Religious Historian Karen Armstrong - The Lost Art of Scripture, Part 2

[Music] scripture demands action there's a lot of religiosity today that tends to be all about me yeah not I'm not condemning these and saying these are wicked but they're not quite religious in my view yoga for example I mean it wasn't an aerobic exercise when people like the Buddha practiced yoga they were extirpating the ego from themselves not making themselves stronger and healthier more peaceful and the same with mindfulness I'm sure it's very helpful to people in we were in trouble but a point about it is for book when he taught his monks mindfulness was that you didn't know you found it that the self did not exist and there is certain spirituality I know when I was a young nun and a child a Catholic child our whole thing was about getting into heaven would we be saved would we get into heaven it was like later getting into Oxford you know passing a whole lot of hideous exams and probably failing and with hideous consequences but he was all focused on me and as a nun we just had to confess our faults and look deeply into our failings and can and do if we broke a soup bowl or something we had to take it into the refugee and say a Hail Mary over it in public really this this we would embed it in the ego that we were supposed to transcend and scripture is telling us that we it's not just all about me the scripture must push you out to act world to beat it's got to change you not just change you but you've got to change your society the prophets of Israel had no time for people who said their prayers nicely in the temple but neglected the plight of the poor of the oppressed and did not take the route their rulers to task for their war crimes and injustice they fulminate about this Jesus makes it quite clear that those that read the kingdom comes I haven't got time to go in what he meant by kingdom but when the kingdom comes the people who get in are not those who said cried Lord Lord in prayer and sang hymns but I was hungry you gave me to eat thirsty you gave me to drink sick naked and in prison and you visited me that action he was constantly going out healing helping and and the Quran is simply it's not about jihad as people insist today in fact I found while I was researching this book that the so called jihad verses which are often quoted to show how violent scripture is this because the scripture is well completely ignored by the first exegetes the most important exegetes for the first 400 years of Islamic history because they said that this these incidents had applied solely to incidents in the life of the Prophet and the conditions were no longer applicable so that there's no point in discussing them they became relevant only when Muslims were being attacked from two fronts by the Crusaders from the West who but took two or three hundred years committed hideous atrocities in the Muslim world and from the Mongols from from the east who devis devastated the land and took whole Suede's Muslim territory away from the Muslims then you start people start scouting around for these verses but actually I found with the modern terrorists those aren't the verses that they choose when they're quite when they're contemplating their actions quite different verses that are and I haven't got time to go into them here but we you might want to know about them in question time but what they chose quite different verses which had never been much use to Muslims before for historical reasons now there's a very good story about the Buddha we often see the Buddha don't we locked in contemplation and you know in yogic pose completely serene and lost to the world and he certainly did a lot of yoga but we're told in the scripture that in a very important moment that after he'd achieved enlightenment the inconvenient thought occurred to him that perhaps he should teach other people to do how to do this I'd do the same and he thought no I don't want to do that this is its but this is very difficult because you have to leave your ego behind and most people just aren't interested in doing that it's going to be extremely tiring and depressing I'm just going to enjoy my newfound peace I'm not going to do it at which point the God Brahma in the highest heaven uttered a terrible cry and he said then the world will be lost the world will be utterly lost and he said Lord he came down from the highest heaven and the god kneels before the enlightened man and he said lord please preach your teaching look at the world and we're told in an important phrase that the Buddha looked at the world with the eye of compassion and he saw the pain of the world and spent the next 40 years of his life tramping round the cities and villages of India talking one-on-one with people helping them to deal with his pet their pain and he told his followers his his disciples that they must do the same after achieving enlightenment as he had they had to go out in SPAC to the marketplace he said back to the mess and confusion and egotism and cruelty of human humanity and help people to deal with that pain not lock themselves away later there would be a split in the order and some wood some monks just wanted to stick with yoga and stuff but the majority that Mahayana said no after enlightenment you stay in the world and help people with their suffering they tell extraordinary stories at how these but these these enlightened Muslims have healed people's pain Confucius for example his heart Trey was training a cadre of scholars who would be able to instruct rulers into the best way of ruling according to the Golden Rule which Confucius is one of the first people to enunciate in a form that was written down do not impose on others he said what you yourself do not desire ever and he said you must do it all day and every day in England we have a habit of saying when we've done something nice for somebody well that's my good deed for the day so as if we could just return to our usual selfishness and unkindness and egotism no all day and every day you look into your own heart discover what gives you pain and then refuse under any circumstance to inflict that pain on anybody else and Confucius was living at the very beginning of a hideous chapter in Chinese history which when China the great plain of China would be engulfed in warfare massive loss of life massive new technology and they they were genuine afraid that human beings unless they observed the golden rule would destroy one another and that's never been more than likely than it is today and Jesus went so far as to say love your enemies now the word he's doing a bit of Midrash here he is quoting from the Book of Leviticus which says love your neighbor and the word used is he said which in the time Leviticus was being written was didn't mean love in our sense which we that has become such a sort of cliched words that hasn't one way now that I love ice cream you know didn't you love that movie no it meant loyalty and it was a trick a term used in international treaties two kings would promise to love each other which didn't mean they would fall into one another's arms and become best friends but they would look out for one another it went come to their aid in time of trouble help them out when with resources