From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
One day the Gestapo hanged a child. … The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this anser: “Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on the gallows.”
Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of a God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.
From Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
One day the Gestapo hanged a child. ... The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a "sad-eyed angel," was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: "Where is God? Where is He?" It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: "Where is God now?" And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this anser: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on the gallows."
Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subsc
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
To make such human, historical phenomena as Christian “Family Values,” “Islam,” or “the Holy Land” the focus of religious devotion is a new form of idolatry. This type of belligerent righteousness has been a constant temptation to monotheists throughout the long history of God. It must be rejected as inauthentic. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims got off to an unfortunate start, since the tribal deity Yahweh was murderously partial to his own people. Latter-day crusaders who return to this primitive ethos are elevating the values of the tribe to an unacceptably high status and substituting man-made ideals for the transcendent reality which should challenge our prejudices. They are also denying a crucial monotheistic theme. Ever since the prophets of Israel reformed the old pagan cult of Yahweh, the God of monotheists has promoted the ideal of compassion.
From Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
To make such human, historical phenomena as Christian "Family Values," "Islam," or "the Holy Land" the focus of religious devotion is a new form of idolatry. This type of belligerent righteousness has been a constant temptation to monotheists throughout the long history of God. It must be rejected as inauthentic. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims got off to an unfortunate start, since the tribal deity Yahweh was murderously partial to his own people. Latter-day crusaders who return to this primitive ethos are elevating the values of the tribe to an unacceptably high status and substituting man-made ideals for the transcendent reality which should challenge our prejudices. They are also denying a crucial monotheistic theme. Ever since the prophets of Israel reformed the old pagan cult of Yahweh, the God of monotheists has promoted the ideal of compassion.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not. … The idea of God, however it is defined is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only we we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbol, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret.
From Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not. ... The idea of God, however it is defined is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only we we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbol, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Yahweh began as a highly personalized deity with passionate human likes and dislikes. Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human. Thus personalism has been an important and – for many – indispensable stage of religious and moral development….
Yet a personal God can be a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, “he” can encourage us to remain complacently within them; “he” can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as “he” seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, “he” can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.
From Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Yahweh began as a highly personalized deity with passionate human likes and dislikes. Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human. Thus personalism has been an important and - for many - indispensable stage of religious and moral development....
Yet a personal God can be a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
[T]he Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion… Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders…: he had summoned his nights to recover his patrimony – the Holy Land – from the infidel… In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.
From Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
[T]he Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion... Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders...: he had summoned his nights to recover his patrimony - the Holy Land - from the infidel... In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Not everybody was capable of philosophical thought, however, so Falsafah was only for an intellectual elite. It would confuse the masses and lead them into an error that imperiled their eternal salvation. Hence the importance of the esoteric tradition, which kept these dangerous doctrines from those unfitted to receive them. It was just the same with Sufism and the batini studies of the Ismalis; if unsuitable people attempted these mental disciplines they could become seriously ill and develop all kinds of psychological disorders.
From Karen Armstrong's A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
Not everybody was capable of philosophical thought, however, so Falsafah was only for an intellectual elite. It would confuse the masses and lead them into an error that imperiled their eternal salvation. Hence the importance of the esoteric tradition, which kept these dangerous doctrines from those unfitted to receive them. It was just the same with Sufism and the batini studies of the Ismalis; if unsuitable people attempted these mental disciplines they could become seriously ill and develop all kinds of psychological disorders.
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 of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this “God” a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make “him” fulfill our expectations. We can turn “God” into a Republican or a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views.
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 of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this "God" a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make "him" fulfill our expectations. We can turn "God" into a Republican or a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views.
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