Scriptorium Daily
Opposing a call to compassion feels like kicking a puppy with a broken paw, but it isn’t. A call to compassion is not actually compassion.
Armstrong, who has never met a religious idea so complex that she could not over simplify it in a best seller, has issued a call for religion to be recaptured from “fundamentalism.”
A charitable soul can overlook the irony of a call to compassion that begins with demonizing most the world’s religious with the devil word “fundamentalist.” Evidently peaceful and democratic disagreement with libertine morality and a culture of death is easily equated in the Armstrong world with terrorism and persecution.
A compassionate person would recognize that Armstrong moves in a narrow social circle where such prejudices are possible. She, of course, has her own “fundamentals” that the rest of us, the vast majority of the world’s population, must share.
If she is a bit humorless and intense, that is to be expected of a prophet intent on evangelizing the world with her creed. That is a right and proper thing for her to do . . . and as long as she allows us the democratic right to dissent from imposing her moral vision on the majority, then all of us should support her right to do so.
She should give the “fundamentalists” the same freedom, but I suspect like many people in the grip of a religious or irreligious enthusiasm she will find this difficult. Can we opt out of her left-of-center libertine Utopia?
Many of us want to opt out, not because we don’t like her vision, but because we think it is wrong: the physical and metaphysical world stubbornly refuses to be as flexible as Armstrong would like.
Traditional Christianity is true. Pope Benedict, Billy Graham, and the Ecumenical Patriarch are right when they affirm that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. People who deny this fact are wrong. This disconcerting fact can make cocktail parties uncomfortable and it often disturbs me, but it is true nonetheless.
Best reason and best human experience demonstrate that the life and message of Jesus Christ are the solution to the problems the world faces. Denying it for the sake of a false harmony is not only a betrayal of intellectual integrity, but it is not the basis for a firm friendship!
That fact that Christianity is true does not have to lead to intolerance or hatred of those who disagree—it can lead to dialogue and education, in three ways.
First, though Christians are confident that they have found the truth, humility demands that we be open to the possibility of being wrong or having misunderstood what we have found. For the last two thousand years we have followed the Socratic path of examining our lives and faith. We suspect we have heard it all (the new atheism may be atheism but it is not new), but it is always possible we have not.
Second, just because Christianity is true does not mean that other religions and philosophies have nothing to teach Christians. Since all human beings are created in the image of God, all of us have some experience of the divine whether we recognize it or not. All of us have areas of virtue, strengths that we can share, and vice, failings for which we need forgiveness.
Finally, Christians do not always understand our faith as well as we should or practice it consistently. Christians have much to learn by the moral examples of religious and non-religious people about the application of their faith to life. Plato, for example, has taught me a great deal about nature of the human soul and reality. Many non-Christians have served as moral examples and guides.
Being wrong about something, even something as important as religion, does not mean a man or woman is wrong about everything else. Being right about some religious idea does not mean that a man or woman is right about everything else. A Christian may rightly see the centrality of the Cross of Christ, but then fail to love his neighbor properly.
That is certainly true of me. I grieve that my life has not always been true to my best aspirations.
Fatuous calls to a false commonality are not the pathway to world peace. Dialogue between people who think they have found the truth does not deny what they have found, but it is respectful and much better. I have engaged in this kind of dialogue with other faith traditions and have benefited by it.
Humility and Christian charity demands that I study and listen even to Armstrong to see what I can learn from her.
Religious scholars strongly disagree every day without resorting to illegitimate force. Karen Armstrong would know this if she were open minded enough to listen.