etc and make sure come too and and and and put and come too just just be look out for their welfare in practical helpful ways and that is the cut if we want a peaceful viable world that is the kind of loved that we have to give so-called enemies today and take take that seriously so now the so the monotheism's were very hot on social justice as we've seen on care for the poor and needy and the people in China and India the focus was very much on the Golden Rule as we've seen but also on what we now call the environment from a very very early phase the people of India saw the extraordinary workings of the as a kind of miracle instead of seeing it simply as a source of energy as or for our own use and they devised they devised rituals to help to strengthen the cosmos now obviously these rituals work a to have any sort of scientific use at all but what they did was created attitude of reverence for the natural world a sense of its wonder and respect and a sense of its fragility which we need today and the Chinese too were extremely aware of this they could they they saw it's that heaven what they called heaven was also earth that heaven earth and humanity formed a sacred triad all were divine and we had to they had to work together the new Confucian the new Confucians that this is confusing the neo-confucians in that the 10th and 11th centuries revived that enormous lee one of them was so so felt so what one with the natural world that he refused to cut the grass that broom underneath his window and said that you know that we must work together that heaven is my father and earth is my mother and I am blessed to be living in their midst now today Chinese philosophers who call themselves the new Confucians saying what can we do what can our scriptures give to the world and they say care for the environment and they have been working with the earth charter to drawing on that tradition to make it speak to our world today so but they're there it's strange isn't it that scripture has become a so problematic we try to prove that it's not true because it doesn't sort of concur with Darwinian science and and create all these troubles for ourselves trying to go back to the first century or the seventh century and be more authentic Christians instead of instead of being inventive and applying what is new today and so I I think we're left with two two big messages a first concern the scripture should there are passages in the in both in the monotheism said the Psalms for example where we're told to look at the glory of the universe and I think the religion the religious leaders should be speaking to this now and bringing this to the peoples the forefront of people's mind and also the question of injustice we're living in a world that is profoundly unjust where where every day my migrants are dying literally dying to get into Europe and we've got great inequity within our own society in London my own city 25 percent of the population are living in poverty which is a disgrace and record numbers of homeless people are speaking of sleeping in the street and again Scripture is speaking entirely to these matters and I think I'd like to close again with a Confucian image that remembering that they were they they were also very important on compassion in the sense of treating people with absolute respect they're their rituals their devised rituals in which the body taught teaches the mind how to relate to others so the bowing and courtesy and the gestures all build up an attitude of - neuro physicists tell us today that we learn far more from our body and bodily movement than we realize anyway the Confucians said we should we start stop we should extend our compassion you start learning compassion for people in the family it's know who going out to save the world when your own family is miserable and in disarray you've got to start at home and they devised a system whereby every member of the Confucian family was treated with absolute respect by one other member the older brother the older son had to had to look after his parents every need treating them overseas gods but the younger brother had to look after his older brother so that everybody in the family got a measure of absolute respect and this was a training that you that you developed within yourself but you can't stop with the family you've then got to move out to the city in which you dwell and make sure that there are people sleeping in the streets or if they are you must speak out about it and be worried about it instead of just tripping over them and and going on you the city is is important but they can't stop there you then have to spread out to the whole country in which unit and finally the final circle of these concentric circles of compassion carry ever outward to the whole world and the Chinese were doing this before they knew how vast the world is when our world is bust but we see now we're all living close cheek-by-jowl joined together on the worldwide web we can't when we're intertwined as never before when markets fall in one part of the world stocks plummet all around the globe there yeah we all face the same environmental danger and yet what we're doing is moving into little denominational ghettos we did it in religion when we started finding out that other people's religions were not as stupid as we thought you know what Muslims run around a building what now we know that what these rituals mean and the more we realized the a unanimity the similarity between the face and more some people retreat into particular ism because they want to be special it's the same with bricks it with with other leaders that we could speak of and this is a world the world cannot survive if we go on like this so scripture is really speaking to us now and it's up to us to treat the art of Scripture with inventiveness with a knowledge that we do not know what God is that God is infinite infinitely beyond this and not create an idol for ourselves that terrify children will fill us with self-importance because God loves us and not other people and I like so I'd like to end on really end now I will with even Arabi whom I mentioned earlier because I found I when I first read this text I was so impressed by it I wrote it out and pinned it on my bulletin board so that I could see it all the time here's a Sufi and surpise had an outstanding appreciation of the other faiths but it's about he's also warning us against ego and and our attitude to other people's scriptures too comes into this it's not only our scriptures that are good others all scriptures have immense power within them so here's what he says do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you discipline all the rest if you do this you will miss much good nay you'll fail to appreciate the real truth of the matter God the omniscient and omnipotent cannot be confined to any one creed for he says in the Koran wheresoever you turn there is the face of Allah everybody praises what he knows his God is his own creature and in praising it he praises himself consequently he blames the beliefs of others which he would not do if he were just but his dislike is based on ignorance thank you

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Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019