Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/009956498X/ref=cm_sw_r_pi_dp_F95swb1TKSJ8W

The terrorist attacks in Paris rendered her new book Fields of Blood. Religion and the History of Violence suddenly and tragically very urgent. In over five hundred pages Karen Armstrong, once a nun and the respected author of bestsellers like A History of God and The Case for God, answers the question whether religion is … Lees meer

Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood eviscerates the notion that religion is behind most of the world’s violence and oppression.

Haar nieuwe boek In naam van God. Religie en geweld kreeg een tragische urgentie door de recente terreuraanslagen in Frankrijk. In ruim zeshonderd pagina’s beantwoordt Karen Armstrong, ooit non en gevierd auteur van bestsellers als De kwestie God, de vraag of religie de oorzaak is van geweld. Een gesprek over islam en terreur, westerse verantwoordelijkheid, … Lees meer

The popular belief that religion is the cause of the world’s bloodiest conflicts is central to our modern conviction that faith and politics should never mix. But, Karen Armstrong writes, the messy history of their separation suggests it was never so simple

In her new book, Fields of Blood, Karen Armstrong argues against the idea that faith fuels wars.

From the renowned and bestselling author of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion's connection to violence.In these troubled times, we risk basing decisions of real and dangerous consequence on mistaken understandings of the faiths subscribed around us—in our immediate community as well as globally. And so, with her deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong examines the impulse toward violence in each of the world's great religions. The comparative approach is new: while there have been plenty of books on jihad or the Crusades, this book lays the Christian and the Islamic way of war side by side, along with those of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism and Judaism. Each of these faiths arose in agrarian societies with plenty of motivation for violence: landowners had to lord it over peasants and warfare was essential to increase one's landholdings—the only real source of wealth before the great age of trade and commerce. In each context, it fell to the priestly class to legitimize the actions of the state. And so the martial ethos became bound up with the sacred.At the same time, however, there were ideologies developed that ran counter to the warrior code: around sages, prophets and mystics. Within each tradition there grew communities that represented a protest against the injustice and violence endemic to agrarian society. This book explores the symbiosis of these two impulses and its development as these confessional faiths came of age. The aggression of secularism has often damaged religion and pushed it into a violent mode. But modernity has also been spectacularly violent, and so Armstrong goes on to show how and in what measure religions, in their relative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence—and what hope there might be for peace among believers in our time.

Karen Armstrong has taken on the fashionable theory that religion always causes violence — but her approach misfires

The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah