An interesting interview in Salon this morning with Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God. An excerpt:
Salon: I think these questions are tremendously important now because more and more people, especially those with a scientific bent, say we don't need religion anymore. Science has replaced religion. You know, religion used to explain all kinds of things about the world. But science for the most part does that now. And people who are not religious say they can be just as morally upright.
Armstrong: They can. I fully endorse that. I don't think you need to believe in an external god to obey the Golden Rule. In the Axial Age, when people started to concentrate too much on what they're transcending to -- that is, God -- and neglected what they're transcending from -- their greed, pompous egotism, cruelty -- then they lost the plot, religiously. That's why God is a difficult religious concept. I think God is often used by religious people to give egotism a sacred seal of divine approval, rather than to take you beyond the ego.
As for scientists, they can explain a tremendous amount. But they can't talk about meaning so much. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina, you want to have a scientific explanation of it. But that's not all human beings need. We are beings who fall very easily into despair because we're meaning-seeking creatures. And if things don't add up in some way, we can become crippled by our despondency.
Salon: So would you say religion addresses those questions through the stories and myths?
Armstrong: Yes. In the pre-modern world, there were two ways of arriving at truth. Plato, for example, called them mythos and logos. Myth and reason or science. We've always needed both of them. It was very important in the pre-modern world to realize these two things, myth and science, were complementary. One didn't cancel the other out.
Salon: Well, what do you say to the scientists, especially the Darwinists -- Richard Dawkins would be the obvious case -- who are quite angry about religion? They say religion is the root of much evil in the world. Wars are fought and fueled by religion. And now that we're in the 21st century, they say it's time that science replace religion.
Armstrong: I don't think it will. In the scientific age, we've seen a massive religious revival everywhere but Europe. And some of these people -- not all, by any means -- seem to be secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism. We have too much dogmatism at the moment. Take Richard Dawkins, for example. He did a couple of religious programs that I was fortunate enough to miss. It was a very, very one-sided view.
Salon: Well, he hates religion.
Armstrong: Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very easy to hate the people who practice it.
I would go farther to say that mythos is the more important of the two because it is the defining narrative context in which all of our reasoning--our logos--takes place. The peculiar anomie of postmodernity is its loss of that defining context, and so with the loss of the mythos that provides a meaning trellis upon which our compassion can grow, we have little motivation or knowledge how to be other than greedy, egotistical, and cruel. That's what happens when you lose the plot.
We are living with the sherds of that trellis, and we make do. The golden rule is one of those sherds, and it would be enough, perhaps. But without a larger meaning context the profound depths of compassion are hard to plumb, and instead we find ourselves being satisfied with being "nice." In most churches throughout the land a smiley face should be hanging behind the altar rather than a crucifix.
Or else we develop other plots--myths that justify our greed and egoism, which is essentially what I've been saying Ayn Rand's brand of Libertarianism is. And when that's the plot, all our reasoning capacity is nothing but a tool in the service of our greed and egotism. That's what it means to be rational these days.
We haven't "outgrown" myth; we just call it by a different name: ideology. It's in this sense that Dawkins lives as much in myth as Jerry Fallwell. But as I have argued elsewhere, there are good myths and there are bad myths--by their fruits you will know which is which.
I am very sympathetic to Armstrong's defense of religion, but there's also something about her that I find a little too Joseph Campbell. It's as if she speaks about religion as a perceptive, appreciative tourist in a foreign land rather than as a native. She speaks the language in a formally correct way, but not idiomatically. Perhaps that's just the scholarly persona. Not sure.