Aquila ka Hecate

I can 'n beitjie.
I used to be religious myself.

It just feels so damn good I guess.
Much like a drug-of-choice I suppose,and whereas I don't condemn the responsible use of marijuana at all, there's still heroin to consider.

I think I get JTVrocher's defence through my gut, so to speak.
Have you never been a religious person?
It's a little hard to explain!

victorialis

Marcel... maybe it is enough to recognize that this need for the transcendental exists in some people at some times. Surely it would be reasonable to hold this recognition in mind -- it comes in very handy.

There are circumstances in which science and reason alone will not prevail, or even avail. Not having met these circumstances is not having lived. Avoiding these circumstances is impossible. They exist. Better to be prepared.

To wait until everyone relies solely upon reason would be to wait for a very long time, if not forever. Possibly it isn't ever supposed to happen -- the apotheosis of reason.

What shall we do in the meantime?

Sigh. Usually I can spell.

Marcel

Aquila, Victorialis;

I am aware that people have this drive inside themselves to experience something religious. It is something that I don't have. I have never been religious either. I have always been an atheist. I even remember that I had an argument about religion with my grandfather when I was eight years! And I also offended my cousin with an anti-christian remark when I was nine. I just couldn't understand it. I realised that it was incompatible with reason and science. I was raised virtually without religion (I am grateful to my father who, as if it were a bedtime story, read to me from the Children's Bible, so I know the book pretty well, but it had no imperatives, and later I got a very playful Bible class at school) and as a child I was already entirely obsessed by evolution theory and naturalism.

Apparently, I am also pretty rational in addition, because another thing that I can't (and probably won't) understand is, that when people have this need, that they consciously decide to adhere a religion. To me it seems like a violation of reason. Knowing you have this need, why not suppress it in stead of distorting your outlook on life?

On the other hand, I find it fascinating to read all this and I like discussing about it.

Best regards, Marcel.

victorialis

Marcel, how can the suppression of a need have any other result than the distortion you're seeking to avoid?

Spirituality need not obviate reason. The idea that it will, no matter what we do, is superstition.

Superstition is a kind of fear unworthy of those who reason seriously, because it brings into reason the very same dysfunctions that the irreligious can see plainly in what they call religious behaviour. The two kinds of behaviour are complements, not antagonists; they make up the full kit.

Why not use all our capacities? The key lies in knowing when each capacity is appropriate, and in not getting carried away by any of them. An insistence upon reason alone will probably bring more irrational circumstances your way, rather than less. They will need to be addressed somehow.

It may never happen. If it hasn't happened yet, I salute you -- but you may not be seeing the whole picture. Maybe it's down to how broad an outlook you want to have and how much you want to understand. If this is something you don't especially want to understand, you're certainly within your rights. But your curiosity is to your credit.

Calzaer

I'd pipe up with the end result my last two questions were leading to, but I don't want Marcel to think he's being ganged up on. So I'll back up a bit and wait until he's got fewer people lining up to throw the baseball at his dunk tank.

victorialis

Ol' Marcel's okay. He really wants to know. Good on him.

Marcel

Yes, I guess it is that banal, I'm afraid.
Your observation allows me to define what this colleague of mine in South Africa was doing. He often lied to people, he smoked dagga (pot), he used foul language, but each time he entered the charismatic full-gospel Church where his parents would take him every Sunday, he would feel the Holy Spirit. It is like a pavlov effect when he enters; there is the 'Holy Spirit'! This made him tick. Just by entering the place his brains started secreting the religious drug and he felt the 'anointing'. Christian people that I used to talk with would certainly have tried to define his feelings, because why would this Spirit reward him with the feelings that they only acquire whilst devoutly worshipping their lord Jesus?
Maybe the Calvinist tradition in my country has coloured my impression of how a religion should be: people should at least be righteous, pious and meek, in order to inherite the earth!


Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; The world wants to be deceived, therefore, let it be deceived.

I'm afraid you're right. This is quite a gloomy prospect for a Western world that has gone through Enlightenment, the greatest, most devastating cases against God, people like Nietzsche and Voltaire and the like. That all these great advances in science and philosophy would be ignored because people have a tedency to succumb to some need to find something of which they don't need to know whether it is there. It is a full act of going down on one's knees for what is in fact a logical fallacy; it is a deliberate repetition of what Nietzsche defined as the old violation of facts by mixing up the concepts of finden (to find) and erfinden (to invent). The poor man thought that mixing hopes with facts was a constant mistake that people were not aware of. He hoped that they would stop making that mistake if it had been pointed out to them. But people are aware of it, and they continue to do it because it gives them such a good feeling.

Isn't that strange? Is being honest to oneself not more important than a rush? I guess not.
But it's still fascinating; this explains how New Age people can express the words: "Truth is what your personal truth is." It perfectly matches today's need for introspection and romanticism; yet another manifestation of individualism. Christianity might die out in Europe, but people will try to wriggle out of the cold world of reason and facts.

