AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
Reading this drivel makes my soul hurt.
Whew.
In a related story, I deplore Karen Armstrong's failure to make a good v. evil distinction.

Questions for Ms. Armstrong, who has made a spiritual quest the focus of her life:

Is there such a thing as good and evil?

If the answer is yes, how can we recognize evil?

Once we have identified evil, what should we do about it?

*does a google search on K.A.* *blinks*

spiritual search? From the looks of the entries just on the first page, spiritually Lost! No wonder she can't distinguish between good and evil.

Is there any way to contact her?

Here is a discussion about Karen Armstrong:

http://www.faithfreedom.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=700&highlight=karen+armstrong

Moral relativism: distinguishing good and evil simply interferes with goals.

Pragmatism: identifying evil doesn't achieve desired ends,i.e., doesn't "work," so evil isn't true.

Epistemological relativism: who can say what is true?

Normal brains do not work with the foregoing premises. To get your brain into the state of a chaotic pretzel, you have to be a modern academic, as is Karen Armstrong.

Karen Armstrong is wrong morally and epistemologically. She is at best an intellectual featherweight.

The best any of us can do with her is not to buy her books, nor quote her as a valid source, but quote her as was done in this article--to shine the disinfecting light on her.

Years ago I attempted to read KA's History of God--the whole point of which seems to be to convince you there ain't no such thing. She's a former nun. People bring their own histories and agendas to the table and some people are very confused. The problem arises when they have a world stage and use that stage to try to solve their own psychological quandries however well disguised it may be in "serious scholarship". The list of such people is long indeed.

Karen Armstrong's view about Muslims are well known. Does her influence carry any weight other than with sympathetic people that refuse to see the evil side of Islam? I hope that thinking people would read her and keep on going.

I am concerned about alleged reader: George W. Bush. I hope that he kept on reading, but his words and actions haven't allayed my concerns.

Why does Armstrong harp on "political Christianity" when so many of these devout Christian are on the ideological front lines against the much greater threat of political Islam?

For all their faults, I am very proud of the brave Christians who didn’t back down when the mainstream media attacked them for their controversial stance on Islam.

When respected scholars and self-proclaimed "freelance monotheists" like Karen Armstrong make absurd moral equivalencies between insensitive statements by Christians versus murderous acts by Muslims, I feel shame at calling myself "secular humanist."

The so-called "humanists" who refuse to denounce the evil of sharia law lack the moral authority to dispute other issues like school prayer, abortion and gay marriage.

Armstrong wrote another despicable article a few months ago in which she excoriated the Church of England for not admitting female bishops (although they do admit female priests). The gist of her article was that Christians had no right to criticize Islamic bigotry against women while they exhibited such "bigotry" themselves.

HELLO? There are NO female imams in Islam of any kind. Women congregants are forced to sit in the back of the mosque or in a seperate, inferior space walled off from the men. They frequently must enter the mosque by a separate (inferior) entrance way. They are not allowed to pray while on their periods. They are not allowed to read prayers in front of the men.

In a Christian church women can sit wherever they damn well please. They can enter through the main entranceway instead of skulking around the back like an 18th century servant. They can pray no matter what time of the month it is. They can read prayers to the congregation -- yes, even in the Catholic church where female priests are banned.

But in Armstrong's viewpoint, it is Christianity that must be excoriated for "bigotry" against women, while Islam must be given a "free pass".

This is the viewpoint of a great many alleged "liberals" and "secular humanists." No matter how far Christianity bends to accommodate them -- women priests, women bishops, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages -- they get no credit from them at all. The liberals and secular humanists continue to excoriate and ridicule Christianity again and again, even though mainstream Christianity says "how high" every time they say "jump".

Meanwhile you have Islam which is under NO pressure to admit women Imams, sanction gay marriages, or grant any kind of ease whatsoever in their bigotted religious practices toward women. Islam -- which never in a million years would ever do anything that the liberals and the secular humanists demand from them.

Yet it is ISLAM which is the darling of the liberals and the so-called secular humanists, and it is ISLAM that must NEVER, EVER be criticized or forced to adapt to something they consider "culturally alien."

Here is the ludicrous article if anyone's interested: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1123442,00.html

Susan:

Standard apologist tactics from Ms. Armstrong in that article you linked to. Ignore Islam's problems while simultaneously diverting attention to other groups by criticizing them.

One fault I found due to my own leanings was in her criticism of the Buddha for his saying that nuns would be "like mildew on a field of rice" for his Order. If Ms. Armstrong understood Buddhist monastic life and the teaching method of the Buddha, she would realize that

a) The Buddha was not drawing outright comparisons between women and mildew; he completes the simile by saying that with the addition of women, the Order, like a blighted field, would not last long.

b) The reason he said this is because he understood the difficulty in maintaining a celibate life, free of desire, in the immediate presence of the opposite gender. (A difficulty encountered by both men and women.)

He was not saying that women were the taint, he was saying that the taint arose due to the union of men and women in the monastic life. Lo and behold, one of Buddhism's later "causes of death" in India was the shameful promiscuity of its monastics. (As I've mentioned before, the major cause of Buddhism's death in India was Islam, by way of the Ghaznavid invasions.)

Karen Armstrong is not simply stupid but evil, a deliberate fabricator who knows what she does. She is an antisemite; she hates the West; she is, in all but name, someone who has taken the side, and promotes the agenda, of Jihad.

