Karen Armstrong's diapers

John Grace shreds Karen Armstong in a marvelous parody at The Guardian. And it got me thinking and fulminating a bit. Mostly, I'm annoyed.

I don't care for Karen Armstrong's versions of theology and over-intellectualized apologetics disguised as hemi-semi-demi-apologetic-non-apologetics and historicism. She is the vanguard of silly academics who think that they can concatenate words into erudite sentences and bedazzle us with rhetorical acrobatics to show us how literal religious belief just isn't the point and that atheists are silly because all of belief is really just above reason, rationality, evidence, and logic. No no! We mustn't be duped by that ability innate in humans to detect baloney and test truth claims because, well, God is just beyond that and not to understand the existence of the apparently explicately non-existent is to make a cardinal error about categories of existence. Or something.

She's wearing designer diapers.

Armstrong and her comrades like to pretend that those silly fundamentalists don't really exist or if they do they're just sillies. They don't really believe in things like 72 virgins in heaven if they're Muslim or the Rapture if they're Christian. Well, I guess they do exist but they aren't really religious. Those are just some misguided wingnuts who don't vote with their mouths, hands, or wallets. No no. Well, if they do, then we can just explain away what they believe and practice as some kind of misunderstanding because they haven't read as deeply as Armstrong has. They don't really understand Jesus, Allah, Moses, or the Buddha. We can be certain of that. Right?

That substantial 1/4 of the U.S. population that thinks it's likely that Jesus will come back to Earth as a super-hero and will whisk them away to eternal bliss with some stadium seating views of the rest of humanity in tribulation doesn't really think that. That's all just fantasy. No one is really a literalist in the really real world where we all understand that God is just some ineffable ground of being, a verb, a transcendent force of inexplicable existence behind/beyond/within/throughout all of existence but is not necessarily existence itself nor non-existence itself but something else.

Well...if they are a literalist then they are infantile. Her ideas aren't infantile. They are grown-up. They are very clear in their total obscurity.

See, "Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God." Because that's what so many people believe and act on and have certainly believed in and acted on for the ~2,700 years since the first monotheism was enshrined. And all of those animists out there and former believers in the pantheons of Greece or the Aztecs, they weren't really religious either right?

How convenient for her to define religion this way and then categorically dismiss huge swaths of living and dead people's ideas about what religion is and how it ought to be believed in and practiced. "They've messed it up with their piffly misunderstandings of nuance," she seems to say.

And people say the "New Atheists" are condescending. At least we have the grounded realism to understand that people who haven't had the leisure to ruminate on whatever they want to come to plain conclusions about their religious teachings and that those conclusions make plain sense from the scriptures they read. Please. I can enjoy me some good woofdyfarkle, historicism, and semantic play. But when it comes to understanding God and his/its will through the scriptures, can we please be realistic in our expectations of what we think Joe and Janet Believer can be expected to believe? They might agree that "God is beyond language" because, as they like to sing, "Our God is an awesome God," but when they do it, they are making God a part of language. When you make Jesus a man, you've made God identifiable as a person. He becomes limited and explainable. He's become not just a piece of language but a being like you that has desires and hatreds and so on.

I think that she's nuts to think that she really understands something that can't be described in words. She's as lost in her own maze of allegedly transcendent concepts as fundamentalists are in their apparent rigidity.

Armstrong's explanations about God are pure literary theoretical inventions - words piled on words that are chained to other words that make for wonderfully silly things like this - that are justified by whoever she likes:

But God transcends personality as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at about the same time as they're learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains infantile.

I just want to stop right here. How do you know any of this? By what means can you possibly verify any of this outside of human imagination? You can't. This is all convenient hand-waving. She is picking and choosing the parts of whatever scripture she wants to and the theologians and historians she's liked and saying that those are the real deal and that people have just failed to understand concept X (if you can even call it a concept because it might be "beyond" a concept). That's nonsense. She has no way to verify the transcendent rightness of any scriptural claim except to say that she thinks it's right because she feels like it's right and so did someone else. She has no more support that believing in God - whatever that even means in the end for her - than in Santa Claus. Why is believing in a non-existent existent God any less infantile than a personal one? If anything, the first is less likely because it is totally outside of all of human experience. At least the second has the benefit of simple human recognition in whose image we have allegedly been created.

In the end, her beliefs are infantile too. Her ideas haven't matured. They've just morphed into drivel and creativity. I'll take Joseph Campbell please for the mythic.

Armstrong wears a diaper from the infancy of our species that she's dressed up with a Ph.D. and some books. She defends the non-existent existent ungendered Santa Claus with no possibility of providing any check on how she might know what she's talking about.