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Homo Religiosus Karen Armstrong Analysis

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Homo Religiosus Karen Armstrong Analysis
Becoming better. This is something that everyone wants to do. Society wants people to gear themselves to improving their lives to the best of their abilities. Even though people try to gear their life in this way, it doesn’t mean that becoming a better person is easy. Individuals don’t know where to start in bettering themselves and what bettering themselves means to them. Karen Armstrong’s essay “Homo Religiosus,” discusses the highly prominent role of religion and its underlying arts and disciplines. Armstrong discusses the different religions of the ancient past and the characteristics that encompass them. She looks at the various arts and disciplines seen throughout these religions. Oliver Sacks’ essay “The Mind’s Eye” analyzes the lives …show more content…
Everyone wants to succeed, but having the ability to succeed does not come painlessly. It requires a certain mentality and requires one to have a drive to succeed. Religion “is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life” (Armstrong 5). The arts and disciplines of religion call for an individual to be able to stare adversity in the face and to overcome it. These same arts and disciplines of religion state that “Religion is hard work.” (Armstrong 6) The practices of blind individuals allow them to overcome the adversity of being blind through their drive. Blind individuals have to live life differently after becoming blind, especially from a visual perspective. It stated that “Like art, the truths of religion require the disciplined cultivation of a different mode of consciousness.” (Armstrong 7) The drive is what gets an individual through their ups and downs. It gives him or her the motivation to actually be willing to commit to succeed. Zoltan Torey wanted to continue to live his life and do the tasks that he wanted to do despite being told that he would no longer live the way he wanted and that he should “rebuild his representation of the world on the basis of hearing and touch” (Sacks 333). Torey was able to do so with the strong drive that burned within him. For Francis Galton, “the missing faculty seems to be replaced so serviceably by other modes of conception” (Sacks 339). Different faculties of conception were available for Galton because he had a drive to continue to live his life how he wanted. The drive of these individuals gave them the power to not give up in the face of adversity. The drive an individual possesses shows how much an individual wants to succeed. An individual can have all the hopes and dreams in the world, but if they don’t have the necessary drive the hopes and dreams will
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