10.08.2007

Towards The Ineffable

Tracking down that religious feeling... in the brains of nuns (via KurzweilAI.net) and in the morals of culture.

After thousands of years the clearest thing we might be able to say about the sacred is that it just defies expression. And yet mankind is still haunted by the presence of the divine, the transcendent, the mystical. As Epicurus, an ancient Greek atomist, perhaps jokingly put it, the clearest proof in the existence of gods is that every culture has them. Though he also went on to suggest that as the gods are "immortal and blessed," their lives were too excellent to be bothered by such matters as keeping the cosmos spinning or being angry if humans did not perform the appropriate sacrifices.
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I frequently think about that "everybody believes it, so it must be true" theory of god, and it seems to me that it ignores the fact that most of the ideas we have about god come from times when little was understood about the forces of nature. True, now that we understand more about energy in the universe, the desire to believe in something greater than ourselves is still incredibly strong, but that may be for two reasons: one, despite what we know, what we DON'T know still befuddles us (and one thing we don't know is, Where did it all begin?); and, two, the idea of nothing beyond this short life is pretty fucking scary to most people.

I'm always sorry that Buddhism doesn't get the publicity and have the influence that other religions get and have, since its lack of theology is a strong alternative to the "solutions" of theistic religions.

October 9, 2007 at 9:43 AM
Tait McKenzie said...

I think that while deities may have helped express inexplicable forces of nature the myths of many of the oldest religions also relate their gods to more social forces. For instance the Assyrian victory of Marduk over Tiamat may have represented the rise of powerful city-states, or was a story to 'justify' the social customs rather than the need to believe in origins or transcendence. Perhaps one of the reasons for the continuation of deities is that their functions change over time to more accurately reflect a given cultural situation. Where Yahweh might have originally been a sky or thunder-god, his increasing sovereignty over and involvement in the lives of the Jews may have reflected their need to articulate themselves as a specific, chosen, people. Of course it's always up for interpretation

Modern religion is interesting because many of the gods and accompanying rituals may have become too codified to continue to evolve and remain accurate expressions of reality. Science and technology started to become much more articulate stories, up to the point when they too stop being able to express reality clearly. The law of gravity makes rational sense, the ambiguity of atomic structures much less so. I think in light of this we've turned back to telling stories, not to the static religions, but to the mass media of movies and pop culture, where the same kinds of archetypal themes and questions occur. And most recently we have begun relying on our own power to tell stories and give answers, attested to by the proliferation of voices on the internet, so that there are no longer one set of gods to order a culture, but multivalence of interpretations, an infinity of personal gods and totems.

October 9, 2007 at 7:58 PM

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