The Karen Armstrong fallacy | Andrew Brown | Comment is f...

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Cif belief

The Karen Armstrong fallacy

What can't be done is to translate the 'essence' of these stories
into some kind of universal, value-neutral truth

I see someone in comments said that I believe:

arguing over the specifics of a myth is irrelevant it is the deeper 'truths'
hidden within a myth that are important. If everybody saw religion this way
as a collection of myths to dip into that are not to be taken at face value,
but rather serve to illuminate a philosophical or moral point then I don't
think I or anybody else for that matter would have a problem with it.
However, this is simply not the case.
I have clearly failed to make myself clear here because I agree that we can't dip in and
out of all collections of myths and never take them at face value. I think of the belief that
we can as the Karen Armstrong fallacy, though this may be unfair to her.
The trouble is that we can't give up myths either. We are all creatures of metanarratives.
That's what makes them interesting and powerful. There have to be big stories which tell
us what other stories are possible. The idea that we can outgrow myths is itself one such
myth or metanarrative, and the people inside it are quite as blinkered as those outside:
their view of the world is just differently disabled.
It is, I think, a version of this perception that fuels a lot of the anger at Karen
Armstrong: she does tend to give the impression that the enlightened ones can float
above the chaos and mess of the world, seeing clearly what all the benighted and narrow
minded can't. It's just that her definition of enlightenment is rather different from that
of the new atheists; but in both cases, there is a suggestion that mental and moral
superiority will lift up the chosen ones.

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The Karen Armstrong fallacy | Andrew Brown | Comment is f...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/20...

The fact that this is visible only to outsiders points up the second problem with myths:
such big stories, or metanarratives, work best when they are shared. But in the modern
world it is painfully apparent that they aren't in fact shared by everyone. Even in the
limited and relatively homogeneous space of Cif belief, it's obvious that one of the most
common reactions is a kind of shocked bewilderment, of the form "How could anyone
believe that?" which is the kind of question that arises when you violate a myth.
Now, I don't know that there is any logical reason why our pictures of the world should
have this kind of hierarchical organisation. One reason to doubt it is that you don't find
it in the world that science discovers. There isn't one master science, not even physics,
from which all the rest can be deduced, and to which all the rest must conform. But it
does seem to be a psychological necessity that we organise our beliefs about the world
like this. It is possible and necessary to doubt any particular myth but it is impossible to
reject them all. This is, perhaps, related to the observation that even the most devout
believer is an atheist about uncountable gods.
I don't mean by this that the choice of myth is arbitrary, or that one is as good as
another. On the contrary, they can always be improved and they are always changing or
being elaborated. But what can't be done is to translate their "essence" into some kind of
universal, value-neutral truth.
This is, now I come to think of it, a pretty radically pessimistic view. To reject the
possibility that myths are all "really" about some one thing that we can all agree on is to
say that there may be irreconcilable conflicts of imagination, just as there are real and
sometimes irreconcilable conflicts of interest and real shortages of vital resources.
Sometimes there really is a choice about who will starve. Conor Cruise O'Brien used to
say that the difference between a conflict and and a problem was that problems have
solutions, but conflicts have only outcomes. Now, it is always worthwhile to try to turn
conflicts into problems. But the only way we can do so, I think, is by appealing to an idea
of justice and what quality could be more mythical, or more disputed?
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