Why she is not taken apart by interviewers, why her smarmy and treacly and sly wickedness is treated instead with respect, and not only by the hopeless BBC.

And let everyone remember that the BBC, which is now spreading its tentacles in America, has its foreign coverage, what is covered, and the language in which it is covered, decided by its World Affairs Editor, number three at Bush House, the sinister John Simpson. Simpson's longstanding hostility -- hatred would not be too strong a word -- for Israel is perhaps best observed in what is surely a dead giveaway: his introduction to a sensationalist book by a former colleague about the supposed "conspiracy" by Israel and its supporters high in the American government to "cover up" the awful truth about the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. A retired judge who investigated the matter for decades has conclusively shown that there was no conspiracy; all of the evidence points to a regrettable accident. The usual collection of those who hate Israel insist that the evidence does not matter; they mutter darkly nonetheless about what Israel was "trying to hide." Think of the notorious James Bamford, who stops for a moment, in his otherwise unremarkable little book on the National Security Agency, to digress into a little riff on "Israeli torture of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners" (not a literal quote, but the essential meaning) was what Israel was afraid the Americans would find out about. He also makes the charge that Israel attacked the Liberty in order to keep "secret" other matters about its surprise attack on Egyptian forces; this is fatally vitiated, I'm afraid, because what he claims Israel wanted to "keep secret" was, in fact, imparted to the entire world on the front page of the New York Times the day BEFORE the U.S.S. Liberty incident. Neo-Nazis, antisemites, and Muslim agents wishing to vilify Israel and blacken its image in the U.S., all love the Liberty story, and use it as a convenient stick, not paying too much attention to the actual facts of the cse, or the well-known phenomenon of simple mistake in warfare, which happens all the time ("friendly fire" is one example).

And it is to this book on the U.S.S. Liberty that John Simpson, World Affairs Editor of the BBC, has given his approval and for which he has written an introduction. Nothing more need be said about him; that alone speaks all the volumes you need.

And Simpson cannot stand the United States, either. His latest book, on "his" war coverage in Iraq, drips on every page with anti-American venom. And finally, Simpson has never uttered a syllable, as far as I can tell, about what Islam means for the West, whether it is Muslim terrorism, or demographic conquest, or anything else. His hatred for America and Israel naturally incline him to ignore that matter, for it tends to get in the way of his pre-existing hostilities and ingrained nastinesses. He and Armstrong really ought to meet; perhaps at a Singles' Evening at the Finsbury Mosque.

I refuse to read ANYTHING written by Armstrong - and also take it to not reading anything which she recommends/endorses.

What color burka does she have in her closet?

jihan

Nice posts, Susan and anonymous.

About 3 weeks ago, Armstrong was a guest on NOW with Bill Moyers. She only commented on Islam to bring up Muhammad's giving women the right to divorce. Then she went into a tirade about the tradition of discrimination of women in Tibetan Buddism and particularly Christianity. Bill Moyers nodded the whole time. You can imagine the rest...

I only regret I couldn't get the transcript of this theater of the absurd for Dhimmi Watch (I could only locate a short version in which she only talked about her upcoming book).

I'm becoming more inclined to agree with Hugh: She is too intelligent to be so naiive. Who is paying her? God have mercy on what's left of her soul.

http://www.pbs.org/now/search_google.html?q=armstrong&simplesearch.x=0&simplesearch.y=0

is where you'll find collected transcripts for her comments on NOW.

Milan: I wouldn't doubt she was getting Saudi petrodollars like Esposito and all the rest. Foolishly, she's employed by a well-known liberal Jewish seminary school which gives her anti-Semitism a cloak of "respectability." Never underestimate the ability of liberal Jews to coddle and promote the very people who would destroy them.

Just after 9-11 Saudi ambassador to the US Prince Bandar bought 5,000 copies of her shamefully apologistic book, "Islam: a Short History" and mailed them en masse to US public school libraries. Send a chill down your spine, does it?

They love her in Saudi and all over the Muslim world.

I doubt they love her in Saudi and the rest of the future glass factory......they most likely look at her as more of a useful idiot.

Yes, of course, it's her WORK they love in Saudi, not her personally.

Hugh: I think she would actually make a better match for John Esposito. Of course, he is already married. But since he is undoubtedly a closet Muslim that doesn't really matter.

"And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many."
Matthew 24:11

1 CORINTHIANS CHAPTER 8: “Beware Not To Cause Your Brother To Stumble”

urthshu: Thanks for the link, but it still does not include the complete transcript of what I heard on April 9.

Susan: I now make it a point to buy multiple copies of "Islam Unveiled" and loan them indefinately to friends. I also urge them to either pass it on or donate it to a library. Some people will never change (my oldest sister thought the book was "crap") but Spencer's clarity, objectivity, and careful referencing can win over liberals. I am the living proof of this.

As crazy as it sounds, I even wrote to NOW to urge them to invite Robert Spencer to the show. Yes, I know that Bill Moyers is a big turkey, but he sometimes invites people with opposing views. It may seem like a long shot, but it is our biggest opportunity to win over the people who really aren't getting it.

The BBC World Service, although centred in Bush House, London, is not financed like the rest of the BBC, but, instead, through the Foreign Office, which is (and has been for a century) raddled with Arabists and their apologists - indeed, being staunchly pro-Arab's a prerequisite for any job in the FO, even if your specialty's China or Chile!