Infidelettante

Let me try this another way. Marcel I'm going to stipulate a few things I want you to keep in mind. One: religion is an emotional exercise not a rational one. Two: something is not invalid just because it is irrational. Three: Truth is what works. I'm not trying to open a debate about this I just want you to understand how I understand religion and spirituality. If you want to debate these then I’m open to that but I’d rather you just keep them in mind as you read the post.

I want to try to explain why I’ve chosen the path I have. I have always been on my spiritual journey. My mothers father was a preacher and she took us to hear him preach every Sunday until we got old enough to put up a fuss then she stopped taking us. My dad was an agnostic.

When I was seven or eight I was lying under a tree in the yard when I had my first true religious experience. I became part of the tree, and the grass, and the yard. I expanded to take in a vast part of the orchard next door and the dairy farm across the street and the woods we played in every day. It lasted only a second or two but it has stayed with me for almost fifty years now.

Eight years or so later I got saved at a youth Bible study. I went to Bible college. Then I spent ten years trying to repair the damage the Fundamentalists did to my head. I knew I was whole again when I read a book on the Gnostics and found the divine female. We played in the woods around were I lived every day. You know what, I always thought of those woods as “Her”. She could hide me if I needed to hide. She would lift my spirits if I was sad. I climbed her trees and walked her trails and grew up and left her. She never left me and when I was thirty five she put my head back together and I have been devoted to her ever since. Not the woods. I don’t think much is left of it anyway. I found Goddess in those woods and decades later I found her in a book and said “I know you!”

I call myself a Pagan. You call yourself an atheist. I am also an atheist, and a pantheist, and a polytheist. We both define ourselves in this respect by how we associate with Christianity. You are an a-theist because you reject the god of the theists. I am a pagan because in this culture anyone who is not Christian yet follows a religion is pagan. We allow the Christians to label us. That’s OK with me. I know who I am.

You can’t understand why I should need a religion at all. Because I need it is the only reason I can give. I love the symbolism of ritual. I enjoy the time it takes to prepare a proper work. It can take days and at times weeks. I enjoy the research and the writing and planning and the gathering of objects and words to make things just so. Do I make it up? Yes. Is it meaningful? More often than not. Does it help? Yes. How? It helps me to focus on a problem or a need, a situation or a condition for an extended period of time. The symbolic objects, words, times, and actions of ritual let me direct my energies in useful and purposeful ways without distraction. It lets me work through problems and difficulties in an interesting and inventive way. It helps me stay more tuned to the cycles of the sun and moon and so to the ways of nature. In turn I have been able to tune in on my own physical and mental cycles and gain a better understanding of an aging body and mind.

Those are a few of the ways my religion benefits me. Could I find the same benefit outside the religious context? Maybe, but I like my religion. There is no cosmic weight here. No universal truths to hold to. Just a man who has found a little corner of the religious spectrum that works for him. Do I care that my religion makes no sense to people who seem to hold logic to be the highest human achievement? Well, I must or I wouldn’t be trying to explain it to you would I. What I want to get across to you is that I see its’ illogical aspects as its’ greatest strength. It is free of the confines of logic and reason. It works by meaning, pattern and form not cause and effect. I don’t want it to make sense to you. What I ask for is for you to understand that there are some things in life that work, and work best, outside the limits of logic and reason. Some things are valid because they are illogical. Some things should be valued because they break the bonds of reason.

JT

victorialis

I'm not sure why Marcel sees these two things as being mutually exclusive. I share, genetically, his Calvinist aesthetic on religious propriety and his religion-free upbringing (and the nostalgia for the Enlightenment -- which was a beginning, not a complete event). I view religion as a set of behaviours, a technology for deliberate interaction with life -- not as a form of truth. Any true thing certainly doesn't need strange behaviour from me to support it; so I don't see integrity as self-denial.

The need or desire for a rush is not always senseless hedonism. Sometimes -- maybe even usually -- it is simply the will to feel fully alive through some experience other than pain. That's not an unworthy goal for a thinking person, especially an underemployed one.

Aquila mentioned the Rede. It seems like rampant permissiveness, but a few minutes' thought makes clear that it is a much stricter rule to adhere to than it sounds at first. "An ye harm none, do what ye will" -- that means you're not allowed to harm yourself, either, which lets senseless hedonism out of it pretty early on, for those who are paying attention. Those who are not paying attention will damage themselves to the extent that they put themselves out of commission, temporarily or permanently, until and unless they wise up. But then, Wicca is not the only way to do that.

As a central tenet, the Rede would sit rather comfortably with an Enlightenment value system: Go ahead, do what you like; and then live with it (and best know beforehand what you're trying to do, and why).

I like all three of JTVrocher's stipulations, especially the second one (a raging two-year-old, for example, is irrational, but hardly invalid -- quite the contrary). A rationalist's distaste for stipulation number two always makes me suspect that the rationalist is using reason as just another Sky Daddy: "reason will fix everything if I work hard enough at it".

If only it were so. But it ain't.

Waning Moon Conrad

How does believing that the bigotries and rantings of Paul are the word of god constitute an actual path to union with the source of all or the experience of enlightenment or the seeing of truth?