Final Post

I want to wrap up the term in a neat box, but... to do so would force me to radically oversimplify or nod superficially to complicated things, or otherwise leave out important untied knots...

It's worth it, after all, that I started out absolutely loathing Wallace Stevens, who seemed simply bored with ho-hum-conventional religion, used a superficial, uninventive, and ucky rhyme/rhythm style, having yet another romantic picture of the noble savages, and poring over it in class I realized there was substance to Sunday Morning after all. (That is, I learned to stop being a self-righteous jerk who assumes her aesthetic preferences are necessarily the right ones.)

The debate over the "place" for religion/religion-analogues in a person's identity is still unsolved, and I think I'll keep thinking about it after this term is over... Same with the debate over the status of Atheism/atheism and other secular worldviews, in the pecking order of the chicken coop of religions... (Though this debate regularly makes my lunch table stormy and unfriendly anyway)

I don't have a well-formed response, but I want to say a hearty "ditto!" to Imitaz's claim,

After one’s loss of faith in God, poetry serves as a substitutes for religious texts in a secular setting where the poet’s words is similar to the scriptures found in religious texts that are believed to be God’s words.

especially in terms of all the debate and noise on one hand that goes on over a phrase's meaning, or intended meaning, or meaning in context X, and silent contemplation/enjoyment/meditation on the other hand. Very similar.

Another website I want to share, pursuant to my final essay: The Forgiveness Project

and because that one was sort of heavy, here's one that's just off the wall: a youtube compilation of long tracking shots from films. Find religion in that! ha-Ha!

and a last... because that previous one was sort of snide. artists are more liberal because telling a good story requires understanding the cohumanity of the bad guys.

Finally, I'm on topic!

I was listening to the "Around the World" concert last night, and (since I just can't turn my mind off homework) one of the pieces reminded me of the stuff we've been covering in class --

the "Mi'kmaq Honour Song" by Lydia Adams (sung by Concert Choir): the notes by the composer say,

"The Mi'kmaq Honour Song is a chant dedicated to and in honor of the Creator. The employment of nature sounds and the call of human voice honors this tradition of the Mi'kmaq peoples. The sounds are not in any particular language, but are perhaps a derivation of a test handed down through the ages."

This is so similar to Pollock and Rothko -- they are all influenced by the affective and "noble savage" way they see primitive culture (kind of like Grizzly Man, too?) and go for "universal" symbolism.

While the piece sounded haunting and evocative of spiritual things (like Pollock's "Guardians of the Secret" seemed to have some religious meaning), in the end it is 'empty' of religion -- it is not grounded in a tradition but just nods at everyone's idea of primitive traditions; not only does it not use words, but the sounds are not out of any real language, by trying to preempt the beliefs of any particular tradition and get "before" them to the source of spirituality, the Abstract Expressionists, and Lydia Adams in this piece, only succeed in creating a front with nothing behind it.

I make a pact with you, Mark Rothko --

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud,
And I or you, pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye, or show a bean in its pod, confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God;
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then;
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropt in the street—and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come forever and ever.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, [c1900]; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/142/. [May 23, 2007].

As the term goes on I'm getting more and more rebellious, and I am completely dumb to say anything nice about the Abstract Impressionists... So I'll go off topic. Walt Whitman! (I was reminded of him out of the blue, because Ezra Pound feels the same way about WW as I do Pollock and Rothko) I think he's a far more transparent example of "secular religion" than any of them, and he uses the metaphors of religion while rejecting everything it entails to boot. If I ran the zoo, WW would be on the reading list for sure.

Mostly I just wanted to inflict my favorite poet on whoever happens to read these.

Not the religion you're looking for...

I hope I'm not the only person on this side of the line, but I'm going to flat-out say it -- The paintings of the Abstract Impressionists are not religious in nature. They may arise out of the same mental faculties as the cave-people's impulse to express themselves, and they may take as their springboard psychological ideas...

But to say that these paintings are a manifestation of big-picture religion as much as anything else is to completely erode the definition of 'Religion' to make it utterly meaningless.

and the wages of sin is...

Catrina throws out a post about Christianity, modesty and nakedness, re: the fall of Adam and Eve, and Augustine develops an interesting argument justifying Adam and Eve requiring clothing...

