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.

Yay science!

So anyway. Way more interesting than secular humanism and Jane Addams is modern atheism!

I'm going to propose some definitions to clarify the group "arches", Atheism, atheism, and whatever else comes up in my head.

First of all, big-A Atheism I would call the worldview that there is no metaphysical or supernatural reality, and empirical data/observation/"hard science" can explain all phenomena that occur. A "problem" for philosophically minded Atheists is the question of where morality comes from, but I'm not going to break Godwin's law and discuss that here...

Any big-A Atheist uses Atheism to answer the questions about the nature of the cosmos that a religious person uses religion to answer. Some Atheists have among their beliefs the belief that the world would be improved by abolishing religion, that people with religious beliefs are deluding themselves and worshiping human creations with no power, etc. (you can see a parallel with religion here I hope?) I would call this sort of Atheism an analogue to religious belief, an arch at the 'top level'

BUT while Atheists must believe that empirical observation is the way to see everything in the universe there is to see, they cannot define themselves solely by acceptance of the current scientific theories about cosmology and the origins of the human species. Science has a property I enjoy very much: the limits to the scope of things it can be used to answer questions about. Because (even though people can make a career speculating about the first quarter-second of the Universe) it is logically impossible to speculate about what happened BEFORE that. See my corny illustration up top? While Atheists may have their opinions, there is nothing stopping anyone putting ANYTHING in the spot Michelangelo's God is taking up (flying Spaghetti Monsters, random chance, etc) and empiricism can't touch it. No decent scientist is going to answer ANY questions about WHY the Universe came into being, or the Ultimate Cause of anything.

As an empirically-minded (though mostly ignorant) Christian brought back to the sheep-area by a science teacher, I'm going to hammer that point again. Acceptance of any theory of modern science CAN'T be incompatible with religious belief, because religious belief and scientific inquiry ask and answer TOTALLY DIFFERENT questions. God works in mysterious ways, and those ways can be the origin of species by natural selection...

Long Moment of Silence

So when I heard about the "assignment/experiment" for next class period, I thought immediately, "excellent, I can put off doing my reading assignment for Government until then!" and then when I realized that might gather some sideways looks, "Excellent! I can secretly nap!" or act like a fool and pretend the "inner light" came upon me, and then I realized those would probably be bad ideas too.

It's interesting to me that (Is this due to the college class schedule? The modern American ideal of busy living? Some other cultural factor I can't come up with now?) I don't know how to deal with the prospect of twenty minutes of doing absolutely nothing. I think the fact that it is so radically out of the ordinary that would give it some of the attributes of a 'religious' or 'spiritual' or at least 'ritualistic' event.

Rapture Index

http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html

This is the "rapture index" I mentioned in class... It took me a while to figure out whether it was serious or not. Yep, completely serious! 68.8% chance of rapture today.

Women in the Church

The thing I find much more interesting than Margaret Fell's writing is this episode from her life:

The meeting between Margaret Fell and George Fox occurred while Thomas Fell was away on business. When he returned, he found that George Fox had converted his wife, daughters, and many members of the household to Quakerism. Although he never converted to Quakerism, Thomas Fell was supportive of her wife--who promptly stopped attending services at St. Mary's and became one of the key figures in the dissenting religious group.

Now I know about the sort of post-Reformation blooming of Protestant sects, but I never knew before that confessional diversities split up families. It seems to me that this can be taken as reassurance that the difference in beliefs -- for example the role of women speaking in church, as Margaret Fell writes about -- is not the earth-shaking thing we can make it out to be. Most sects agreed on the "important points" -- Jesus is the Saviour etc -- and could therefore get along. I don't think we should believe that tolerant Thomas Fell is what Sam Harris (well, class interpretation of Sam Harris) would call a 'half-assed' believer, soft on doctrine.

Ship of Fools website review (tangent!)

