Personally I think Thor is more plausible than Yahweh anyway
In this amusing interview in Salon, Richard Dawkins discusses why religion is both inane and dangerous. Of course he’s mostly talking about the Abrahamic religions, because as he accurately observes, belief in Apollo and Thor has pretty much died out.
What I’ve been wondering for about 35 years now is why the believers in Yahweh are so convinced that their fairy tales are more plausible than the pagan myths they supplanted. Consider:
Danae and Zeus
Mary and Yahweh
What is the difference between these two pictures?
If you answered “exposed booby,” you are correct. Danae has an exposed booby, which tells us she’s a pagan, which means that nothing in the picture really happened. Utterly absurd to think that a god would descend on a human woman and get her with child. Unless the god is Yahweh and the human woman is Mary, in which case it makes perfect sense and is completely believable.
For me, the Abrahamic religions are spectacularly implausible, so much so that I often wonder how educated people can really believe in them.
But believe in them they do, and it’s not a harmless delusion. As Dawkins argues, it’s faith itself that is the problem. Here’s an extract of the Salon interview to give you the gist of his argument:
Salon: My sense is that you don’t just think religion is dishonest. There’s something evil about it as well.
Dawkins: Well, yes. I think there’s something very evil about faith, where faith means believing in something in the absence of evidence, and actually taking pride in believing in something in the absence of evidence. And the reason that’s dangerous is that it justifies essentially anything. If you’re taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die — anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed — that clearly is evil. And people don’t have to justify it because it’s their faith. They don’t have to say, “Well, here’s a very good reason for this.” All they need to say is, “That’s what my faith says.” And we’re all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we’re actually faithful ourselves, we’ve been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences. The consequences it’s had historically — the Crusades, the Inquisition, right up to the present time where you have suicide bombers and people flying planes into skyscrapers in New York — all in the name of faith.
Salon: But don’t you need to distinguish between religious extremists who kill people and moderate, peaceful religious believers?
Dawkins: You certainly need to distinguish them. They are very different. However, the moderate, sensible religious people you’ve cited make the world safe for the extremists by bringing up children — sometimes even indoctrinating children — to believe that faith trumps everything and by influencing society to respect faith. Now, the faith of these moderate people is in itself harmless. But the idea that faith needs to be respected is instilled into children sitting in rows in their madrasahs in the Muslim world. And they are told these things not by extremists but by decent, moderate teachers and mullahs. But when they grow up, a small minority of them remember what they were told. They remember reading their holy book, and they take it literally. They really do believe it. Now, the moderate ones don’t really believe it, but they have taught children that faith is a virtue. And it only takes a minority to believe what it says in the holy book — the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, whatever it is. If you believe it’s literally true, then there’s scarcely any limit to the evil things you might do.
I’m no expert on Buddhism, but it’s said that Buddha tried to teach his followers not to be followers. He encouraged them to reject arguments from authority and to test the validity of his teachings through personal experience and analysis. We know he said this because it’s in the Buddhist scriptures, so it must be true.
But the idea is good, and if the world would stop dicking around with these ancient fairy tales and get to work constructing a new-and-improved religion, I think “No Blind Faith” should be the number one article of faith.
Seriously — if religion is inevitable, then why not start a new one that would build on everything we know about the universe now, incorporate our most enlightened ethical stances, and leave room for further developments in both knowledge and morals? If god exists, or if you believe god exists, then treat him/her/it like a mystery to be investigated and start investigating. Why keep reading these old texts by people who obviously didn’t know jackshit about anything? For chrissake, we don’t turn to the ancient Babylonian astrologers for our knowledge of the stars; why should we look to ancient writings by Middle Eastern farmers and shepherds for knowledge of the Supreme Being?
42 Responses to “Personally I think Thor is more plausible than Yahweh anyway”
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richard cherry says:
Ohmigod you said ‘naked booby’ - cue thread suddenly becoming all porn-related.
