Karen Armstrong Religion

In this episode of NOW with Bill Moyers: Karen Armstrong on religious Fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong is interviewed on her life of being religious and where she stands with religion at the time of the interview. She was a former roman catholic nun and after years of not being happy with the way the practices of that religion she had left her convent. She continues to speak of how certain religions lacked compassion, that they use fear to control people. She speaks of violence in religions alluding to the story of Cain and Able and how Cain killed his younger brother because he won the favor of God. This shows that religion can motivate those follow in ways that emotionally blinds them for the favor of their God. She compares these religions to “Buddhism, Hinduism, monotheism, the Hebrew prophets, they insisted that you must transcend this violence, you must not give in to this violence, but you must learn to recognize that every single other human being is sacred” ("NOW with Bill Moyers: Karen Armstrong on Religious Fundamentalism"). These religions take a different route than Catholicism and Christianity, which can incite hatred from one another in hopes that they are in favor of their God, an example would be the crusades in which the Templar would commit acts against the …show more content…
From her own life she has experience the brutal hand of religion and the toll it can take on people. Religion can be ruthless in a sense for you to get acceptance from God, but that’s not “what religion was really about, uh, not about dogmas, not about propping up the church, not about converting other people to your particular wavelength, but about getting rid of ego and approaching others in reverence...” ("NOW with Bill Moyers: Karen Armstrong on Religious Fundamentalism"). People have to be selfless and learn to value each other, but with religion that doesn’t always