According to Augustine, as long as Adam and Eve obeyed God, they had complete willed control over their bodies. (Augustine goes on for quite a while about organs of generation, procreation without lust etc...) But the object is clear -- before the fall, everything was "mind over matter". When it happened that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they fractured the whole paradigm in some sense, and their physical bodies 'rebelled' against their wills, mirroring their wills' rebellion against God. Now given our First Parents' nakedness, and given that Augustine (in his pagan days) enjoyed the company of ladies... we can all imagine what exactly happened to Adam...

Thus begins the era of pants, and continual squabbling over who is responsible for lust...

But to drag this around to the topic of the readings, the backflip Augustine did in explaining the Genesis story had absolutely no textual support in Genesis. It was grounded merely in Augustine's owns sense of what was plausible and internally consistent (though it did inform his more theologically-relevant opinions about Original Sin, which DID influence the ideas of the Church)

That, to me, is slightly unnerving, that a chunk of theological opinions are based merely on what one ex-nymphomaniac (however clever) thought was plausible.

To realllly stretch it to get to the class readings, what the abstract expressionists did was similar, but even further removed from religion. They may have started with Jungian archetypes, which might be said to be present in big-picture religion, and ran away from there -- figures are barely present in some of these compositions, and if one has to take the artist's word for even that, there is very little there to start from.

More about Science...

Sarah wrote a post regarding science, and how it works, .... And I like her example.

The difference, as I understood it from a class I'm gonna recommend (Rationality and Religious Belief) between scientific belief and religious belief is that scientific belief (Yes! since nothing is *provable* per se, just made really really likely, there's a tiny amount of belief there) is revisable. If data happened by, and folks analyzed it, and it said that the state of things is not X but Y, and this conclusion was arrived at by a lot of reputable folks, any decent scientist would accept the state of affairs was indeed Y, and that their idea that things were X was based on incorrect assumptions. Furthermore, their belief that things are Y would not be set in stone but subject to future revisions in this way.

There is nothing that would change a religious belief in that way. Religious beliefs "God exists", "God can forgive sins", "after the last judgment you will be rewarded or punished eternally","The material world only appears to exist", regard things that cannot be observed. IF a religious belief is true, the world will look exactly the same as IF it is not. Though some things may challenge religious belief, (the fact that really awful things happen in the world is a problem for belief in a loving, omnipotent God) nothing will rationally shake away a religious belief, and in practice, it takes quite a bit to "irrationaly" or "emotionally" shake a religious belief off a person. You don't see people having crises of faith because they come across new data, and the acceptance of a new worldview will never go over as smoothly as new discoveries in a scientific field.

The important difference is that the empirical explanations of the world take into account their own limited character, and contain mechanisms for revising themselves. Religious dogma don't have such a thing -- there is no clause in the catechism saying "if more than 6 million people tragically die as a result of moral evil, God is loving but not omnipotent." or "Christ is Lord, unless someone close to you commits suicide" : When religious beliefs are involved, a 'change of gears' cannot be smooth.

Religion in Hull House...

A caption for a photograph of an arts building described the importance of art education for children:

At Hull-House formal art education for children achieved a high priority, again because of the belief that children's moral and spiritual development depended upon exposure to transcendent ideals, especially in a world so rooted in materialism and so lacking in places of beauty.

Eureka! A religion-analog in Hull House is 'transcendent beauty'. The thing that struck me about the picture I have above (perhaps because I was consciously looking for it) was that the piano in the raised alcove, because of the separate/important position it has, and because of the symmetrical arrangement of things around it, has an "altar-like" aspect.

Another religion-analog (by which I mean a method for spiritual experience, or an understanding of the divine reality) is 'reverence for the past': quoted about a Labor museum, Addams finds it important to build a bridge between the generations of immigrants (individual labor) and their children (factory labor).

If these young people could actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from simple tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education which [educational reformer] Dr. [John] Dewey defines as "a continuing reconstruction of experience."

She seems to be talking about creating explanatory narratives, an origin story of sorts for the American Immigrant factory laborer, which ennobles both their past and their present, something that would seem to be the task of a budding religion.

A third thing, a page claims that the Madonna and Child was an image prominently displayed in art on the walls of Hull House, (for example, here)
and it seemed to me that that might be because it represented the common religion in its most caring and regarding-human-relationships incarnation, visually.

Hull House, because it seems to be more spacious and "nicer" than the surrounding area, the complex has the character of a building set apart for religious worship, only its aims are really education.