Dawkins’ ideas aren’t exactly new; I don’t think the ‘no blind faith’ is as useful a rule (I like blind faith - we had blind faith that one day an England cricket team would emerge with the backbone to beat the Australians - and it worked!!!) as ‘don’t fuck with other people’. Any system of belief that is really based upon the idea that other people have rights would be a start. But then Christianity is apparently predicated on some shit about loving your neighbour and look where that got us.
But as long as the equal importance of the other is enshrined, you can believe blindly in purple pixies and I might snigger, but I won’t be against you. No matter how much we come up with justifications for all sorts of ’sensible’ ideas like the one about other people, we rely on faith (maybe not blind as such) - that these other people are real and important.October 14th, 2006 at 5:58 pm EST -
richard cherry says:
and I like the nice clean lines of the lower image. maybe I’m becoming a christian…
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Violet says:
Ohmigod you said ‘naked booby’ - cue thread suddenly becoming all porn-related.
I think talking about religion is more fun that talking about porn, but people seem to disagree. Even Mandos would rather talk about sex. I ask you.
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cicely says:
Really, Richard, *Dawkin’s* ideas aren’t exactly new?
I’m pretty sure I agree with him verbatim.
I don’t think the sports analogy is quite right. You always believe - have some kind of faith I guess - that your team can win. But you also accept that it can lose. It’s the unpredictability of outcome that gives following sport its life and character. It’s a drama unfolding and none of us know what’s going to happen. We try to prepare ourselves for both joy and despair, don’t we? When it’s over, we deal with what actually happened on the field. Including the injustice of refereeing error. There ain’t no infallible sports god and there ain’t no justice. There’s only the game.
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Mandos says:
The thing about porn and sex is that it’s about a moral position and the basis for the discussion is our desire to be on the same moral page re harm done to women in particular. With religion, there’s epistemology, history, additional components of cultural identity, etc at stake, so there’s much less of a basis for discussion, because we aren’t on the same page as to the point of it all.
I mean, when you say,
Seriously — if religion is inevitable, then why not start a new one that would build on everything we know about the universe now, incorporate our most enlightened ethical stances, and leave room for further developments in both knowledge and morals?
this is kind of akin to begging the question. But to me, not to you. Because for me, there isn’t a point in it if it isn’t of divine provenance of some kind.
So I’m not sure how fruitful a discussion can be. Thus I tend to let the atheists play by themselves.
And with that, I’m going to close my fast.
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Violet says:
But Mandos, you’re missing this part:
If god exists, or if you believe god exists, then treat him/her/it like a mystery to be investigated and start investigating. Why keep reading these old texts by people who obviously didn’t know jackshit about anything?
I’m not an atheist, because I don’t think we can really know what the fuck’s going on. I could call myself a theist with as much confidence. I certainly don’t think Yahweh exists, anymore than I think Zeus is a plausible figure as the creator of the universe, but what exactly is going on with the universe and the nature of existence is quite outside our bounds to know. At this point, at least.
So theists believe that there is some kind of god. Perhaps they feel it, or sense it. People say that they believe in god because Mohammed said so or Moses said so or David Koresh said so, but if you dig down deep enough, that is not really true. Thoughtful people reach the point in their education and reflection where they realize that faith is ultimately a choice, a gut instinct, a desire. Ultimately, you don’t really believe in God because Mohammed said so. You believe in God because you believe in God, and so you believe that Mohammed was right.
But once you realize that…why hang on to Mohammed? Or Jesus, or Moses, or David Koresh? These were just people like you, expressing their inner conviction that God exists. If God is a natural fact — and you believe that it is, that’s why you’re a theist — you don’t need any other human being’s word for it. You don’t need these ancient revelations.
Start with god as a natural fact, and go from there. Investigate. What might god be like?
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love2all says:
You match my views regarding religion, you really do. (I DO like porn, though, but that’s a whole other topic) I consider myself agnostic because, well, I just have a hunch that there’s something out there.
