Karen Armstrong's books have been a very important part of my journey to accept myself and my faith in the teeth of churches and people telling me what to believe. I have come to a conception of faith as a journey rather than as an idea, a constant act of turning away from ego/certainty, and a constant act of turning towards others in compassion, and towards the divine in wonder.

I express that faith in a liberal Episcopalian/Anglican tradition, but realising that I am one traveller on a journey has liberated me from the need to have others express their faith in the same way. Karen Armstrong's books reassured me that letting go of doctrine and dogma was not simply laziness on my part, but an important part of the journey. Emotionally, in "The Spiral Staircase", and intellectually, in "The Battle for God" and "A History of God", her writing has been a pool to which I have returned again and again for spiritual renewal.

Dear Salon,

I think some atheistic readers read a few words of the article and screamed "OH NO AN ARTICLE ABOUT RELIGION! I'M MELTING... MELLLLTTTIIIIIINNNNG!"

Armstrong seems to defy notions of "the big white-bearded old man in the sky", so if that's what atheism calls good critical reading, to somehow try to say that she actually promotes this small idea, they'll need a lot more intelligence, and a lot less overblown kneejerk reactivity on their side, in order to convince.

Meanwhile, the shrill atheists belong in the same camp with the hellfire and brimstone tent preachers, in my opinion. All desperately selling snake oil because they can't grasp a concept that others find something in. At the rate they're going, they will need to find solace with like-minded logicians-- say, at the nearest GOP thinktank in DC.

Jesus existed, so did Muhammad, so did the Buddha, and they weren't bad guys. And neither are all of their followers. So let their memories and actual (not revised) legacies live in peace.

A final word to the shrill atheists: please allow for the beauty of the soul to express itself in this world without being so doggoned dramatic about it.

Sigh. It seems those touched by religion in their youth can never escape the impulse to create religion anew, even as they attempt to repudiate it. This was Freud's fate, and Marx's. It seems Armstrong has fallen prey to this as well. Everything she says about the "Axial Age" is total nonsense, though it's clear it's a myth she needs very much to make the world make sense to her. How terribly religious. No introspection before the axial age? Has this woman never heard of ancient Egypt? Jeremiah and Buddha saying exactly the same thing? One thinks not. She chastises the interviewer for having a "western chauvinist" view of religion for seeing a distinction between theistic religions and non-theistic religious philosophies, yet she ends up engaging in the same kind of chauvinistic redefining of religion according to her own parochial interests, i.e., the Axial Age. Her imposition of this myth onto everyone's religion, and then her use of its as a prescriptive notion that distinguishes between "true" and "false" religion is a hundred times more presumptious than the interviewer she criticizes.

And saying that only Catholics and Muslims obsess about the afterlife is a bit like saying that only men obsess about sex. Kind of an odd qualification, don't you think?

This is a very interesting article, but in the end Armstrong fails to support her thesis. It's also unfortunate that she seems to accept the spurious notion of "myth as answer" which seems to be the last refuge of the schizoid modern theist. That science fails to provide "meaning" for a disaster like Hurricane Katrina doesn't automatically imply that any random "explanation" is any more credible than the Santa Claus she cites.

or at the very least, she's the one who knows how to look at things, and everyone else who looks at things differently doesn't.

Karen Armstrong sounds a little haughty and full of self-importance to me. She seems to be saying that all the world's religions are saying basically the same things, but if you said this to her, I suspect she'd dismissively say, "no,no,no, you don't understand at all. The axial age, ..." blah blah blah.

Likewise, the Bible and the Q'uran both discuss violence towards unbelievers, and apparently because she says these things shouldn't be interpreted so literlally, they're not that big a deal.

Religious fundamentalists only come to exist because of oppression by secularists? Please. Most of the battles between Catholics and Protestants or Hindus and Muslims, present and past are about turf, most emphatically not about some mean, secularist other who rules over them.

Finally, based on the interview, one comes away with the impression that she has nothing to say about Luther. Maybe this a reflection of an interviewer's lapse, or maybe she dismisses him because he is not a figure from the so-called axial age, and he wasn't a mystic. But how were ordinary people throughout Europe supposed to stand up to the hegemony of the Catholic Church without Luther?

Were peasants supposed to say, "oh, you silly old pope, I don't have to listen to you, all that Bible stuff is just poeticism that I can interpret as I see fit!"

I'm sorry Ms. Armstrong, but non-mystical theologians have made important contributions to the interpretations of faith too.

Karen Armstrong says that, “I'm slightly down on cleverness” but then classifies herself as a “Freelance monotheist”—whatever that means. She then not so artfully dodges the interviewer’s question on whether she believes in God with the appropriately condescending answer “No, because people who ask this question often have a rather simplistic notion of what God is”. And does she consider herself a religious person? “Yes. It's a constant pursuit for me. It's helped me immeasurably to overcome despair in my own life. But I have no hard and fast answers”. This is all after pooh-poohing Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris as monomaniacal religion haters; two scholars I might add that don’t have particularly fast answers--but do have hard ones.

Karen Armstrong finds it difficult to deal rationally with secular humanists like Richard Dawkins (who she characterized as “Very, very one sided”) because the so called ‘other side’- which she is obviously invested in- is largely smoke and mirrors; affectations that help her “overcome despair” in her own life.

Is it really Dawkins and Harris that have the ‘pathologies’ Karen?