Specify Of Books The Case for God
Title | : | The Case for God |
Author | : | Karen Armstrong |
Book Format | : | Hardcover |
Book Edition | : | First Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 406 pages |
Published | : | September 22nd 2009 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2001) |
Categories | : | Religion. Nonfiction. History. Philosophy. Spirituality. Theology |
Karen Armstrong
Hardcover | Pages: 406 pages Rating: 3.83 | 7562 Users | 626 Reviews
Narrative To Books The Case for God
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.”
Present Books Conducive To The Case for God
Original Title: | The Case for God: What Religion Really Means |
ISBN: | 0307269183 (ISBN13: 9780307269188) |
Edition Language: | English |
Rating Of Books The Case for God
Ratings: 3.83 From 7562 Users | 626 ReviewsAppraise Of Books The Case for God
Can I really be the only person who finds Karen Armstrong, the author of fifteen books on religion, writing in her latest that one cannot comment on the divine with words but only with silence, more than a little ironic?To be fair, Armstrong does offer several interesting insights. Her effort to find universal "truths" that run across faiths is worthwhile and thought provoking. One might even imagine that there are many members of exclusivist faiths for whom this would be a revelation, thoughDon't be fooled by the title; this is not some trite attempt to prove that God exists or that religion is a great thing. Instead, it's a tremendous, sweeping yet detailed account of the changing conception of religion from the dawn of humanity to the present day. Along the way, Armstrong stresses several themes.For millennia religion was not seen primarily as a series of propositions to which one was required to assent ("God exists", etc). Instead, it was a commitment to a particular way of
Armstrong is a scholar of comparative religion. In numerous examples here, she shows how worship in virtually all world religions depends on a foundation of silence, or what she calls unknowing. This is the silence through which one gets intimations of the divine presence. I found the description remarkably like two kinds of Eastern meditation I have practiced over the years. There was no presumption on the part of early theists that they could grasp God. He was beyond human comprehension. Since
Citing the Greeks, Armstrong's argument begins by stating that there are two realms of knowing. One is through "mythos" and the other is through "logos". The former allows us to access ultimate meaning, something logos can't do as it involves pragmatic reason related to survival. She calls ultimate reality God, but she is clear that God is not a being at all. In rejecting God as a personalized deity, she aligns her thought with that of Tillich ("God above God") and others (e.g., Heidegger's
One might expect this to be somewhat of a critique on God which is followed by a scholarly explanation/reasoning which would essentially entail the primary discourse of this book. This is quite different than that. Karen starts off with way back to the earliest notions of God and then slowly unfolds the history of different religions of the world. Somewhere in the middle she delves into a rather dense polemic strictly pertaining to christianity, which I thought was a bit too technical and
"There is a God-shaped hole in the heart of man where the divine used to be." Jean Paul Sartre"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is good as dead." Albert EinsteinArmstrong ends her fascinating, if often too encyclopedic, defense of belief in God with the Buddha, who tells his visitor to "remember me as one who is
The Case for God provides a great survey of the history of religious thought since Christ and puts in context the polarized fundamentalism and atheism of today. As someone who has never taken a religion course or read much about theology I found The Case for God to be very enlightening and thought provoking. The book at times is a dense read, particularly in the first half, but gains momentum as it progresses to modern times. For those not interested in devoting the time to reading the entire
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