I have said many times to my husband and friends that I am not a fan of most religions because they call for blind faith without questioning. Any religion that allows for questioning, I’m usually ok with. That pretty much leaves Buddhism and Wicca, two religions I actually do respect.
Why be scared of God? God should have nothing to hide; it’s absurd to think a deity would punish you for asking questions. Secrecy and faith are about control and you should alway be suspicious of those who frown upon asking questions. That’s why I never did well in catholic catechism classes… the teachers were sick of me asking questions that I shouldn’t have been asking, according to them. They didn’t know how to answer my questions anyway.
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Mandos says:
But you’re still talking about obtaining God on your own, basically.
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stevesh says:
“What I’ve been wondering for about 35 years now is why the believers in Yahweh are so convinced that their fairy tales are more plausible than the pagan myths they supplanted.”
If you really want to know, and my sense is that you probably would rather not, the book to read is Interpretations of Poetry and Religion by George Santanyana.
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richard cherry says:
cicely - I never said I disagreed with his views. I broadly agree with both of you. But I’ve been believing that for a while and I know I wasn’t the inventor of such clear-headedness. The cricket allusion was more in the nature of a joke, really. Sadly it interrupted my key thought ‘I don’t think the ‘no blind faith’ is as useful a rule…as ‘don’t fuck with other people’. And that isn’t new either - sure some bloke in the bible mentioned that (allegedly).
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cicely says:
Oh, I should have realised the cricket analogy was more in the nature of a joke, Richard. To be honest I’m absolutely hopeless at certain aspects of this written, stop-start conversation (blogs, message boards, email etc). I’m in awe of the flow a lot of people can get going all on their own behind a keyboard.
I think I’m an atheist because whatever might be ‘out there’, I don’t think it has a lot to do with me. Put it this way: I don’t just believe, for no reason at all, that human beings on Earth are the most intelligent beings in the universe. (or universes?) There are limits to what we know, and possibly ever can know. We might lack some kind of ways of perceiving that other beings have. But my question would be, what does that have to do with us anyway, and the ways in which we live our lives with each other? We’re responsible for that.
I think the requirement for blind faith about gods and their demands and intentions really is the problem. The fact that Eve’s ’sin’ was to take a bite out of the apple from the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ is pretty disturbing to me. If there was a god, why would s/he give us a brain such as we have if we aren’t supposed to use it as it can be used - for original thought? And hasn’t that been the conflict right up to now between religion and science? Creation or Intelligent Design v Evolution etc. And if you’re on one side or the other, you’re going to perceive of the other side that they’re ‘fucking with you’, if and when they try to impose their view in real life terms.
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Mandos says:
To paraphrase the great American contemporary poet Donald Rumsfeld, it’s about the unknown unknowns.
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Laura says:
I think the real problem is not religion, but fundamentalism, whether religious or secular. People have done both horrible and great things in the name of God. The civil rights movement, for example, was church-based; would you say it was bad because the people who fought for civil rights were motivated by a blind faith in God?
Fundamentalism, with its black and white worldviews, is a much bigger problem. I don’t really care what people believe as long as they don’t try to force their beliefs on me or anyone else.
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Violet says:
But you’re still talking about obtaining God on your own, basically.
But if God is a natural fact, why is that a bad thing?
Here’s my analogy: God is like the stars. We see the stars with our eyes; God we see with our inner eye (to get all mystical on you).
The Babylonians looked up at the stars and theorized about what they were. They were wrong. Babylon was a relatively primitive civilization compared to us and so their theories about the stars were similarly limited.
So we modern people do not need to read the ancient Babylonian astrologers to learn about the stars. It would make no sense to do so.
Even more to the point, we don’t need to read the ancient Babylonian astrologers to know that the stars exist. We can see them for ourselves.
For me, God and the established religions are like that. It truly makes no sense to me to rely on some ancient primitive theories about what God is. No more than I would dig out a Babylonian text to read up on the stars.
