In posts I wrote last year (here, here and here), I expressed my doubts about Karen Armstrong's thesis that religion is to be seen as being about practices rather than beliefs. The reason for my scepticism was (and is) that there's an equivocation in the way her thesis is articulated: on the face of things, it takes the pressure off having to justify religious belief in rational or evidential ways, because the emphasis on ritual, and myth, and commitment, consigns the substance of actual belief to the background; but, surreptitiously, belief creeps right back in, for Armstrong and other proponents of the same thesis employ terms - like 'truth', 'insight', 'understanding' - that have nothing else as their object than what purport to be matters of fact (broadly speaking), propositions about the state of the universe.
That is a critique of the general shape of the Armstrong view. In Sunday's Observer Richard Holloway indicates ways in which particular religious beliefs are not properly accommodated by what she argues:
[W]hat about the resurrection? Christians think that this is not a myth in the Armstrong sense of a timeless truth encapsulated in a story, but is an actual event - Jesus got up and got out of the tomb - one of whose purposes is to assure us of our own life after death. Whatever you make of the Christian claim, it resists any attempt to turn the resurrection into a myth in the sense of that word as used by Armstrong. I think it's a myth in the way she describes, but the church does not.
This is why I think Armstrong's myth project has about it a whiff of the disingenuous. It is the way she and I and many others hold on to the great scriptural tropes, but it is not how the church's official teachers hold them...
Other examples follow, such as that concerning, again, belief in a 'world to come'. Those who need this belief, need it on the condition that it is true; turned into a myth, its consoling or redemptive properties will be weaker.
At bottom, the whole intellectual project founders, in my view, on this logical conundrum: if you really do evacuate religion of all its substantive beliefs, it will be left as meaningful as scraping a stick along a wall, or balancing a marble on your head, or pronouncing a slow 'drooom' into a mauve cup; and if religion has more significant meaning than that for its adherents, meaning which really matters to them, this must be because of things religion says about the condition of the universe and their place within it.