Ship of Fools,'The Magazine of Christian Unrest', existed first in print from 1977-1983, died dead and returned to life in 1993 with the Internet. "The ship sails under the flag of orthodox Christianity, but on a buccaneering voyage", claim the creators. The "magazine" features serious editorial articles about modern Christianity, without shying away from criticism and even ridicule, and uses humor liberally while examining Christianity's bumpy interactions with marketing, media and politics. The website is veritably jam-packed with content, and includes a very active forum community, so I'm having a beastly time examining it in three pages. No lie, SoF is my favorite religious community online, and you all ought to check them out immediately. Here are highlights from site content.

The Laugh Judgement, the recap of a forum/panel discussion regarding the top ten funniest and top ten most offensive religious jokes. The panel stared taboos right in the face and decided that they ought to stay right where they are. Verdict? Pedophilia is just unfunny. But schism and public beatings are fine!

The Mystery Worshipper. Mostly UK and NZ-based, MWs go to unfamiliar churches and review the building, choir, congregation, service, etc. A surprising variable set of views, as well as churches. Makes my snarky preference of one Appleton church (smart homilys, no crying children) over another ("family-oriented", full of clapping and singing...) seem more legit. This seems to be the most faithfully-updated area of the website -- the humor pages and the serious columns are more sporadic.

Caption Contest. Where the forum community and the online newsletter meet -- no one gets away with looking ludicrous.

The Forum divided into sections as "Heaven" "Purgatory" and "Hell" (referring to how hot the debate is allowed to get) is the powerhouse of SoF.

The Ark. Slightly confusing to understand, but it seems as it was going on, The Ark was a virtual comedy/game show, where prominent SoF forum members played Biblical characters, (yes, including God), interacting over a 40-day period and "voting off" their fellows as though it were "Big Brother". Once you read the episode transcripts, though, it all becomes clear -- check out John Baptist struggling through sacrifice and situational ethics with a chatty God in the Crow's Nest. Now the players are all bots in a virtual Ark environment, at least until the next season...

Lord, I have no idea how I'm going to 'review' this monster...

Knife! Knife! Knife! er...

Poor Haile!

From the Wikipedia article on the Rastafari movement:

Haile Selassie visited Jamaica on April 21, 1966. Somewhere between one and two hundred thousand Rastafari from all over Jamaica descended on Kingston airport having heard that the man whom they considered to be God was coming to visit them. They waited at the airport smoking a great amount of cannabis and playing drums. ... Bob Marley's wife, converted to the Rastafari faith after seeing Haile Selassie; she has stated that she saw stigmata appear on his person, and was instantly convinced of his divinity. It must be said also that Jamaica had been suffering a serious drought at the time, that was suddenly punctuated by rain upon Selassie's arrival; this must also have done much to spread the Rastafarian message.

Can you imagine the only respected African leader, being thronged by all these wacky pot-smoking hippies? He looks like a guy with no sense of humor. Jeez. Seriously, though. Reading through Selassie's Wikipedia page, he seemed to like the Jamaican Rastafaris' interest in African rights and anticolonialism, but ... very little is said about how he viewed the cult that happened around him. I'm imagining Monty Python's Life of Brian ... Oddd.

Rastafari Heresy

According to the Wikipedia article on the Rastafari movement, "Rastafari are criticised, particularly by Christian groups, for taking Biblical quotes out of context, for picking and choosing what they want from the Bible, and for bringing elements into Rastafari that do not appear in the Bible."

This seems comment-able... From the point of view of this class, we keep hammering on the idea that there's nothing ELSE to do besides interpret Scripture texts the way culture and opinion dictate, and there is no CORRECT way to look at these texts. This seems to make the "Christian groups" here slightly hypocritical -- all that the Rastafari groups can be criticized for is having interpretations of Scripture that differ (albeit in ways the Christian groups find heretical) from others. On the topic of 'elements that do not appear in the Bible', the lines Christian groups draw around what is "the Bible" is as arbatrary (though not meaningless) as anything -- a book in my library, "The Gnostic Bible" (which I'm disappointed isn't being studied in this class) is a huge fat collection of early Christian mystical texts that didn't make it through the "bible committee" so to speak.

A thing I like about the Rastafari movement is the fact that they (though this might seem so transparent just because they are a modern movement) sort of guiltlessly take Scripture and turn its meaning into what is most useful to them. The individualistic character of Rastafarianism seems to make it almost infinitely mutable.