And it also makes no sense to me to rely on these ancient theists to believe that God exists at all. If I were a theist, I wouldn’t need Moses’ testimony that God exists anymore than I would need the ancient Babylonian astrologers’ observation that the stars exist. And as I noted before, deep down people aren’t doing that anyway. Belief in God is internally arrived at and actually precedes adherence to a particular revelation.
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Mandos says:
So, if you’re fixated on the religion-as-experiment sort of thing, well: Most religions, including the ones associated these days with “fundamentalism”, have a mystical strain or two which intends to do *just that*. Use the inner eye, etc. Thing is, they don’t abandon the basis from which they came, which you can see as part of the investigation itself. That background of practice is part of the spiritual universe, as it were. You’re proposing to amputate the spiritual universe. Now, that’s an interesting experiment in itself, but, well, I don’t think it’s complete.
Now the thing is, I don’t even think I agree with the motive. Which is Dawkins’ slippery-slope enablement argument, with a focus on and implicit agreement with certain ways of reading certain texts.
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Violet says:
Now the thing is, I don’t even think I agree with the motive.
Actually my motive is to release religious thought from the baggage of these ancient and very harmful creeds.
I mentioned in another thread not long ago that Christianity, for example, is always tied in some way to those godawful misogynist scriptures. Christianity has spawned many mystics and break-away sects, as you know, but they’re always having to grapple with this ancient crap: a God who’s into genocide and obsessed with reproduction, a saint who says women need to shut the fuck up, a whole primitive asinine moral world. Here we are, trying to be enlightened people, and figure out how to reconcile our modern knowledge and morals with these ancient texts.
The answer is simple: the ancients were wrong. Not hard.
Really, imagine modern astronomers treating the Babylonian astrology charts like Holy Writ, and twisting themselves into knots to reconcile modern astronomical knowledge with ancient Babylonian precepts. The very thought is absurd. ABSURD.
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Violet says:
What I’m proposing, by the way, is what high-level Christian theologians are doing anyway and have been doing for awhile. (By high-level I mean Paul Tillich as opposed to some bible college in South Carolina.) When Tillich talks about god as the ground of being, he is in no way constrained by biblical notions of god. He’s engaged in a philosophical investigation of theism. His personal tradition is in Christianity, but that’s just his milieu.
Similarly, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan not long ago were talking at a conference about whether it even made sense to call themselves Christians anymore. Because by the standards of almost any “regular” Christian, they’re not. They’re working with a conception of god that is grounded in modern philosophy and ethics, and is in no way reliant on or constrained by biblical evidence.
What I think is that this sort of thing ought to filter down to the popular level, and in fact become the basis of a new popular religion. A new religion that would be free of the ancient rotten baggage, and incorporate our best modern ideals and most advanced knowledge. Why not?
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Mandos says:
It’s really the same thing as Dawkins’ reading. He, like you, agrees with fundies on the correct exegetical technique, and thus that the fundie reading is the “correct” reading, as though a religious text were a scientific text with Correct Readings.
See, you’re treating scripture and tradition as part of the written record of the evidence, like a Babylonian treatise on astronomy or a scientific journal article from the 1800s. I’m saying that they’re part of the *experience* and *phenomenon* itself.
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Violet says:
He, like you, agrees with fundies on the correct exegetical technique, and thus that the fundie reading is the “correct” reading, as though a religious text were a scientific text with Correct Readings.
Hee — if you knew more about me, which I can’t divulge since I’m a secretive fictional character, you would know that this is funny. No, I do not agree with fundie literalism and have spent a shocking amount of time in my life engaged in the kind of biblical exegesis that completely demolishes fundamentalist readings. And there’s the rub, MandosX3: why so much energy expended on this crap? Why not just jettison the old nonsense altogether? Think outside the box, man!
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Mandos says:
It’s been done occasionally before, even by powerful people who weren’t subject to resistance to it, and I don’t think it worked out in the long run. In the Mughal Empire, the great emperor Akbar came up with “Deen e-Ilahi” attempting to do something similar to what you describe, and instead merge Muslim and Hindu and other tradition and sift through his contemporary philosophy for its theological basis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....n_religion
It’s probably a terrible article, and the last paragraph of that section appears hostile and probably grafted on, but you get the idea.
