[lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 23:21:10 -0400
> [Original Message]
> From: Graeme Wend-Walker <graemeww@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 5/26/2005 6:53:18 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had
>
> Andy:
>
> Again, I get all this. Some people are wacky. My point was that you let
> these things define religion. They just don't.
A.A. I think we're thinking along the same lines but using different words.
If we were to substitute spirituality everywhere you say religion, then we
would be in perfect agreement. "Religion" is in my opinion wacky by
definition, because by definition it involves the worshiping of, relying
on, a reality that we invent. It is a reality that is anythinig we want it
to be. Spirituality is I think what you're getting at. Spirituality and
religion are often, if not usually, diametrically opposed.
You may as well say that all
> people who follow soccer are hooligans,
A.A. All people who follow soccer are passionate; some are hooligans. But
all people who follow religion *must* subscribe to religion's terms or they
cannot be in the club.
or that all scientists are
> psychologically enslaved to the pharmaceutical or weapons industries.
> Religion is problematic, sure. There's a lot there to interrogate. I'd
enjoy
> interrogating it all with you. But let's try to rise above the
reductionism
> ourselves, huh?
>
> Religion (I figure) is a faculty.
A.A. By this I'm understanding a sense, a sixth sense perhaps. I have no
objection to sixth senses; animals are well documented to have such senses
and it's quite possible that some people have such senses too. However,
I've never heard of any documented ability for the paranormal in any human
study. A problem with this that jumps out at me is that charismatic
religious leaders all claim to have a special something that gives them a
direct line to God.
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.
>
> There are a lot of people out there who might be called "religious" in
their
> basic response to life but who would never call themselves that. Maybe NOT
> calling themselves religious is part of the deal; the word may have
specific
> connotations for them from which they'd rather distance themselves. Some
do
> this distancing consciously, others less so. (It would be better if I'd
> didn't call them "religious" either, out of respect to their religion. (It
> can cause great offence.) But our culture has not evolved a terribly good
> vocabulary for dealing with these things.)
A.A. I think your parenthetical hits it. Spirituality can be described in
many ways. A talent for empathy for example strikes me as more spiritual
than physical; or a deep appreciation of, say, nature might be more
expressed in some people than others. Those people might be considered
spiritual, since they're relating from the spirit.
>
> Some people are "religious" in the sense of having great faith in
> technological messianism; "one day science will free us," they think,
"from
> the pain of being human; we'll be able to upload our identities [ascend]
> into a world where we can be anything we want to be [heaven]".
>
> Others are religious in their capacity to conceive of higher and higher
> degrees of inclusivity, like a violin string trying to imagine the whole
> violin. Some exercise this capacity by personifying (or otherwise
> objectifying) the highest stuff they can think up, or by turning it on
> themselves in a courageous act of self-deconstruction, of humility.
>
A.A. I agree with your examples. When these spiritual qualities, talents
if you will, are codified as God's desires for us, they are no longer
generated by one's spirit but are instead turned into laws. They are
turned into laws by human entities claiming special access to the divine.
> Others, though, use it to authorise whatever it is they already believe or
> want to believe, staving off the anxiety produced by genuine religious
> self-confrontation (and the ordinary anxiety of being human) by kidding
> themselves they've already arrived, that they're one of the elect. This
> sense of certainty they get by recoiling off their own anxiety produces
> those horrible, self-legitimating brain-loops you were talking about.
>
A.A. I agree completely that religion is a means of controlling self and
others. Control is not necessarily a bad thing; self and society need
control However, controlling society with invented realities generates a
lot of problems, as we all know from reading history books and watching the
news.
> Those people make me puke. But you don't need religion to produce that. In
> any dictatorship, for instance, you'll find the smug, self-righteous and
> judgmental deriving their authority from an identification with secular
> power. (With GWB you get the whole package.)
A.A. Yes. What Maoist China and Stalinist Russia produced were religions
of atheism with Mao and Stalin as the gods. They were tragedies beyond
compare.
>
> The reason I want to defend religion is that not all the people who might
> call themselves religious are so cowardly, and they don't deserve to be
> thought so.
>
A.A. Maybe we can say organized religion causes far more trouble than it's
worth. It's often, perhaps always, politics in disguise. Thanks for the
thought provoking discussion.
Andy Amago
> Best,
>
> Graeme Wend-Walker
>
>
>
>
> From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Better to have had faith
> Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 22:42:02 -0400
>
> Maybe because to me "a blinding to reality" is someone getting excited
> enough about religion to take science out of schools and otherwise embrace
> superstition over empirical evidence. Maybe because I saw the look on my
> nephew's face as he told me about accepting Christ and how they're home
> schooling to avoid contact with non-religious ideas for their kids.
Maybe
> I think you have to be weird to be willing to die rather than give up the
> tooth fairy, er, God. Are you in the habit of taking LSD and standing on
a
> window ledge, so to you this is normal?
>
>
>
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