Reply to Cate's "Commandments"

See, I found that part really interesting -- I'm not sure if the society was polygamous at the time, but it seems to be an "incest law" for a polygamous society, where blood ties are a little harder to figure out.

This passage confused me, because it took a while for me to realize that "Uncover the shame of X" was a euphemism for "See X naked". It's a list of folks you shouldn't lust after because they're your family. "No man shall uncover the shame of one with whom he hath kinship; for I am the Lord" ... makes sense to me! As Machiavelli would argue, the best place for laws to be handed down from is God Himself, since then they're really hard to amend on a whim. So the folks that count as family are:

• your father's wife (not just your mother)


• your sister (daughter of your father or mother or father's other wife)


• your grandchild, from a son or a daughter


• your aunt, maternal or paternal


• your uncles' wives


• your son's wife ... I find the tone here amusing "Thou shalt not uncover the shame of thy son's wife, for she is thy son's wife". The idea of God's exasperation with having to lay down the law so specifically for his depraved creations makes me laugh.


• your daughter


• the wife of your nephew


• your brother's wife (as long as he's living)


• this last one is confusing, but I think it's saying don't marry a woman and her daughter at once, or a woman and her granddaughter at once, or two sisters

If religion is the source of laws, then it makes sense for religious documents to include some laws! And -- I mean, this is pretty much more comprehensive than "Thou shalt not covet thy neigbor's wife" -- it's a complicated system of social taboos, covering under incest a whole number of people who one isn't really related to by blood. I don't know, it doesn't bother me. It seems like the kind of thing a document like Augustine's would consider one of the "remnants of its times" which wouldn't inform 'present-day' religious belief.

Religion for Public Order

So once upon a time, when I was a preteen, I saw the movie Kundun, and having been brought up with no religious background, I immediately thought the beliefs/rituals that went on were so strange that no one, especially not someone so apparently intelligent as the Lama, could seriously believe them -- it made sense to me that the Lama was perpetuating the Tibetan religion to stay in power, his real concern was the political future of Tibet re: China. The same would be true for all religious leaders -- all Catholics are being put on by the Pope, all Muslims first by Muhammad and later by the religious scholars and Caliphs...

I've learned better since then. But it was interesting to come across my old "instrumentalist" perspective on Religion while reading (for another class), "The Discourses" by Machiavelli.

In book 1, chapter 11, "On The Religion of the Romans" Machiavelli talks about Romulus' successor, Numa Pompilius:

The Romans of his day were completely wild, not domesticated; he wanted to train them to live a sociable life and to practice the arts of peace. So he turned to religion because it is essential for the maintenance of a civilized way of life, and he founded a religion such that for many centuries there was more fear of God in Rome than there has ever been anywhere else. Such piety was of considerable assistance whenever the senate or one of Rome's great leaders undertook any enterprise. ... Anyone who reads the history of Rome with care will recognize how useful religion was when it came to commanding armies, inspiring the populace, keeping men on the straight and narrow, and making criminals ashamed of themselves."

Well this view is fine, for a Medieval Christian looking back on the pagans, but Machiavelli completely fails to do the things you'd expect of a Medieval Christian -- namely, demerit the Pagans for their idol-worship (he finds Roman religion a great source of order),
call the Christian religion superior (in fact he blames the Pope for a divided Italy),
or claim that REAL Divine support gives the most weight in political matters (he never speaks about Jesus, though he calls Moses a great military leader, and he gives corresponding advice on how YOU TOO can make people believe God speaks to you...)

He emphasizes that the 'front' of religion must be kept up, and while it may be manipulated, that manipulation can never come to light without a political disaster. He criticizes the Christian authorities in Rome for being way too blatant with their corruption and vices -- if the modern Church looked (and 'looked' is all Machiavelli cares about) at all like the early Church, citizens would, in effect, be peer pressured into acting better.

