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Karl's Fiction Writing Site
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| Between Science and Mystery |
Posted by Karl on Wednesday May 10, @11:58AM
from the dept.
Chet Raymo has a very interesting site called Science Musings. His ideas make good collateral reading to the stuff I talk about here. For instance, his recent posting When God is gone everything is holy. In it, he says:
Once we reject the absolute truth of one thing, whatever it might be -- God, a holy book, a law of nature -- then everything, even the smallest element of reality -- an insect, a leaf, a grain of sand -- becomes infinitely interesting.
Despite how it sounds, Raymo's site is relentlessly secular, just as mine is. What he's saying is that religion does not have an exclusive lock on the experience of Grace. It takes a lot of work to jettison the language and presuppositions of orthodox religion while keeping the genuine experience behind it alive. And you get no respect, from either side, for trying. But Raymo is an example of the kind of life that's possible if you persevere.
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Re: Between Science and Mystery
by Jose on Thursday May 25, @01:23PM
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We need to campaign to ressurect the word "dogma" from its moribund state. Religion is being discussed more and more nowadays. We'd all benefit if we could more readily make a distinction between religious dogma (don't eat meat this friday) from the mystical aspects of a religion. Which is what I imagine you're referring to here.
I don't think its really that hard to seperate the two. In fact I would argue that religious dogma and religious experience are less interconnected than you might think.
The absolute master of this is Attenborough. Watching one of his nature docs gets the circuits labelled "Religion" humming without pressing the god button.
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Re: Between Science and Mystery
by Matt Arnold on Friday June 23, @10:46AM
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I read the linked page. This is "relentlessly secular"? I'll take your word for it that this isn't assembled by a text-randomizing computer program, or something similar to Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax. If Raymo is offering informational content, it must be something I am ill-prepared to interpret. I have a memetic allergy to the words "beyond logic" when applied to dread essences and other entities. It implies exempting one's answers from accountability to reason, argument, evidence and observation.
I do recognize the ideas embodied in the specific paragraph you quoted.
I myself have grappled with attempts to cope with and redirect the religious impulse in our culture, with various rational organizations and philosophies providing a secular alternative to church. These included the Fellowship of Reason in Atlanta, the Universists, and the Church of Virus. The North Texas Church of Freethought is another such institution, although I didn't participate in that one.
In retrospect, I realize that in essence, we were trying to distract and confuse religious people with religious-sounding terminology while utterly rejecting the psychological effects they were looking for. Our efforts failed because we didn't actually share the religious impulse, we just wanted to re-channel it. For all practical purposes, this gets it running on a tiny and pathetic treadmill where it can't hurt anybody and eventually atrophies. Religion is a wild, free-range parasitic meme that does not seem to survive under tamed conditions.
Many vapid new-agers would come and go in the membership, only long enough to realize -- for all our talk of the mystery of the cosmos, the infinite interestingness of every insect, leaf, and grain of sand -- we were holding our noses and barely tolerating their supernatural woo-woo. Those who don't want to tame their religious impulse don't bother joining such institutions.
So the institutions merely self-selected for groups of healthy atheists, agnostics, sort-of-deists, and sort-of-pantheists, trying to devise a cure for a global memetic parasite that none of them have. We couldn't relate to it from the inside, so we couldn't really affect it or speak to it. We got bored of this and drifted off. I still haven't thought of a solution to this problem.
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Re: Between Science and Mystery
by Karl on Thursday July 13, @10:08AM
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Maybe another example would be helpful. Try this one.
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Re: Between Science and Mystery
by state on Wednesday August 02, @07:32PM
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It's really rather simple, folks. Everything is a matter of formalism, a factor that affects many without their awareness of it. Hence, morals are illusory, as they are a function of absolute truth, which - given that they apply to empirical circumstances - are falacious.
Or, let's put it another way: Nothing in the universe we experience can be considered absolutely so. If we absolve/dispell ego, there's no need to claim such in any instance. (One could carry this on to analytical truths, even.)
Bluntly, claims such as Raymo's seem to be a way of 1) trying to convince oneself to relinquish absolutism, without any logical reason (and actually Zen implicity parallels my statement above), and 2) trying to convince others, similarly.
(note: I feel I've been more eloquent in other instances, which may be a sign that posting to this may be futile....or maybe this site has some paranormal effect I'm perceiving that indicates my thinking is bullshit - though, if either, I'm thinking it's the former.)
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Re: Between Science and Mystery
by Karl on Saturday August 19, @07:46AM
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Sadly, I'm not trying to be deeply technical here. I'm just saying the world is a very cool place, and we tend to build blinkers for ourselves so that we cease to see it. That's my reading of what Raymo is saying too. I have a three year old daughter, and she's amazed and thrilled by just being.
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