10.22.07

Armstrong’s confusion on Buddhism/monotheism

Posted in The Axial Age, religion at 6:46 pm by nemo

James comments on Armstrong post
A good point from James: Armstrong seems to confuse the (admittedly) difficult question of the Axial Age with the idea of the same thing happening in different places at the same time, surely a distortion. We can grasp the Axial Age without carefully seeing its context, and then we have to zoom in on each of its branches individually, to study the complex literatures/histories in each area, a very difficult task. We can see that an exploration of diversity or opposites is an equally good interpretation. Her treatment of Buddhism becomes hopeless on these grounds as it all goes into the sausage machine.

James said,

October 22, 2007 at 4:33 pm ·
“Armstrong is a tricky hypocrite who is an atheist who slyly peddles books to religion types and half-religion types, and maybe no religion types.”

Armstrong’s sloppy scholarship should be obvious to anybody who has taken at least a freshman level religion class. It’s just the same recycled perennial philosophy ecumenical bullsh*t. Indeed, I don’t understand why anybody would take her seriously after saying something as dumb as this:

“That’s fascinating. So in Buddhism, which is nontheistic, the message or the experience of nirvana is the same as the Christian God?

The experience is the same. The trouble is that we define our God too closely. In my book “A History of God,” I pointed out that the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn’t think about God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to apply to God.”

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/30/armstrong/index1.html


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