One of the great religious historians gives a long interview - her faithful account.
"Being spiritual means allowing your heart to break. In the end, death "is the great mystery, the terrible mystery."OK, this is another Reader's Digest post. I like them. It is like distilling brandy, boiling down the prime material to have the high octane stuff left.
She gets a lot of hate mail from "secularists who hate religion and feel I shouldn't be defending this evil stuff. I have no friends in London who are religious at all," she says. "People ask me not to talk about it when I'm invited for dinner. My British publisher asked me when I was going to stop writing about it. They said it was a dead end. Europe is beginning to look endearingly old-fashioned in its secularism," she says, "while the rest of the world is becoming more religious."
"People are always astonished when I tell them how religious Americans are," she says. She is very admiring of American religiosity, except for the religious right. "Like most fundamentalists, they have a pernicious, horrible, paranoid view of the 'other,' " she says. "It used to be that the Soviet Union was the enemy described in the book of Revelation that would bring about the last days. Now, they've switched to Islam. They had to regroup. But you can't equate true religion with hatred."
She mentions the "Left Behind" series about the world ending. "It's a strange thing in this country that people have this view of the world. If these people went to a psychiatrist, they would be diagnosed with a psychological disorder. The fact that so many people subscribe to this shows a profound unease, fear, a feeling of impotence, rage and pent-up fury."
"I always knew that Islam was not a violent religion," she says. "For 1,500 years Islam had a far better record of living peacefully than Christians. The point is to separate out the extremists we have in all of our monotheistic religions from the mainstream."
Stereotypes of Islam are dangerous, she said. The Holocaust, the slaughter in Bosnia -- "all that killing is about deeply entrenched stereotypes."
Because of the parallels with the Axial Age [the time period when the world's great religions were started], Armstrong believes, it's highly possible that the world is at another religious turning point. "In every single case, the catalyst of major religious change was revulsion from warfare and aggression."
Her idea is to start a new "theology of power," based on the Golden Rule. "To understand that other people and other nations, however remote and alien, are in real terms as important as Washington."
The United States is unique in the world, she says, the only superpower. "So what do you do? Do you start wars nobody can win? Al-Qaeda can't bring down the U.S., but the U.S. can't bring down al-Qaeda, either."
"Believing in God is neither here nor there," Armstrong says. "You have to make that belief work for the world. Christianity is about looking at other people's point of view. It's 'kenosis,' or emptying of the self. It means you have to dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put others there.
One of the few people who paid me for this blog, and paid me when I was desperately short of money, said he used it everyday to find out what important things were happening. At that time there were a lot more of these digests. If people send me money and say don't put digests in the blog I might listen to them more.
This is also one of my religious posts as opposed to the normal postings of outrages over the political direction of this country. I find the topics closely related.
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