The religious life of the pagans was base on the replies given them by their oracles and on the cult of divination... These oracles came to speak as they were instucted by the powerful, and the deception involved was recognized by the populace. Thus men came to be skeptics, and became inclined to overthrow every good institution. So the rulers of a republic should uphold the basic principles of the religion to which they are committed. ... Everything that happens that fosters religious faith, even if they privately judge it to be false, they should support and encourage; the more prudent they are, the more scientific their outlook, the more they should do this. It is because sensible men have adopted this policy that belief in miracles has taken hold ... since wise men supported them without worrying about the truth of the claims.

While this sort of evenhanded treatment is interesting, because it seems to be a sort (a strange sort) of equality among religions, in Machiavelli's mind, a step more towards actual equality than, say, the post-Reformation equality among Christian sects in the American colonies... I think this view of religion is at least as damaging as Sam Harris's. Not only does it look down on the real religious faith of the many, it sort of denies access to religious faith by the 'ruling class' or the 'intelligentsia" who ought to know better, or think more rationally.

Response to Catrina's "Contradictions of Solomon"

... I'll type this one up once my copy of the KN has printed and I can quote easier..

Ethiopian Tassel Worship

I can't find the quotation to support this now, but in the Kebra Nagast, Sheba asks Menyelek to bring back a tassel from the covering of the Tabernacle, so the Ethiopians can worship it. This reminded me of The Book of Idols we read in Hajj to Mecca last term, ... I even have the printout so I can cite it.

The reason which led them to the worship of images and stones was the following: No one left Mecca without carrying away with him a stone from the stones of the Sacred House as a token of reverence to it, and as a sign of deep affection to Mecca. Wherever he settled he would erect the stone and circumambulate the stone in the same manner he used to circumambulate the Ka'bah...In time this led them to the worship of whatever took their fancy."

Does it seem like the Ethiopians are disposed to polytheism already? Is the Queen of Sheba still too used to worshipping the sun to really get her head around the strict monotheism of the future? It seems strange to me that the fact that she wants to worship a tassel isn't called out as wrongheaded, when the "Orthodox Fathers" are commenting on other things.

Ethiopian Sun Worship

It is interesting that this book is derivative of the Bible -- and just like the Torah (among many other things) is the history of God's chosen people, the Kebra Negast is an attempt to sort of claim part of the inheritance. It is sort of infused with stuff that was important to the Ethiopians...

I'm not sure whether this is because of the translator, or because of the era/background in which this was written, or because the story is new to me, but this was (to me) a much better story than many Bible stories. The characters seem more realistic and well-rounded.

For example Sheba explains the religion of her people:

"Tell me now: whom is it right to worship? We worship the sun according as our fathers have taught us to do, because we say that the sun is the king of gods...And we worship the sun, for he cooketh our food, and moreover, he illumineth the darkness, and removeth fear; we call him 'Our King', and we call him 'Our Creator', and we worship him as our god; for no man hath told us that besides him there is another god."

and Solomon explains that the God of Israel did one better than that, and created the sun... And later Sheba promises:

"And the people shall not worship the sun, and the magnificence of the heavens, or the mountains and the forests, or the stones and the trees of the wilderness, aor the abysses and that which is in the waters, or graven images and figures of gold, or in the feathered fowl that fly; and they shall not make use of them in divining, and they shall not pay adoration unto them."

This seems like an unusually neutral, or even favorable treatment of polytheism by a Christian book. It seems understandable, for the Ethiopians, to be polytheists, and their style of worship is reasonable since their objects of worship aren't useless images but the Sun, which provides some useful services.

Might this dialogue between Solomon and the ancient Queen of Sheba have been used to convert polytheists? It seems like it would be much more convincing than the sort of condescending 'your gods are worse than powerless' approach.

Sam Harris and Muslim Fundamentalism

This lady (I'm sure you've seen this photo before...) is Wafah Dufour, niece (among many others) to the Big Bad, Osama bin Laden. I think she's a good posterchild (along with Uncle, not pictured) for the West's flat and schizophrenic picture of Islam and Muslims.

But we'll probably talk about that in class. (Let me say that Harris's argument degenerates pretty quickly into insults, calling Muslims 'sexually repressed', and Qu'ranic descriptions of Paradise 'unimaginative'. I'm sort of gobsmacked that he's taken seriously.)

