In the first case, Religion USES Ritual process, it is not ritual process[snip]
and in the second one, I don't know where you get these primitives. I
never met one like that and they certainly weren't priests.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 2:48 PM Subject: [Futurework] Why not God for all?
[snip] Chimpanzees go in for a thing called a rain
dance. Usually the adult males perform it: they jump up and down, they shout, tghey pull branches off trees, they go berserk. Nobody really knows what the function is.
There is one anecdote about a rain dance that really fascinates me. A group is going through the forest and they come to a waterfall, and the alpha male, and he only, proceeds to perform a rain dance. He splashes, he shouts, he throws rocks -- it;s a big deal. What I think is going on is that he is recruiting a force of nature to strengthen his own personal position, increasing his own prestige by allying himself with something "out there". Isn't that what priests do?
[snip]
I'm sorry but I am confused: Did the PreColumbians *not* sacrifice many young persons and captives on their pyramid alters? Or, are you arguing that what *we* un-understyanding benighted fools (AKA "middle-class Westerners") call "sacrificing young persons and captives on pyramid alters" is really something very different? Maybe those who we call the "victims" were not victims at all but were rather enjoying a gourmet meal together with the persons we call the "priests", at a Mescalin 3-star restaurant? And they did not die, but came back the next day to savor another gourmet meal there? Please provide me the background information so I can see how what I now take to be murders are really happy meals!
I know that the only thing that can possibly cause a person to have mistaken ideas is to study THe Great Books of The Great Dead Western Males. Elsewise there is only "the universal peaceable kingdom". Westeern medicine created cancer. Right? (I have argued that this is indeed in an infelicitous way true, since persons who do not know about cellular biology cannot encounter a cancer cell no matter what they encounter in life, including what we would call "cancer cells").
Just where did we get our false ideas about "primitives" from? From our (no, Ray, not "your" -- I am talking about white Europeans here...) parents and teachers? And they were wrong? Well, maybe they were both wrong and right. Maybe the attribution of "primitive" qualities to primitives was not always entirely accurate (maybe the truth is that the pyramid victims were vivisected, but they were given an opiate to make them enjoy it anyway...). Naybe we believe these things because the parents and teachers who taught us about them themselves instantiate them so much as to make us believers theough experience.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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