Karen Armstrong is my favorite too. But she is no Goddess herself. Her bestseller "A History of God" lacks the reference of the influence of Paganism on the shaping of the monotheistic religions. Akhenaten, the founder of monotheism, gets a single line while Hammurabi gets none. She seems to be completely ignorant of the Ugaritic literature. Her language is lucid but approach is not encyclopedic. Anybody with open eyes can see that God concealed to his messengers even the heliocentric nature of the solar system, let alone the rest of the Universe. What does it prove? Either God doesn't exist, or his(why not her?) messengers were all frauds. Let there be no doubt that nobody questions the existence of mother nature(mother goddess). THe concept of a male God creates all the controversies.
Bravo Farida Majid! Who else could write this!
How do you define yourself, if that is possible at all?
Khalid Hasan
From: farida_majid@hotmail.com
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:56:44 -0400
Subject: [mukto-mona] GOD: Not DEAD, and not going anywhere
I am a fan of Karen Armstrong. She had taken on the West's knee-jerk Islamophobia in the post 9/11 days with great courage, common sense and depth of knowledge touched with personal spirituality.
Her expose of the Dawkins-Harris-Hitchens crowd is totally realistic and makes sense. For years I've been saying the same thing about our deshi "secualists" -- they are the best unpaid agents the Jamaati and Sanghi thugs have in our national politics.
Farida Majid
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So-called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have denounced religious belief as not only retrograde but evil; they regard themselves as the vanguard of a campaign to expunge it from human consciousness. Religion, they claim, creates divisions, strife, and warfare; it imprisons women and brainwashes children; its doctrines are primitive, unscientific, and irrational, essentially the preserve of the unsophisticated and gullible.
These writers are wrong -- not only about religion, but also about politics -- because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don't find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn't going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it's time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.
. . . . . .
[Continue reading by clicking on the link below]
Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous books on religion, including A History of God, Islam: A Short History, and, most recently, The Case for God.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/god_0
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Mukto Mona plans for a Grand Darwin Day Celebration:
Call For Articles:
http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=68
http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?p=585
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