But only 18 people converted to his religion.
Borg and Crossan and whoever, I think are in the same position. You want this religious position to filter down into the masses, but I don’t think it can. And I think that’s at least partly because people instinctively reject something that didn’t emerge from a practice of divine provenance itself.
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Mandos says:
Hmm, that link didn’t work. Here:
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Mandos says:
I know from previous posts of yours that you did spend a lot of time on this stuff. But I don’t think that a) you can jettison it and b) you’ll necessarily get a better world for doing so. We live in an imperfect world where some voices are louder than others, and they’d do their best to engrave themselves into what you began anew.
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Violet says:
I think Buddha was basically doing the 5th century B.C. version of exactly what I’m talking about, even down to the admonishment not to treat his words like Holy Writ. Obviously the religion rapidly acquired the usual paraphernalia of divine revelation and authority, but you can’t say that Buddha’s effort to found a new belief system failed.
If Buddha could do something like that 2500 years ago, I think modern people should be able to do an even better job today. Consider that many educated Christians read books by Bishop Spong, for example, and those ideas really resonate with them. And of course there’s no reason a new religion couldn’t be grounded in some of the traditions that people find comforting and familiar, the way that Buddha’s thought was ultimately grounded in a Hindi milieu.
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Mandos says:
“I think Buddha was basically doing the 5th century B.C. version of exactly what I’m talking about, even down to the admonishment not to treat his words like Holy Writ. Obviously the religion rapidly acquired the usual paraphernalia of divine revelation and authority, but you can’t say that Buddha’s effort to found a new belief system failed.”
They didn’t fail in that there are many Buddhists, but you yourself point out that many people treat it, again, as sourced from divine provenance, not merely one man’s investigation if indeed that’s what they were.
But like I said, I don’t think we even agree on what the problem is.
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Violet says:
But like I said, I don’t think we even agree on what the problem is.
All right, what is it you think the problem is?
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Mandos says:
The ability of human beings to take any idea and turn it into a bad one.
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Mandos says:
So if you ask a Hindu who the greatest Mughal ruler of India was, they’d most likely say Akbar. This is understandable since they were the conquered underclass and Akbar had a reputation for tolerance tham many other Mughal rulers (like Aurungzeb for—as some claim—an extreme instance), not to mention governing a prosperous time in India.
But you’re not likely to get as glowing a review from many Indian Muslims and especially Pakistanis. That’s because the whole of the Islamic milieu—the *ummah*, I guess—is a single coherent Experience, even at the same time being propositionally contradictory. From the dangerous fundies to the meditating saint-venerating Sufi mystics. A whole sophognomy, to coin a term.
You can’t simply graft a theology that suits your predilections onto it. That’s not science, that’s engineering.
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Violet says:
The ability of human beings to take any idea and turn it into a bad one.
Okay…but how does that preclude us from trying to develop new and better ideas anyway?
In ethics, for example, we’ve developed feminism and multiculturalism and human rights theory and animal rights and all kinds of stuff, new ways of thinking about our fellow beings on this planet. All these new ideas can be subverted, like any new idea, but that’s hardly an argument not to come up with them.
Religion is, to my view, a branch of human thought that is in dire need of clean-up. Old-fashioned ways of thinking need to be replaced. The reliance on ancient mumbo-jumbo, for example, is primitive and superstitious.
Religion has evolved, by the way: a couple of thousand years ago there was a lot more reading the gods’ intentions in sheep entrails, a lot more bribing of the gods with animal sacrifices so they wouldn’t smite your ass.
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Violet says:
Stevesh: actually I have read Santayana. I was naughtily posing a rhetorical question largely as an excuse to post funny pictures and make my point in a humorous way.
