lawtig02
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As someone to whom religion is very important personally, I agree with all of this without reservation.
In my mid Life I was an actively engaged Christian
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And don't forget if the song YMCA is played. Everyone in the bar knows the ritualistic dance.
donbosco
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I am told that The Cave Thanksgiving gatherings still go on.
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Those are interesting questions. How are we putting too much faith in science by knowing it doesn't have and doesn't claim to have all the answers?
I know that you know 10000 times more than I do about religion, but the religious experience I've had they claim to know everything through their interpretation of God. I'm more I inclined to trust the more humble approach of searching and understanding that we don't know everything.
I have found reading these post about religion very interesting.
I don't think many of these replies are actually responding to TarSpiel's point, which has nothing to do with his own religiosity or lack thereof.
We can trumpet scientific advances until they finally figure out how to graft talking cocks on our foreheads, but none of those accomplishments crowd out widespread human demand for some deeper sense of purpose and/or holistic integration in a community and the world at large. I also think it's incorrect to suggest that the scientific community does not weave its own accomplishments into a story tying together a benighted human past, a promising human present, and a transformed human future. I already mentioned that liberal Christianity turned its attention to scientific advancement (hello eugenics!) and social reform in the early 20th century. In short, the commonplace move to make the world a better place--scientifically and otherwise--derived (at least in part) from the secularization of a postmillenial liberal Christianity. And I say this as an atheist who thinks the premises of Christianity are fascinating but insane.
As an aside, the problem of purpose in a rationalist, technological society is a common science-fiction trope, in novels where scientists have, in fact, figured out how to put those magnificent cocks on our foreheads. On my reading, Greg Egan's Diaspora tries to imagine scientific endeavor as an aesthetic-cum-sacral experience. The best entries in Iain M. Banks's Culture series reflect on the same ideas.
As another aside, I'd guess that the weak point in Durkheim's argument isn't that he never saw a Toyota Prius or received an mRNA vaccine, but what I'd bet is his reliance on prevailing sociological ideas about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, community and society. No doubt subsequent generations of sociologists have taken him to task on conceptual problems within that framework.
Nowadays, churches, synagogues, mosques, and Roy Rogers restaurants certainly do not have hold positions in modern society that allow these institutions to steer peoples' experience of a purposeful life, which is why we can entertain for one second the notion that the Cave serves the same purpose. But to compare the worldview of Durkheim's Australian aborigine to Barney fucking Gumbel is doubly ridiculous, and even if Barney delivers meals to Carl and Lenny in snowstorms. At the very least, the value of ritual emerges in the ways in which it yokes the participant into a purposeful practice with a past, a present, and a future--a ritual human centipede, one might say, ass-to-mouth across the ages. Does going to a bar do that?
We can trumpet scientific advances until they finally figure out how to graft talking cocks on our foreheads, but none of those accomplishments crowd out widespread human demand for some deeper sense of purpose and/or holistic integration in a community and the world at large. I also think it's incorrect to suggest that the scientific community does not weave its own accomplishments into a story tying together a benighted human past, a promising human present, and a transformed human future. I already mentioned that liberal Christianity turned its attention to scientific advancement (hello eugenics!) and social reform in the early 20th century. In short, the commonplace move to make the world a better place--scientifically and otherwise--derived (at least in part) from the secularization of a postmillenial liberal Christianity. And I say this as an atheist who thinks the premises of Christianity are fascinating but insane.
As an aside, the problem of purpose in a rationalist, technological society is a common science-fiction trope, in novels where scientists have, in fact, figured out how to put those magnificent cocks on our foreheads. On my reading, Greg Egan's Diaspora tries to imagine scientific endeavor as an aesthetic-cum-sacral experience. The best entries in Iain M. Banks's Culture series reflect on the same ideas.
As another aside, I'd guess that the weak point in Durkheim's argument isn't that he never saw a Toyota Prius or received an mRNA vaccine, but what I'd bet is his reliance on prevailing sociological ideas about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, community and society. No doubt subsequent generations of sociologists have taken him to task on conceptual problems within that framework.
Nowadays, churches, synagogues, mosques, and Roy Rogers restaurants certainly do not have hold positions in modern society that allow these institutions to steer peoples' experience of a purposeful life, which is why we can entertain for one second the notion that the Cave serves the same purpose. But to compare the worldview of Durkheim's Australian aborigine to Barney fucking Gumbel is doubly ridiculous, and even if Barney delivers meals to Carl and Lenny in snowstorms. At the very least, the value of ritual emerges in the ways in which it yokes the participant into a purposeful practice with a past, a present, and a future--a ritual human centipede, one might say, ass-to-mouth across the ages. Does going to a bar do that?
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No but the purpose of going to the bar is neither as contrived or prone to be misleading. Rituals, procedures and ceremonies that enshrine and perpetuate mistaken ideas and practice may well have a purpose but not so much a good one. The mere act of keeping those things alive lends the powers of antiquity to them whether deserved or not.
Course, I don't buy the technological paradise, either. Put me with Effinger's Budayeen cycle with a dirty nasty splintered world with humans continuing to chase illicit dreams and kicking the can of human progress randomly down the highway.
