March 25 good news: 84 percent of the world population has faith........

[beam me up scottie]

145. Interesting. I googled your religious "scholar" and it appears I was correct.

Wishful thinking: Karen Armstrong continues her quest to absolve religion from playing any role in violence

In 1095, Pope Urban II asked the knights of France to take on a sacred mission. The Christians of the East had fallen under the dominion of Muslim rulers, as had the holy city of Jerusalem, and it was time to rescue them. It was to be, the pope suggested, "an act of love" where they were to "nobly [lay] down their lives for their Eastern brothers".

The knights left in the spring, brimming with zeal to win back the Holy Land for Christendom. In Germany, they pillaged and murdered the local Jewish population. "Do we need to travel to distant lands in the East to attack the enemies of God," wondered one participant, "when there are Jews right before our eyes, a race that is the greatest enemy of God?" After arriving in Jerusalem in 1099, following years of bloody attacks on the local Muslim population, and a five-week siege of the city, the knights gathered at the tomb of Jesus, singing Easter hymns and thanking God for their success. It was the first Crusade. More would follow.


The religious historian Karen Armstrong has set herself a complex and fraught task with her new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk]. Surveying the whole of recorded human history, the former Roman Catholic nun seeks to discover the links between religious belief and violence like the Crusaders’. What inspires the faithful to take up arms in the name of God? Is religion, as Armstrong imagines its critics arguing, "responsible for more war, oppression, and suffering than any other human institution"?

***

But Fields of Blood is less history than polemic. Armstrong has a brief – to defend religion against the slings and arrows of outrageous secularism – and writes from a defensive crouch, intent on downplaying any perception of religion as a fundamental motivating factor in human violence. "Modern society has made a scapegoat of faith," she argues in the book’s introduction, and the rest of Fields of Blood aims to debunk the notion that religion is exclusively or excessively responsible for the world’s ills.

***

Armstrong makes a habit of downplaying one religiously fuelled atrocity by highlighting another. She regularly analyses cruel behaviour through the lens of the beliefs of the people committing the atrocities. Religious torturers may have meant well, but bloodthirsty savagery often appears in the guise of piety or patriotism or self-defence. Fields of Blood’s defence of religion also mostly ignores (with the exception of the Crusades) the long, squalid history of religiously motivated violence and bigotry towards practitioners of other faiths. What is the thousand-year history of anti-Semitism in Europe other than an expression of Christian fear and hatred of Judaism, often emerging in outbursts of horrific violence prompted by wild rumours of Jews killing children or poisoning wells?

Armstrong, writing for a secularised western audience, wants us to clear away our ill-informed beliefs about the corrosive effects of religious faith. Religion is forever intertwined with politics and society, and is rarely responsible for the crimes attributed to its influence. But merely to state that religion’s violent impulses are often linked to nationalist ideology, or that those who commit crimes in religion’s name are often ignorant about its tenets, is not enough.

Religion, as Armstrong argues in the book’s afterword, "does lots of different things". The Hindu rioters who tore down the Babri mosque may have been as ill-informed about the precepts of their religion as the crusading medieval knights, but to simply excuse them from the charmed circle of the religious elect is insufficient. Dismissing an entire religion because of the horrific acts of some of its practitioners is intellectually lazy; but dismissing those practitioners from their faiths because of the conclusions they reached about what belief meant is intellectually dishonest.

http://m.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/the-review/wishful-thinking-karen-armstrong-continues-her-quest-to-absolve-religion-from-playing-any-role-in-violence

See I've seen this kind of 'reasoning' before and it's always the same.

Who am I supposed to believe: religious people who commit atrocities and claim it's because of their religious beliefs or a few revisionists who tell us to ignore the words of those believers and thousands of years of evidence?