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Wisecrow says:
This philosophical discussion is interesting, but there is a simple fact that usually gets lost - about a million years ago a group of Homo erectus were sitting around a campfire, terrified of all the things they couldn’t explain, and “invented” something to make them feel safe. The evolution of religions makes perfect sense - I’m just amazed that there are so many otherwise intellegent people who believe in a supreme being when the origin of such a belief seems obvious.
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Mandos says:
Okay…but how does that preclude us from trying to develop new and better ideas anyway?
My point is that it sounds like you want to jettison something wholesale, as opposed to some kind of exegetical evolution. I’m saying that the motives for doing so might be misplaced, and this form of jettisoning doesn’t seem to have a historical track record of success.
The ultimate jettisoners, atheists, still have, what, 5% of the world’s population? I suspect it has always been about 5%, honestly.
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Infidel says:
Wisecrow,
Isn’t it just as possible a million years ago a group of male homoerectus conspired to construct a patriarchy using fear and faith. -
Violet says:
and this form of jettisoning doesn’t seem to have a historical track record of success.
Arguably, something like that has happened every time a new religion has come along. Not all religions are revealed religions, and sometimes a faith has become popular simply because it makes sense to people or appeals to them.
And something like that definitely happened with the rise of Marxism, in terms of people embracing a weltenschaung that was based on intellectually derived principles rather than revelation.
I feel like you think my motives are suspicious somehow, but I assure you that I really do wish for a healthier form of religion. I doubt that the religious impulse will go away, and philosophically the theistic position is as defensible as the atheistic. (Of course by the theistic position I just mean positing the existence of some kind of Being, not specific and implausible ancient deities like Ra or Yahweh or Thor.)
The irony for me is that I think I would be a far more solid theist than most religious people. Because I think that if god exists then he/she/it must be a natural fact totally apart from any human’s testimony, whereas so many religious people seem to fear that it’s only these “revelations” to ancient people that assures them of god’s existence.
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Mandos says:
Well, that’s the impasse here, actually. What I’m suspicious of, is, well, that it appears to me that your goals aren’t that far off from Dawkins’ goal, which is less about theism as such and more about *faith*—that is, I have a feeling that Dawkins wouldn’t object to God if you could make a case for God as a Natural Fact. His beef is with faith.
Thing is, revelation, enrapturement, and so on are all part of the religious experience in themselves. The “inner eye” discovery part is already contained in most major “sophognomies” because people have long ago recognized the need for it. You want to keep that, it seems, but jettison what is to me its natural complement.
Yes people have jettisoned religions through history but this (and the—at least philosophical conflicts associated with it) are natural objects in themselves. I’m suspicious of the meta-rejection you propose.
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Violet says:
I don’t understand the penultimate sentence in your comment. Is there a word missing or something?
What I object to is not faith, but faith in ancient scriptures and revelations. I see that as a feature that religions need to outgrow. And in fact, I think they will outgrow it. The modern explosion of knowledge, the scientific ethic, the growing sophistication of human civilization — I think these will ultimately doom the childish and primitive reliance on ancient scriptures and revelations, which basically are just the residue of shamanism and book-worship among an illiterate population. I think this “magic holy book” stuff we will outgrow, just as we outgrew, for the most part, trying to read the future in sheep entrails.
The reason this needs to happen, and sooner rather than later, is because the ancients generally had their heads up their asses. They were ignorant and primitive and their writings are simply a deadweight holding back religious thought.
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Wisecrow says:
“Wisecrow,
Isn’t it just as possible a million years ago a group of male homoerectus conspired to construct a patriarchy using fear and faith.”Yes. But I think they were probably more interested in avoiding being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger…
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Infidel says:
Who’s to say? It isn’t like they were mere animals. They were hominids with large brain pans, imagination, trust, faith, fear, they had sexual urges, morality, and all the males needed juju to make up for the fact that they weren’t the important sex of the species.