Here's a quote that relates pretty well to stuff I've blogged about before:

Let us imagine that peace one day comes to the Middle East. What will Muslims say of the suicide bombings that they so widely endorsed? Will they say, "We were driven mad by the Israeli occupation?" Will they say "We were a generation of sociopaths"? How will they account for the celebrations that followed these "sacred explosions"? ... If they are still devout Muslims here is what they must think: "Our boys are in paradise, and they have prepared a way for us to follow. Hell has prepared for the infidels." It seems to me to be an almost axiomatic truth of human nature that no peace, should it ever be established, will survive beliefs of this sort for very long.

Sam Harris, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" pp 126-7

Though I don't want to be a jerk and quote myself, I think this fits into my earlier post about religion as a chain (or web) and how it changes through time. Sam Harris here seems to be neglecting a few things. First of all, Islam is just one aspect of Muslims' lives -- the great majority of Muslims, after all (2.8 million in the US alone!) are doing things OTHER than blowing themselves and civilians up, in fact they are not being violent at all. So the phenomenon of suicide bombing can not be attributable to Islam alone.

Second of all, hypothetical-future-peaceful-world-Islam is not the only religion that has to deal with a violent past. The first example that jumps to mind is the Papal Inquisition, or the early American (and contemporary English) witch trials. I don't find it inconsistent to explain these events with sociological explanations (scapegoating, groupthink, etc...) without having to find all the foundational principles of the religion itself bankrupt.
Sam Harris deals with the examples in favor of Muslim culture, like al-Khwarizmi (You'll see his picture on a stamp in Briggs Hall) by claiming (it seems) he was PRIMARILY part of the empirical/scientific tradition, and SECONDARILY a Muslim. Similarly, a 15th century Inquisitor can be seen PRIMARILY as a murderous sociopath, or a manipulated (a la Stanley Milgram) believer, and secondarily as a representative of Catholic faith.

Since there is already this pretty potent example of a tradition taking its violent, unsavory past and digesting it (It wasn't until our recent Pope John-Paul II that the Vatican officially apologized for not believing Galileo... but the Church had taken a neutral stance on science for quite a long time in between, and certainly in the present day, no one advocates Inquisition-style attempts to eradicate heresy) it does not seem difficult for another culture to do a similar trick.

...we must take care not to regard something in the Old Testament that is by the standards of its own time not wickedness or wrongdoing, even when understood literally and not figuratively, as capable of being transformed to the present time and applied to our own lives. A person will not do this unless lust is in total control and actively seeking the complicity of the scriptures by which it must be overthrown.

St. Augustine, "On Christian Teaching" p. 81

Here another example, St. Augustine expressly forbids interpreting the lives of the OT Prophets as literally worthy of emulation. The idea that Islam could not produce a theologian like Augustine (or another Al-Ghazali or...pick your favorite theologian...) seems a little implausible.

"Extra" post -- God-Emperor of Dune

Because I didn't get to bring up Frank Herbert as much as I wanted to during Hajj to Mecca:

The very physical movements that, at an earlier time, would have constituted a brave act of counting coups are now a somewhat pathetic expression of nostalgia.

This line from Charles Taylor's Radical Hope reminds me of an aspect of the Sci-Fi novel "God-Emperor of Dune", where the ultra-long-lived cult object-slash-dictator of the Galaxy attempts to preserve the severe desert culture where he came to power, even though the first success of his ruler-ship was turning that desert planet into a temperate earth-like one.
This scheme results in the unimpressive "museum Fremen", who seem to recite lines from a standardized book of Fremen Culture as the communitarian cultural system which was based on strict water conservation is made more and more meaningless when even in the most desert-ish desert, it rains sporadically.

It's interesting that Herbert has his God-Emperor ignore this aspect of change, when the same character has mutated the Fremen's messianism into a religion that can command brainwashed-dogmatic style loyalty on skillions of other non-desert planets with different cultures... Ah well, you can't have everything.

Anyone else up for a seminar: religious themes in contemporary sci fi? hehehe.

