Divine History

This week I finished Karen Armstrong's A History of God, which catalogs the last 4,000 years of religious monotheism. She makes some interesting points which I felt were worth a comment or two. The first is the idea of our tendency as humans to anthropomorphize our deities. We want our gods - for some reason entirely unclear to me - to be like us. Personally, I think we're horrible enough a species on our own that we don't need to be endowed with divine powers, and Armstrong seems to agree:

Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism. (55)

"More attractive and popular" because he "endorse[s] our egotistic hatred and make[s] it absolute"? That sounds disturbingly like my memories of high school (which was, for what it's worth, Catholic). But the idea that our deity of choice behaves like a 13-17-year-old girl ought to rightly give us nightmares, especially if we remember what it was like to be the other 13-17-year-old girl who wasn't "attractive and popular." And yes, I know that isn't quite the point Armstrong is making... in fact, her point is worse. We are attracted to deities who are cruel and exclusionary because exclusivity and ostracism makes us feel better about ourselves. What a shining endorsement.

More disturbing still is the idea that it isn't simply others that religion of this sort teaches us to condemn. In fact, later monotheism (as it appears in Armstrong's study, this includes Christianity and Islam, but has moved past Judaism) encourages us to regard ourselves not as beings in need of improvement, but fundamentally and critically flawed:

A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. (124)

So to sum up the argument thus far (and to give Armstrong her due, this book is not a rant akin to those offered by Richard Dawkins; rather, she includes these comments amid well-researched history and plenty of comments about the good religion has offered throughout history, as well), we see monotheism alienating subscribers of other religions, and then alienating its own adherents from one another. Armstrong continues to comment that "This is doubly ironic, since the idea that God had become flesh and shared our humanity should have encouraged Christians to value the body" (125). But it did not. Instead, Christianity (specifically, early to medieval) encouraged the physical and psychological debasement of human physical needs, causing repercussions that have lasted in the human psyche well into the twenty-first century as we know it.

Armstrong does not offer a solution - she isn't trying to "fix" religion, simply to explain its history. But she does remark upon something very interesting in one of her later chapters on the Enlightenment: "Once 'God' has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, 'he' does not exist" (342). Which makes me think very carefully about the recent rise (noted in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason) of subjective opinions as "fact." It is an issue I see with my students (college freshmen), and one that appears with increasing frequency in today's media. So what do I take from this? The idea that the more subjective we are with our "facts," the more prevalent intolerant religious fundamentalism will be because if facts are subjective, then no one can be wrong, no matter how irrational or counter-factual their assertions are.

Not all spirituality causes these reactions or oppressive ideological tendencies. I recognize this. As an avowed atheist (or "Bright"), I am biased against religious views, but I know that not every spiritual person is intolerant, exclusive, or irrational. I know many spiritual people who are quite the opposite. But in today's increasingly fundamentalist world (be it Christianity, Islam, or Scientologist), reason is taking a back seat to subjective self-promotion and exclusionary racial, ethnic, and creedal oppression. And if we can permit this because it exists under the blanket of "religious freedom," then God - or Reason - help us all.