis: There's been a lot of conversation in this country of late about the need for, given the dirth and paucity of civility in our society. How then, to your point now, do we find ourselves in a space of civility about the God question, about religion?
Armstrong: I think we've got to go back to basics here. All the world religions insist that there's one important ingredient that is the test of any true religiosity, and it is compassion, the ability to put yourself in the place of somebody else and treat them with absolute respect. That, whether you're a Confucian, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Taoist or a Monotheist.
That is the test of religion. So to denigrate others or even speak disparagingly of other people's faith or other peoples' ideas is a denial of what religion is supposed to be about. And nobody has the last word on God because God goes beyond anything that we can say or know.
Tavis: This is a rather dense text, so you've written a whole book to explain the very simple question I'm going to ask you now, which is without, to your earlier point, denigrating others, what are the starting blocks? Where does Karen Armstrong begin in building the case for God?
Armstrong: Basically, that religious knowledge is learned by practice. Religion is a practical discipline like swimming or driving, dancing or gymnastics. You can't learn these things by reading a book. You have to get into the water and learn how to float. A dancer will have to practice for years and years and, when she's finished, she'll be able to do things with the human body that would have been initially quite impossible.
Now religious people have done this with their hearts and minds and most of our religious doctrines are not metaphysical facts which we have to believe. They are programs for action. They are telling us how to behave and that goes with something like the Incarnation or the Trinity, as well as just as it does in other traditions.
It's very clear in Judaism and Islam because these are religions of practice, but Christianity too. During our enlightenment period when we became so rational, we turned religious knowledge into something notional which we had to accept and believe instead of something that we practiced. It's hard work, religion. It's not a question of just singing a couple of hymns or reciting a creed. You have to change your behavior at a profound level.
Yoga, for example, was not an aerobic exercise to help you lose weight or to make you feel a little more peaceful. It was originally a systematic breakdown of egotism and selfishness that freed you from the prism of greedy selfishness that holds us back from our best selves, from the Divine.
Tavis: Let me ask a politically incorrect question. It won't be the first time or the last time I've done so or will do so on this program. How much of the fact that we have to now make a case for God has to do with man's arrogance born of living longer and being able to do stuff we thought we would never be able to do, born of our arrogance, number one, combined with a cynicism.
That's not to suggest that every atheist I know, every agnostic I know, is cynical and arrogant, although I know some who are. But how much of the need to have to make the case for God has to do with cynicism in our society and the arrogance of humankind?
Armstrong: I think arrogance is related to ego, of course. Yes, we think we've sassed out all the problems of the universe and that science, our own human brain, will sort out all our problems.
But scientists are also discovering how little we know about the universe, that the certainties we thought we had with Sir Isaac Newton have gone and the universe is much more mysterious. All-knowing is built into the human condition. There's always things about our experience of the world that elude us and it's that, the recognition of that, that actually brings us happiness.
So I think there's also an emptiness, though, in our society. I think, you see, we are meaning-seeking creatures, we human beings. Dogs don't seem to spend much time agonizing about the canine condition or the plight of dogs in the afterlife, but we do. And if we don't find meaning in our lives, we become paralyzed and fall into despair.
Religion has not been here to answer our questions about the universe, which we can to an extent find out by our own reasoning powers, but to help us deal with those aspects of life which we can't control, old age, sickness, death, unhappiness, the suffering of children, the plight of our fellow human beings in terrible states, our cruelty to one another. And it's these terrible questions that religion helps us to deal with and to live peacefully, creatively and compassionately in the midst of the suffering that's inherent in life.
Tavis: Since you said it, to the nonbeliever watching right now or listening right now, how does - to the nonbeliever - how does a belief in God help one find meaning and does one have to acknowledge God to have a life of meaning?
Armstrong: God, what we call God, is pointing to something that goes beyond anything we can know. So we're not talking about any certain knowledge, but the practice. It's not just believing which we have made a fetish of in the West in the last couple of hundred years, but it is the practice of compassionate selflessness day by day all day and every day that gives you an enhancement of being.
I used to be an extremely spiteful human being. I was very unhappy and very defensive. Since I've been studying religion and trying to empty myself of all my cleverness in order to understand people who lived and wrote hundreds of years ago, I've found that it's changed my attitude to people in daily life and you feel richer.
I mentioned the dancer earlier, the dancer who learns to do wonderful physical feats and achieve earthly grace. Some human beings have, by getting rid of all those petty selfish things that hold us back, achieved an enhanced humanity and a sense of peace, a transcendent peace even. But you have to do it; you have to do your religion and practice it hard in order to get it. It won't come easily.
Tavis: It seems to me that with all the debate about whether or not there is a God and the need to have to make the case for God that, even for those of us who believe, believing is the easy part. It is the practice, the living what you talk about, as we say in the Black church. That's the difficult part.
How much of our diminishment of our belief in God has to do with the fact that we don't really want to practice this stuff? So if you're not going to practice it, why believe it?
Armstrong: Well, if you're not going to practice it, it means nothing. That's the point. It's like the rules of a board game. You know, when you pick up the instructions and you start reading these things and they seem interminably dull, boring, abstract and complicated. Then you pick up the dice and you start to play and everything falls into place.
These doctrines or beliefs, as we call them, make no sense unless they are translated into ethical, ritual action. And I've tried to show in the book how these beliefs were originally structured to lead to action and then you get it. Then you start to understand what the doctrine is trying to tell us. If you put it into practice, you find that it tells you something profoundly true even if that truth isn't factual or demonstrable scientifically.
Tavis: I'm always delighted to talk to Karen Armstrong. She has a new text out now called The Case for God. She's a perennially best-selling author and I think you'll enjoy and be challenged by her new one, The Case for God. Karen, nice to have you on the program.
Armstrong: It's been wonderful. Thank you.
Tavis: Always good to see you. Thanks for coming on.
Armstrong: Thank you.
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