Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence Audiobook (Free)

Through the renowned and best-selling writer of A History of God, a sweeping exploration of religion and the history of human violence.

For the first time, religious self-identification is around the decline in American. Some analysts possess cited as result in a post-9/11perception: that faith in general is usually a source of hostility, intolerance, and divisiveness-something harmful to society. But how accurate is that watch? With deep learning and sympathetic understanding, Karen Armstrong pieces out to discover about Fields of Blood: Religious beliefs and the History of Violence the truth about religious beliefs and assault in each of the world’s great customs, taking us with an astonishing journey from prehistoric times to the present.

While many historians have looked at violence in connection with particular religious manifestations (jihad in Islam or Christianity’s Crusades), Armstrong looks at each faith-not just Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism-in its totality over time. As she describes, each arose within an agrarian society with plenty effective landowners brutalizing peasants while also warring among themselves over property, then the only source of prosperity. Nowadays, religion was not the discrete and personal matter it could become for us but rather a thing that permeated all areas of culture. And so it had been that agrarian aggression, as well as the warrior ethos it begot, became destined up with observances from the sacred.

In each tradition, however, a counterbalance to the warrior code also created. Around sages, prophets, and mystics there grew up communities protesting the injustice and bloodshed endemic to agrarian society, the assault to which religion had become heir. And so by the time the great confessional faiths came old, all comprehended themselves as eventually devoted to peacefulness, equality, and reconciliation, whatever the functions of assault perpetrated within their name.

Industrialization and modernity have ushered within an epoch of spectacular and unexampled assault, although, as Armstrong explains, relatively small of it can be ascribed right to religious beliefs. Nevertheless, she shows us how and in what measure religions, in their comparative maturity, came to absorb modern belligerence-and what wish there might be for serenity among believers of different creeds inside our time.

At a moment of rising geopolitical chaos, the imperative of mutual understanding between nations and faith communities hasn’t been more urgent, the dangers of action based on misunderstanding never greater. Informed by Armstrong’s sweeping erudition and personal commitment to the advertising of compassion, Fields of Bloodstream makes vividly apparent that religion is not the problem.