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john lennon says:
Everyones got somethin to hide
except for me & my monkeyi think Dawkins is a hypocrite
he is as fanatical against religion as religious nutters are against ‘whatever’
and i think he would back any idea/movement to rid the world of religion even if it involved bloodshedlets just all hold hands, and sing along ;-)
Imagine theres no heaven
please if you try
no hell below us
above us only sky……….. -
Red, the Archaeologist Adventurer says:
I’ve been lurking for a while, and came across this post in the list of reccomendeds. It corellates exactly with my thoughts as of late. So, even though it’s an old post, I thought I’d delurk to say hello, and thank you, you’re my favorite internet person ever. I especially love your blog, as studying anthropology is what led me to feminism in the first place.
Exactly, exactly. I’ve grown up in a conservative small town based on a religion that’s sort of Christian, sort of not. It’s got all these books that were written in the 18th century, that are taken as doctrine. The things I like about the religion are those that say not to take anything as blind faith - to ultimately develop a relationship with God, to figure out for yourself what you beleive is right. But then, paradox! It also says to beleive the Word (bible/18th century books) as the source of knowing what’s right. So, you’re pushed to only beleive things that you’ve questioned, but you’re only meant to question things that have been put forth in the doctrine. You’re meant to both trust them and question them, without “external evidence”. What…why? I’m meant to question, and change my understanding of doctrine so that it makes sense to me and my life, as long as I don’t consider actually rejecting an idea. This is supposedly different than blind faith. I guess it is, but I don’t get it. It seems like I’m supposed to twist external evidence (anthropology, science, etc) to fit with the doctrine, not the other way around (or, not as much anyway). For most of my life, I’ve gone about it the other way. But, is that faith? No. Why do I even need the doctrine, if I have to constantly be changing it, just so that I feel ok about saying I beleive it? It seems much safer just to go to the source.
Understandings of the divine are couched in a social context. We, as social creatures, cannot avoid this. But, by placing absolute trust in the understandings of the past, we are also putting trust in the social contexts. Even if we attempt to sort the spiritual and the social out, they are intertwined so thoroughly that it’s very much impossible. Cosmology explains why things are the way they are. But, the way we think things are change! Misogyny is the biggest example, in my mind. If the social perception of the differences between men and women are explained as a result of differences in their spirit, in order to accept that particular idea of spirit we MUST accept, to an extent, the social understanding. Why not just look to our own spirit, and see what we find?
But,my question is, does that constitute religion? Does a personal spirituality divorced from doctrine of any sort count as religion? As soon as people band together in beleif, for whatever reason, there’s an investment in passing down those beleifs. In the passing down, we’re essentially fossilizing an idea so that it can continue even after the context in which it was formed has expired. Or, rather, ensuring that people will have reasons (other than selfishness) for trying to stop the context from changing. This process seems to work alright in everything but religion (science, for example). We should just replace religion with philosophy. Although, I do have an appreciation for ritual (in general - not so much for myself) so I’m just going to stop talking now.
Anyway, sorry this was long and didn’t actually add anything to the conversation. I’ve been trying to explain these ideas as of late, and not doing so great a job. So, I just wanted to say thank-you.
Also, now that I’m delurked, would you mind sparing some advice for a young feminist new to arena? Mostly I’m just wondering what some good books to look for are. I am currently reading the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin, and The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir. Obviously, I read sporadically, and am not in desperate need of reading material at the moment, but I’d love some direction.
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Red, the Archaeologist Adventurer says:
Also, I appologize for apparently not knowing how to turn off the block quote.
Weird.
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Red, the Archaeologist Adventurer says:
My goodness, what a mess. What I was TRYING to quote was the analogy about the stars. But somehow it disappeared.
I should’ve previewed. Alas.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Welcome Red, the Archaeologist Adventurer! It’s nice to have you here.
As it happens I’m putting the finishing touches on the iconography for our new religion (the one we invented over Christmas), so perhaps the group will take that opportunity to delve back into these issues. God knows I could talk about that stuff all day, but then it’d just be me and Pastor Pistle.
I fixed the blockquote problem in your comment, but the thing you were citing wasn’t there at all. But I know what you meant, the paragraph about the Babylonian astronomers.
Books about feminist theory? I’ll give it some thought.