That's about all I have, no real conclusions just a parallel example. I hope someone else in this class digs Dune. :)

Religio-web, Origen's metaphors

I'm responding to a few blogs at one go -- taking Dave's post about personification in Lamentations and Origen, and Imitaz 's metaphor about religion as a chain...

I like the idea that religion throughout time is like a chain, where one link depends on all previous links, but I'd like to complicate it a little. Each individual religion doesn't just stand alone once it emerges, adding links to its chain in isolation. Religions are influenced in a number of ways:

• By coming into contact with other religions, and 'taking' things, either by converting individuals who find it hard to put earlier ideas out of their worldview, (For example, turning Hindu deities into Buddhist bodhisattvas) or by filling in a theological gap with someone else's plausible answer


• By coming into contact with past religions, and incorporating them (for example ancient Greek philosophy influencing Christian theology)


• By changes in society, environment, and technology changing a group's priorities (Modern physicians don't use Leviticus to diagnose diseases)

(This would make Imitaz's 'chain' something more like a "web", but anyway.

Assuming most people throughout time saw their own religion (and others) as not being influenced in these ways, but instead being like a chain, the 'aftereffects' of these changes would have been hard to deal with. Here is where I come to Origen. Because he was not looking at (and didn't have the information about) the changes that went on to Judaism and Christianity, throughout their histories, since Lamentations was written, he had to go at the text with the assumptions he was already equipped with: that Scripture was divinely inspired and full of interpretable meaning, and that the Gospels/Christ story can be used to retroactively inform and explain the Old Testament/Torah. ("Someone might investigate why, since the title of the book, "Lamentations" is in the plural, it says "this lamentation" in the singular in the prologue." p 75 The simplest answer seems to be "typo" -- Origin is obviously looking very hard for deeper meaning.)

Because the historical sack of Jerusalem was not important to Origen, (and a historical interpretation alone would not square with the idea of Scripture as a divinely-inspired guidebook for the Christian) he had to make something useful out of what was there.

But that much we talked about in class.

Right at the beginning of the commentary, (p 74-75, section III) Origen states that "The Hebrews say that the books of the Old Testament have the same number as the letters of the alphabet because they are an introduction to all knowledge of God, just as the letters of the alphabet are the introduction to all wisdom for those who learn." This itself could be a metaphor, -- maybe the books just happened to have the same number, or no one wrote more because 22 seemed like an 'even' number, maybe later the correspondence was given mystical meaning... Origen attempts to add on to this, saying a division by four is meaningful, (according to things HE found meaningful) because of the four elements or four humors.

Basically, I don't feel like metaphorical reinterpretations ONLY happened in 'official' and formal documents like Origen's exegesis, but also happened/happens every day as people try to square texts with their assumptions about those texts.

(blog tangent)

Does anyone here know more than me about CSS? I'm trying to edit my layout to look a specific way, and right now the html is pretty impenetrable. Help! ... I may, in the end, just give it up. But I think my blog would be improved with a little Flammarion Woodcut guy looking up from the bottom-left corner.

Grizzly Man's religion

That's "Big Bear, Little Bear" by Hibbary, on gallery site DeviantArt.

I thought I could stretch far enough so it was related.

In class we talked about the similarities and differences between Grizzly Man's way of life and the hypothetical religion and way of life of Paleolithic people. Obviously we found significant differences.

I think it's interesting to note that the sort of Grizzly-Man style reverence/love for the natural world seems like it only could come out of a modern technology-heavy urban way of life -- when you're disillusioned with the apparent spiritual poverty of human life, it's easy to fall for the "simple life" in a tent in Bear Sanctuary, living "like your fellow animals". On the other hand, when you're hunting bison with stone axes so not to starve in a cave in the winter (no matter how beautifully painted a cave), it would be much more difficult to find the lifestyle "simple" and a thing to enjoy.

I'm not sure we know enough about the specifics of Paleolithic religion to point to the similarities, in terms of "big picture" religion; I think Paleolithic people and Grizzly Man would be related by only the broadest possible definition.

