Karen Armstrong Talk

[Demolition Squid]

At work, I've been listening to the Free Thinking festival lectures. About half of them are just horribly depressing or ill-informed, but there's some gems. I particularly enjoyed this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mq8m1 (if you are not in the UK, you should be able to access it via Hola)

It is fairly long, and Karen isn't a naturally gifted speaker, but some of her ideas are really fantastic. There were a lot of great points so I'll just pull out some of the ones that stood out most to me:

People aren't using words the right way. People talk about dialogue a lot, but one of the fundamental principles of a dialogue as Socrates meant it was a calm, reasonable exchange of ideas. If you aren't willing to have your mind changed (which does not mean making that change easy) then you are not engaged in a dialogue. Most 'public dialogue' fails this test. She also touches on how our opinions have become a core part of identity, and we ought to get rid of that.

Love is also used far too easily, and this has caused people to misinterpret love as it was meant in the Bible. Love meant giving practical support and aid to others, respecting them and tolerating them. It did not even necessarily mean liking them. Love was not understood as a temporary emotional element, but as something that should be a foundation of human relationships - continuous regardless of how one feels. Unlike dialogue (where I feel the original meaning has more use than the modern), I think it could be useful to use a different word here. Love in this context seems more like respect than 'love'. Maybe the Bible's lessons would make more sense if it was 'Respect your neighbour' rather than love them.

She also challenges religion's reputation for causing war, pointing out that historians of war always point to multiple reasons for conflict - of which religion is often a small part. This seemed really brave given recent ISIS activities, but then she went on to point out that ISIS's members know roughly nothing about Islam, by and large, and that their appeal likely has more to do with the disenfranchisement and depression endemic to being part of a minority. This made a lot of sense to me; she's not justifying their atrocities, she's saying that if you don't actually listen to and examine the root causes for these people's actions, you'll never stop them. And religion is often only a small part of those reasons.

I'm going to listen to this at least another time or two to tease out more thoughts, because there are a lot of ideas around religion here that I've just never encountered before, but I thought you guys might like it too.

[Reginald Ret]

Bookmarked for future watching/reading.

[Cain]

She also challenges religion's reputation for causing war, pointing out that historians of war always point to multiple reasons for conflict - of which religion is often a small part. This seemed really brave given recent ISIS activities, but then she went on to point out that ISIS's members know roughly nothing about Islam, by and large, and that their appeal likely has more to do with the disenfranchisement and depression endemic to being part of a minority. This made a lot of sense to me; she's not justifying their atrocities, she's saying that if you don't actually listen to and examine the root causes for these people's actions, you'll never stop them. And religion is often only a small part of those reasons.

Yup.  War's a multicausal phenomena - putting wars down to "religion" in a crass, Richard Dawkins-esque way is little more than a fake explanation.  Asking "why" wars happen is a stupid question anyway, if history teaches us anything, its that almost anything, in the right context, can be a cause for a war.  Asking how wars occur is far more interesting and fruitful, the process by which war occurs.

And when you get into that, you find a lot more interesting data, too.  For example, wars often follow social and political upheaval - 50% of all revolutions are followed by a war.  That may not sound like a signficant statistic, but for social sciences, that's a very big number (of course, this data doesn't include civil conflict arising from revolution as war, which would presumably preclude events in Syria from counting as war as well).  Wars are rationally chosen when leaders think they can achieve their aims via conflict rather than via negotiation - Assad's father literally destroyed a city to prevent an Islamist uprising, and the Iraqi government is increasingly despotic and Shi'a in orientation.  Historically, Al-Qaeda in Iraq almost ran an Islamic state out of Anbar province, until the US backed reluctant Sunni tribes in fighting AQI.  ISIS draws its membership from those who are often socially excluded in other countries - Muslims have lower literacy rates and higher unemployment than pretty much any other social or religious group in Europe, and its Middle Eastern members are drawn from the ranks of the impoverished young, from states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where fat old men with royal connections run everything and there is no chance for advancement.  And of course, the Middle East has constantly been meddled with since WWI - the lust for oil has led to the backing of tyrants who have held their people back.  Alternatives - like Arab nationalism and socialism - have been undermined and discredited.  People want change and the only change that is being credibly articulated is by groups like ISIS.

As a quick example off the top of my head.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Makes perfect sense to me. I've always seen the role of religion in wars as a form of social wheel grease, same as nationalism or ideology. When you're going to war, it's good to have the people behind you. Doesn't matter how, all that matters is they're behind you. If they're religious then the war is gods idea. If they're ideologues then it was Karl Marx's idea...

[Johannes]

Thank you for the link. 

Now listening...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Somehow I have never seen this thread before.

[Vanadium Gryllz]

Very interesting talk. Thanks for the link!