Karen Armstrong Is Brilliant

When Karen Armstrong speaks we should all listen.

Here is a blurb from an article she wrote for the Guardian, "Unholy strictures, It is wrong - and dangerous - to believe literal truth can be found in religious texts":

"Protestant fundamentalists, for example, claim that they read the Bible in the same way as the early Christians, but their belief that it is literally true in every detail is a recent innovation, formulated for the first time in the late 19th century. Before the modern period, Jews, Christians and Muslims all relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Preoccupation with literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution, when reason achieved such spectacular results that mythology was no longer regarded as a valid path to knowledge.

"We tend now to read our scriptures for accurate information, so that the Bible, for example, becomes a holy encyclopaedia, in which the faithful look up facts about God. Many assume that if the scriptures are not historically and scientifically correct, they cannot be true at all. But this was not how scripture was originally conceived. All the verses of the Qur'an, for example, are called "parables" (ayat); its images of paradise, hell and the last judgment are also ayat, pointers to transcendent realities that we can only glimpse through signs and symbols.

"We distort our scriptures if we read them in an exclusively literal sense."

I have a feeling Armstrong is trying to stem the tide of any burgeoning extremism that might evolve from the terrorist attacks in London. She obviously has been watching what has happened in America since 9/11.

I have read some of Armstrong's previous work, and can't wait for her new book, A Short History of Myth.

(via bookslut)