Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

9. On Loving Your Dead Neighbor: Violence, Knowledge, and History

107 On Loving Your Dead Neighbor Violence, Knowledge, and History 9 What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. —Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation, on the axial age Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. —Jeremiah, inhabitant of the “axial age” The story about our ancient human past that I have just recounted is, I believe, true. Although it is brief, it is consistent with the evidence. Specifically , it is true (albeit brief) in its presentation of ancient religion and philosophy. It attends to what can and cannot be known about ancient religions and philosophies, it attends to their particulars where they can be known, and it avoids generalizing in such a way as to obscure these particulars. It not only honors the past, it honors the religions and philosophies of the past. It does them no violence. It seems to me that such avoidance of violence matters. We ought, I think, to try to treat our neighbors in the past just as well as we try to treat them in the present. We ought not to misrepresent them, we ought to try to understand what 108 Convenient Myths they mean and not twist their words, and we ought not simply to use them in pursuit of our own agendas. These are ethical imperatives that many people try to live by in the present. I do not see why they should not apply to the past as well. It is my contention that the mythmakers discussed in chapters 1–6, even though they share a serious commitment to nonviolence in the present and the future, have failed to avoid inflicting violence upon the religions and philosophies of the past. I do not suggest that they necessarily intend to be violent, or that they themselves understand what they are doing as violent. Nevertheless, violence occurs. They tell us what they would like ancient philosophies and religions to have said about the world, rather than what they did say (and in some cases still do say). They see what is not there, and they ignore what is there. There is a studied disregard for particular, annoying facts, which are routinely stripped out of these ancient religions and philosophies in pursuit of what they allegedly have in common. Generalizations (sometimes wild) are advanced, and serious misrepresentation occurs. The case study I want to use to illustrate this violence is biblical, specifically Old Testament religion. This is my area of professional expertise, and it is also my own still-living tradition, in the sense that Christians share the Old Testament as Scripture with Jews (who refer to it as Tanakh). I can well imagine that there may be other readers of this book who will have their own issues with the mythmakers—who will feel aggrieved about how their own ancient, but still living, tradition has suffered at their hands. I hazard a guess that these will include readers who feel offended at how reduced and impoverished a vision emerges from this mythmaking of significant worldviews such as Hinduism , Buddhism, or Confucianism. However, I need at this point to leave these many people to articulate their own perspectives on the matter. I have my own particular concern: that it is certainly the case that the Old Testament literature has been grievously misrepresented in the midst of all this mythmaking. It is certainly the case that violence has been done, however unintentionally, to this “old story,” the biblical story, which the mythmakers have been concerned above all others to replace with their own “new stories” because of its historical importance in Western societies. On Loving Your Dead Neighbor 109 Karen Armstrong (Again) We see the violence to which I am referring, by way of a first example, in Karen Armstrong. In chapter 3 we noted her curious reading (in her Short History of Myth) of the biblical book of Genesis, in which Genesis is read, quite against the grain, as presenting the rise of civilization as a disaster. We noted also her misleading inclusion of the biblical prophets within the group of axial age sages who taught their disciples to look within themselves for truth. The misrepresentation continues on the immediately following pages of the same book, where Armstrong contrasts the picture of God painted in the story of Abraham, where God...