Important in the case of the Wisconsin mound-builders are several elemends missing from Paleolithic and Holocene art. (Coincidentally elements I recently blogged about). Most strikingly is the portrayal (in mounds and in ceramic) of imaginary creatures -- the turtle/lizard/underground water panther, the thunderbird, and the hero character. Reading that the horned-man shaped mounds may represent a legendary hero and not just a generic human reminded me of the class discussion where we talked about how Paleolithic humans would understand the imagery of a Christian church -- missing from Paleolithic art are the representation of specific people. Not only are the mound-builders portraying a specific person, it is one, larger than life, that no one knows personally.

What I am curious about is the moment in history when people "switched over", from creating purely literal and figurative art to depicting mythological creatures and imaginary people in their art. Might Paleolithic groups have had myths like the Woodland peoples that fail to be represented in their cave paintings?

The reading mentions the fact that several mound groups are oriented to celestial phenomena, which are important to agricultural societies for predicting the seasons. Is it possible that turning to agriculture not only gave communities a food surplus (and therefore a free time surplus) but also no data to inform myth and story creation? Not only (as we talked about in class) are agricultural communities more at the mercy of natural forces, they have more elements to account for in their life -- rain and thunder and sun and the planet venus, and pests like rabbits and crows -- not only large game animals. This 'richer' mental life may have given the future mound builders a better foundation for the myths which developed into a religious tradition.

Paleolithic Symbols

Oliver wrote, about abstract symbolism among Paleolithic peoples:

If there was a common religion among all members of this band, symbols would lack a practical use as an identification marker. This lack of utility would likely provide more than enough reason for the paleolithic people, who probably spent most of their time working on providing their basic needs, not to expend the energy in their creation.

This makes perfect sense – while symbolic thinking worked wonders for early humans in terms of problem solving, art is to some extent a 'luxury' in terms of survival value. While it's not that creating systems of more abstract symbols would be “too much work” for paleolithic humans, the way of life that they led seems to make that unnecessary. The Guthrie book continually references how the paleolithic art incorporates intricate details of the animals portrayed, that is evidence of the very close-contact relationship these people had with them. Maybe this alone – focusing on specific details when portraying the animals that framed their lives – led more abstract symbols (or 'background' subjects like trees and flowers and celestial objects and weather) to not occur to Paleolithic painters.

Another aspect of Paleolithic life that would make abstract religious symbolism “unnecessary” depends on the hypothetical extent to which religion was complicated, and visible, and what role it played in everyday life. Perhaps if religion informed (for example) the method by which a leader was chosen, then “dogmatic” differences between groups might be obvious. But if (what I think is more likely) religion existed more fuzzily, and more integrated into daily life without harshly enforced specifics, individuals could move between groups (by inter-'marriage' perhaps) without there being a noticeable difference in religious life. There would be no need to call members of Clan A Religion one thing, and Clan B Religion another thing, because the distinction wouldn't exist.

lascaux 'temple'

Cos I just read a whole ton more than I need to (and love it), I'm gonna add a long quote from Karen Armstrong's "History of God" that gave me a little bit of context imagining early human religion.

One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. ... One of [this pov's] consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the "spiritual" or the "holy" which ... was once an essential component of our human experience of the world. ... Naturally people wanted to get in touch with this [spiritual/supernatural] reality, but they also simply wanted admire it. ... This sense of the numinous was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior. The numinous power was sensed by human beings in different ways -- sometimes it inspired wild bacchanalian excitement; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life. When people began to devise their myths and worship their gods, they were not seeking a literal explanation for natural phenomena. Their symbolic stories, cave paintings and carvings were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives; indeed, poets, artists and musicians are often impelled by a similar desire today.

I don't want to keep kicking a dead horse because I want to be right, but I feel that the "traditional" explanation for cave paintings (especially the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux) i.e. that they have a religious/ceremonial purpose, isn't completely off base. Because language, art, and religion are so tied up with symbolic thought, which was (as we've talked about) humankind's new 'feature', they are sort of mushed together.

faith and bias

A thing I don't think that got focused on enough in class today was the relationship between scientific research and religious faith, and it's a relationship I find important.

