11.19.09
Armstrong’s charter
It’s hard to criticise someone who just wants us to be nice, but there’s something about Karen Armstrong’s charter that grates
Perhaps one aspect of some people’s ‘anti’ reaction to Armstrong is the sense that those who preach don’t deliver.
It is often forgotten that the rise of secularism was more productively compassionate, socially, than two millennia of monotheism, with some notable contradictions there, no doubt (capitalism, for example). It wins the ‘compassion’ sweepstakes hands down. Thus Armstrong’s indirect religiosity is misleading.
It was modernity that reelicited social compassion in Christianity.
But the earliest stage of Christianity was implicitly carrying out a stage of social advance in relation to slavery, a complex history.
Note the clear correlation with the eonic effect: the compassion effect is not intrinsically connected to religion.