Just finished reading the second chapter of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. This chapter looks at the historical development of the first five books of the Bible (constituting the Jewish Torah) where Armstrong presents her premise that this document is perhaps the first great compendium of mythology and historical fiction, drawing its content from the history of the tribes of Israel and their relationship with their God. Far from being either factual history or a consistent theological treatise, Armstrong (based on reference to archeology and biblical scholarship) sees this work as a set of stories that were told and retold over hundreds of years and compiled in written form by four groups of “editors”, each in succession adding to and reworking the various stories.

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Conventional wisdom of many on the progressive side of politics and social change is that religion, particularly Christianity, is a key source of our culture’s problems if not evil in general. John Lennon’s classic song “Imagine” conjures a utopian world that would be free of this supposed source of division and strife. Many people more on the conservative side of things do not share that concern about the Christian faith and its practice, but see Islam in that same sort of negative light. My take is that neither (nor religion in general) is a source of hate, war and oppression, actually came into being to promote love and humanistic ideals, but have been manipulated as tools of a much older ideology of domination and “us and them” thinking that some would call “Patriarchy”.

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I believe we are approaching a developmental crossroads in the evolution of our human species, though we might be a little bit stuck and in need of some sort of inspirational push. With all the violent religious (and secular) fundamentalism in the past century, we need to come to a new covenant among more tolerant belief systems and traditions to accept “many paths”, acknowledging that your path through the transcending mysteries is just as appropriate for you as mine is for me. That is, as long as both of those paths follow a few basic principles, like the Golden Rule. (more…)