Posts filed under “Books”
An Outside Perspective
I grew up in an extremely conservative, strange, and cult-like church. It took me a long time to figure out that there wasn’t something wrong with me, that the problem was the church. When I was in elementary school, the music minister’s wife, Patty Jo, disappeared. We learned years later that her husband had killed […]
Religious truth doesn’t describe the world
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Science demands the fundamental belief that there is a rational explanation for everything; it also requires an imagination and courage which are not dissimilar to religious creativity. Like the prophet or the mystic, the scientist also forces himself to confront the […]
The Gunslinger
A friend of mine recommended The Dark Tower series to me almost 7 years ago, but I’ve only recently begun reading it. I put it off for so long partly because I’m not much of a Stephen King fan, but the first two books in the series (The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three) […]
What’s wrong with the religious right?
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The problem of predestination and free will … indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond “good” and “evil,” which are regarded as masks […]
Just one reason we shouldn’t be nation-building
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Politics is not extrinsic to a Muslim’s personal religious life, as in Christianity, which mistrusts mundane success. Muslims regard themselves as committed to implemented a just society in accord with God’s will. The ummah has sacramental importance, as a “sign” that God […]
Religious tolerance under Arab imperialism
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Nobody in the new empire was forced to accept the Islamic faith; indeed, for a century after Muhammad’s death, conversion was not encouraged and, in about 700, was actually forbidden by law: Muslims believed that Islam was for the Arabs as […]
Monotheism doesn’t necessarily mean sending all non-believers to hell
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The image of the olive tree in [certain Koranic] verses has been interpreted as an allusion to the continuity of revelation, which springs from one “root” and branches into a multifarious variety of religious experience that cannot be identified with or […]