My biggest objections to almost all these beliefs is that the generally stem from a time and a root belief, however farfetched, that the universe was small enough and new enough that an individual could actually be important to the maker of that universe. No one seems to notice that every time the universe grows and ages that chance attenuates. Put me down for not believing any philosophy that considers humans important to the universe as a race and absolutely scathing toward any the values the individual as such. Settle for being important to one another.
That's fine--I have no objection to anyone's conclusion that the beliefs undergirding these rituals are wrong or even harmful. But the point remains: what ritual based on right belief do you then cram in our gaping purposeful hole?
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In the end in my Christiany journey for a few decades this was my goal, my focus. One interaction at a time. And most of the time it was a two way street-so all good for my human ego
LeoBloom
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I'm sure it is not a surprise, my friend, but totally agree with you on the local tavern.
No ritual. Make up your own. Same with your beliefs. For me, I focus on two main ideas. " First, do no harm..." and " Love thy neighbor...". Most everything else will follow.
Go for it. See how long it lasts because now we're smack dab confronting the very problems that confront religion in modern liberal societies. It's probably not an accident that adherents to those moral principles have historically embedded them in wider ritualistic practice.
I'll quote Jon Levenson, a well-known scholar on the Hebrew Bible, who wrote a recent and very good book on Jewish Sabbath:
A major source of the astonishing survival of Shabbat over the millennia is precisely that it entails, and even continually brings into existence, a social body where there might otherwise have been only a collection of undefined or self-defined individuals, with their idiosyncratic spiritualities (or none at all); that it answers to norms and expectations rather than personal preferences and whims; that is gratefully received rather than creatively devised to meet this or that generation's felt exigencies.
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I completely agree on both points.
Part of the problem, though, is viewing religion as a sort of proto-science - which it really isn't - that has somehow been surpassed by science - which it hasn't.
Religion deals with basically different aspects of the human experience than science does. If you did FMRI scans on a person's brain performing a ritual and one of a person at a bar or doing an experiment in a lab, you'd see them firing up different parts of the brain.
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Well, the Australian beliefs and practices are our best window into Paleolithic religious beliefs and practices. They're the cornerstone out of which all other religious traditions evolved. That's the basic logic behind it. And more "advanced" religion still bear many traces of their ancestral roots.
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I think in that example, I can see some meaningful connections. Thanks for sharing it.
And for what it's worth, New Orleans is my favorite city I've ever been to. I had a hard time leaving, and was seriously considering moving there for months after my visit.
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Interesting. I am a neuroimaging scientist (fMRI mostly) and I haven't studied the effect of religious thought on brain activity, but most introspective thought including mentalizing (for example, taking another person's perspective), mindfulness (for example, Buddhist practice) and general mind-wandering involve the default mode network, whereas a person doing an experiment in lab would probably instead involve the frontoparietal network (executive functioning). A person in bar, that's a tough one. Who knows?! I would suspect mostly social cognition (which overlaps the default mode, in particular involves the medial prefrontal cortex), - if the person is not too blotto and engaging in meaningful conversation - but also general mind-wandering (also the default mode) which, while maybe not always identical to areas that might be involved in religious/mindful cognition, will have some overlap.
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ZenMode
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Ddseddse
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IMO, that's why "I've prayed on it" style Christianity is ruining Christianity for all of us. Precisely because it almost 100% of the time resolves to the "personal preferences and whims... devised to meet... felt exigencies".
This comment sent me scrambling to recall another book that I read a few years ago, and which Levenson cites: Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity by Adam Seligman, et. al.
Seligman and his three (!) co-authors argue that contemporary understandings of ritual have been impoverished by our over-valuation of sincerity. The Protestant Reformation is an important tipping point for this move towards sincerity, and the Christian Eucharist would be a case in point. In this post-Protestant telling, what does it mean to participate in communion? The ritual act reduces to an “instrument,” the point of which “always resides beyond the ritual.” (Yes, Augustine had arguments on these lines too). Forget Donatism and the spiritual state of the priests: the efficacy of this ritual wholly depends on the participant, on “inner states like sincerity or belief that may not always be relevant to the social and cognitive contexts of ritual action.” This approach to ritual views the individual as the locus of ritual meaning—what matters is how sincerely, how authentically, they experienced the ritual. In that sense, romantics and fundamentalists becomes strange bedfellows—they shared a project founded on the projection of selfhood into the world.
On Seligman’s view, a non-individual approach would attend to how ritual ropes participants into external social meanings. The ornamentation, the pomp and circumstances, is part of the point because those elements (which Protestants detested) require us to accede to the “as if” of the ritual.
I find this take on ritual interesting in terms of its consequences for literary study, which has historically derided genre in favor of authentic self-expression. I think we can see the homology between ritual and genre inasmuch as the latter is also a vehicle that asks its participant to accede to the world "as if."
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I disagree. Archaeology is really our best window into Paleolithic religious beliefs and practices. Studying modern foraging or 'primitive' societies can help, but I don't believe that Australian aboriginal beliefs and practices are any more, or less, valuable than other societies such as the San and Hadza people of Africa, the tribesman of Papau New Guinea or the Yanomami people in South America.
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