Sunday 17 June 2018

What shall we do with the ‘God’ signifier?

I’ve started rereading The Case for God by Karen Armstrong which moves away from the Christian Fundamentalist-New Atheist false dichotomy towards a more measured approach to the unknown and how it relates to our shared human condition. Karen Armstrong is a religious historian and writer who has published many books about the Abrahamic tradition and its place in the wider context of other historic and extant religions. The Case for God is a grand history of how humans have related to God/Allah/Brahman/Dao starting over 30,000 years ago and finally bringing us to the present day and our own predicament and inscrutabilities.

Early in the book, she asks an unanswerable question (which puts butterflies in my stomach if I stand on the edge of it for too long): Why is there something rather than nothing? (ponder what ‘no thing’ is, how it lies beyond comprehension and what could have been):