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.