[lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 23:23:35 -0400
We are on the same wave length. I used the word talent and sent my post
before reading this.
Andy
> [Original Message]
> From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 5/27/2005 4:24:48 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
>
>
> On 2005/05/27, at 7:53, Graeme Wend-Walker wrote:
>
> > Religion (I figure) is a faculty. You've got it and you can use it
> > well or
> > use it poorly. Using it doesn't have to involve actually calling
> > yourself
> > "religious" or identifying with anything in particular. I suspect
> > we're born
> > with a sort of "polymorphous spirituality" that gets shaped in the
> > same way
> > our other faculties, potentials etc. get shaped. Unfortunately,
> > this faculty
> > often gets twisted.
>
>
> Max Weber offers an alternative hypothesis, that some of us are born
> "religiously musical" while others are not. On this account,
> religiosity is something like a talent for music or languages, a
> knack for fixing automobiles, or the ability to play basketball like
> the kid down the block or like Michael Jordan, something that only
> some of us are born with.
>
> An interesting, if minor, data point. While studying Chinese popular
> religion in a village in northern Taiwan, anthropologist Steven
> Harrell collected information from 14 informants: 3 were, he says,
> village theologians, who had each constructed his or her own
> idiosyncratic elaboration of the world view on which Chinese popular
> religion is based; 1, an old woman, was the village atheist, who said
> flatly, religion is nonsense; the remaining 10 said only "we do this
> because its the custom."
>
> Cheers,
>
> John McCreery
>
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