In the first place, the Neanderthal article establishes the idea of a nonhuman, nonreligious culture. In the second place, the "Why We Believe" article explains the potential evolutionary roots of religious belief. We're left with the idea that religion is uniquely human, and biologically innate. There are two potential problems we didn't really touch on in class, that I want to point out as priorities:

1. Scientific research / critical discussion does not diminish the value of faith

2. Religious faith does not bias critical discussion.

The first is brought up by the article, "Why We Believe" -- surprisingly the researchers (unlike polemicists like Dawkins) completely leave religious dogma, and questions of right ness and wrong ness alone. The scientists seemed sure that their research left religion completely alone, the way gross anatomy can't shake a stick at dancing, or an understanding of biochemistry can't touch the experience of panic.

More than pure research though, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the critical viewpoint? By treating sacred texts as historical documents, what do you gain? What do you loose? By treating the saints of this that or the other religion as unreliable narrators of the true facts, are those religions diminished? I would like to think they are not, but the danger of being unable to take the reality of belief seriously is just as dangerous as any type of dogmatic fundamentalism, I feel.

The second point is more personal: I've made it a goal for myself to try to be more "objective", to be able to define my assumptions and biases and by doing so see around them -- for example, to be able to look at Genesis 1-4 through a Catholic point of view, seeing how it explains how Adam's fall made it possible for mankind to be redeemed through Christ, and then taking off those glasses and seeing Genesis from a Jewish point of view, or a critical/historical point of view, or a literary point of view, or the viewpoint of any other set of religious assumptions.

(A good example is modern Paganism -- Pagans can claim that they don't worship the Devil as defined by Christians, and that they don't even believe that the Devil exists. But if they looked at themselves through the "glasses" of Christians, they could see that putting individual will in a place of central importance and worshipping nature forces (anthropomorphized or no) is functionally equivalent. Looking at the dispute that way, the reasons Pagans' arguments fail to curb Christian hostility are more apparent.) In the same way, to modern Atheists, plenty of groups with strong religious beliefs seem less intelligent, self-deluding, maybe even immoral for ignoring the 'real facts' of the Universe. (Atheist moral dogma is much less standard than Christian... )

Because beliefs regarding the supernatural are unprovable, the important difference between individuals with different faiths are the assumptions each holds about the 'behind the scenes' makeup of the world. If we plan on comparing religions without saying one is right and another is wrong, we must be able to put ourselves "in the other guy's shoes".

What does religion do?

So I missed out on the "what is religion" debate, but I've gathered together bits and pieces from other people's blagoblogs... Here's my take:

Religion provides some functions:

1. Wish fulfillment: religion provides an answer to empirically unanswerable questions, which points to a supernatural power/realm. (i. e. an afterlife where everyone gets their just desserts, a loving all-powerful god that forgives you for your bad deeds, a "higher plan" to events that appear to be random)

2. Ethics: regardless of who "really" wrote the Scriptures of whatever cultures, they provide a commonly agreed-upon set of rules to live by, and enforce social order.

3. Culture: In a group of people who share a common religion, the same symbols and stories will be recognizable, and provide a 'bedrock' starting point for the visual arts, music, theater, and idioms in the spoken language.

Regarding the "Why We Believe" and Neanderthal articles, the idea that religion is sort of innate to human existance sounds reasonable -- I can't come up with a counter-example of a human culture that gets by without some sort of religious belief. (The idea of the symbol-free, languge-free and religion-free Neanderthal culture is interesting to imagine. I think the author speculates too much about its specifics, but it makes a good counter-example to solidify the claim that religion is part of human experience.)

Bomb the Blogosphere

Hello all and sundry! If you are a silly type person, (perhaps wandering in from my personal journal) who doesn't know these things, this blagoblog's point is to express my opinions on a tri-weekly basis, regarding reading assignments (and other oddments) in an intro course on Religious Studies, one of my majors at everyone's favorite liberal arts college in Outagamie County: Lawrence U.

Now that I've got the valedictory out of the way... I'm gonna read the rest of y'all's blagoblogs.