When videos of hostages being decapitated to shouts of Allahu Akbar (God is greater) are posted on the internet, and religious minorities from Burma to Nigeria are under threat of rape, pillage and massacre, it is tempting to blame “religion” for the violence that is inflicting misery on millions of human beings throughout the world. But as Karen Armstrong explains in this ambitious and erudite overview, “in religious history, the struggle for peace has been just as important as the holy war.”
Violence was endemic to the agrarian empires of the pre-modern era that expanded in order to create the surpluses on which culture and civilisation depended. The Hindu Bhagavad-Gita reminds us that there are no easy answers to the problems of war and peace, a conclusion that can also be drawn from readings of the Bible and Koran. Religion, Armstrong says, is not “an unchanging essence that inevitably inspires violence” as secular-minded critics maintain, but a “template that can be modified or altered to serve a variety of ends,” some of which are violent.
While Armstrong’s thesis is sound so far as it goes, it does not sufficiently emphasise the way that religious symbolism legitimises violence by lending it metaphysical force. In a pluralistic, globalised world, received traditions are forced to confront each other, challenging the monopoly status they held in the past. The religious violence that Armstrong rightly sees as integral to modernity may have all sorts of ancillary causes, including responses to the violence of the modern state. But the heart of the matter—which Armstrong avoids confronting—is rage at the absence of deity; at what Nietzsche famously called “the death of God.”
Read more books in brief
The Quantum Moment by Robert P Crease & Alfred ScharffThe Game of our Lives by David GoldblattThe Dog by Joseph O'Neill
Violence was endemic to the agrarian empires of the pre-modern era that expanded in order to create the surpluses on which culture and civilisation depended. The Hindu Bhagavad-Gita reminds us that there are no easy answers to the problems of war and peace, a conclusion that can also be drawn from readings of the Bible and Koran. Religion, Armstrong says, is not “an unchanging essence that inevitably inspires violence” as secular-minded critics maintain, but a “template that can be modified or altered to serve a variety of ends,” some of which are violent.
While Armstrong’s thesis is sound so far as it goes, it does not sufficiently emphasise the way that religious symbolism legitimises violence by lending it metaphysical force. In a pluralistic, globalised world, received traditions are forced to confront each other, challenging the monopoly status they held in the past. The religious violence that Armstrong rightly sees as integral to modernity may have all sorts of ancillary causes, including responses to the violence of the modern state. But the heart of the matter—which Armstrong avoids confronting—is rage at the absence of deity; at what Nietzsche famously called “the death of God.”
Read more books in brief
The Quantum Moment by Robert P Crease & Alfred ScharffThe Game of our Lives by David GoldblattThe Dog by Joseph O'Neill
