Guess who said this?

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

Well, it could have been any number of Sophisticated Theologians™, but you’re right if you guessed Karen Armstrong, the ex-nun who has been lavishly honored for explaining that God isn’t “real” in the sense that most people think. Ironically, she has laid out her apophatic thesis—that one can’t say anything meaningful about God—in a string of books. (By the way, she wrote the above bafflegab in a Wall Street Journal printed debate with Richard Dawkins, which is worth a read.)

If you know Armstrong, and you know that she’s about to come out with a new book that looks like this (click on screenshot to go to Amazon listing; book out Oct. 28), you can guess what it will say:

That’s right: her thesis is that religion has almost nothing to do with creating violence—it simply absorbs violence whose causes are social or cultural. Even the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t really about religion. Sound familiar?

Of course it will sell well, for Armstrong has done quite well for telling believers and faitheists what they want to hear, whether it be that it’s useless to look for evidence for God, that Islam is a religion of peace, and now that religion has never been a cause of violence.

And yet there’s already a negative review in the Telegraph by someone who is not at all a fan of atheism or a critic of religion, but still has enough integrity to see through shoddy arguments. The reviewer is Noel Malcolm—Sir Noel to you—scholar, journalist, and author. And Malcolm, who has no great love for Dawkins (why is Richard even mentioned in this piece?), at least has no truck with the idea that religion births no evils. A few snippets (more than usual because I savored this review):

First, the obligatory Dawkins-dissing, just to show that Sir Noel is on the side of the angels:

‘Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. We thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11 changed all that.” So said Richard Dawkins, who until his retirement enjoyed the title of Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Some of us began to wonder whether Dawkins had secretly renegotiated the terms of his job, becoming instead the Professor for the Public Misunderstanding of Religion. To argue that one act of terrorism, however extreme, committed by members of one radical movement proved the harmfulness of all religion was a strange piece of reasoning. But then on to Armstrong, who gets the brunt of it:

. . . her new book runs from the one to the other, from Gilgamesh to bin Laden, covering almost five millennia of human experience in between. This is both an apologia and a history book, aimed always at supplying the context of what may look like religiously motivated episodes of violence, in order to show that religion as such was not the prime cause. But what is, or was, religion “as such”? Armstrong argues from the outset that it is impossible to give a clear answer to that question. Writing about ancient Persia, she declares that “a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence; it is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends”. That sounds reasonable enough, but then she makes a much bolder claim. Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion. Ergo, it is wrong to single out “religion” as something to blame. [JAC editorial comment: Oy vey!] If that were true, it would also mean that you can’t single out religion as something to excuse, or at least partly exonerate. But when she discusses medieval Christian anti-Semitism, for example, Armstrong is quick to say that not only “religious conviction” but also “social, political and economic elements” were to blame. The violence of the Spanish Inquisition, likewise, “was caused less by theological than political considerations”. What was all that about it being impossible to distinguish religious issues from non-religious ones? The whole idea that no such distinctions could be made in western Europe until the end of the 17th century is, in any case, highly dubious. . . . When she comes to the present day, Armstrong’s defence of religion seems questionable on other grounds too. She is no doubt right to say that the aggression of a modern jihadist does not represent some timeless essence of religion, and that other political, economic and cultural factors loom large in the stories of how and why individuals become radicalised. Yet she goes beyond that, to suggest that such violence tends always to be a response to provocation or oppression. The key term here is “structural violence”, which crops up repeatedly in her pages. When Anwar Sadat tried to introduce a free-market economy to Egypt, his policy involved “blatant structural violence”, as it increased inequality and inequity: radical Islamism swiftly followed. “Structural violence” is a bit of a weasel phrase, as it means something other than actual violence. What it seems to imply is a kind of equivalentism between the actions of the state and those of the genuinely violent radicals who seek to overthrow it.

The next paragraph ends with a zinger—the kind of puncturing of pretension I love to see directed at apologists:

Equivalentism is carried one step further in Armstrong’s comments on George W Bush and his response to 9/11. In launching the “War on Terror”, he was displaying the “quasi-religious fervour” of neoconservatism, with its “semi-mystical belief” in “America’s unique historical mission”. “Suicide bombing shocks us to the core,” she writes, “but should it be more shocking than collateral damage in a drone strike?” The answer, surely, is “yes”: the intentional slaughter of people is worse than the unintentional slaughter of them.

But then the obligatory dissing of Dawkins occurs again in the last sentence:

I am all in favour of mounting a sensible defence of religion against the Dawkinsite dogma. But I doubt this is the right way to go about it.

Others can read this book, though I doubt many here will. I’ll save my dosh for, say, Golfing for Cats:

.h/t: Pyers