I picked up A History of God for the first time in a few months, and found myself utterly enthralled.

At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated churchmen such as Ballarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail. This would make the traditional religious mythology vulnerable to the new science and would eventually make it impossible for many people to believe in God at all. The theologians were not preparing their people well for this approaching challenge. Since the Reformation and the new enthusiasm for Aristotelianism among Protestants and Catholics, they were beginning to discuss God as though he were any other objective fact. This would ultimately enable the new "atheists" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centures to get rid of God altogether.

(...)

But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds. Many have continued to do so to the present day. When the arguments were disproved by the new science, the existence of God himself came under attack. Instead of seeing the idea of God as a symbol of a reality which had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation, it was increasingly assumed that God was simply a fact of life like any other. In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themslves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith. Like the philophers and scientists, post-Reformation Christians had effectively abandoned the imaginitive God of the mystics and sought enlightenment from the God of reason.

Or to put it more simply, Christians actually created the formula for atheism, by insisting on being dogmatically and unreasonably literal. I'm pretty sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

I put down A History of God for a few months because frankly, it's heavy, dry reading in places, but I picked it up again over the holidays. I'm in the section on Islam now and this was really interesting to me...

Today it is common in the West to depict Islam as an inherently misogynistic religion, but, like Christianity, the religiion of al-Lah was originally positive for women. During the jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic period, Arabia had preserved the attitudes toward women which had prevailed before the Axial Age. Polygamy, for example, was common, and wives remained in their father's households. Elite women enjoyed considerable power and prestige -- Muhammad's fist wife, Khadija, for example, was a successful merchant -- but the majority were on a par with slaves; they had no political or human rights, and female infanticide was common. Women had been among Muhammad's earliest converts, and their emancipation was a project that was dear to his heart. The Koran strictly forbade the killing of female children and rebuked the Arabs for their dismay when a girl was born. It also gave women legal rights of inheritance and divorce: most Western women had nothing comparable until the nineteenth century. Muhammad encouraged women to play an active role in the affairs of the ummah, and they expressed their views forthrightly, confident that they would be heard.

...

One of their most important questions was why the Koran addressd men only when women had also made their surrender to God. The result was a revelation that addressed women as well as men and emphasized the absolute moral and spiritual equality of hte sexes. Thereafter the koran quite frequently addressed women explicityly, something that rarely happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures.

It goes on to talk about how men later hijacked the religion and began to interpret the Koran differently, and how Muslim feminists today urge their men to return to the original interpretations of the Koran.

This whole passage blew my mind a bit... it's totally opposite of what I had understood Islam to be about, and clarified for me once again the idea that there's nothing wrong with religion in and of itself. In fact, very often religion is what drives humanity's search for new ideas and ways of thinking. The danger in it comes from our own hubris and lust for power, and on the flip side, our tendency to become sheep and follow those who lead, rightly or wrongly.

To bastardize a bit of wisdom from gun nuts: Religion doesn't kill people, people kill people.

See what I did there? I'm probably gonna be giggling to myself for at least an hour over that one.

Merry Christmas, all!

Behind a cut, 'cuz it's long. Bolding is mine.

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So I'm reading A History of God by Karen Armstrong. So far it's really interesting, and making me think about things in a different way. Forgive typos, I have a new keyboard and am still adapting.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals... Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. ...these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done.

...

Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiement, unprecedented in human hsitory. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a relgiion without God -- not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.