Steve,
Morning.
Steve:
> You seem to be arguing for Stephen Jay Gould's notion of
> "non-overlapping magisteria" or NOMA.
mel:
I am a fan of Gould, but maybe unfairly, I regard his NOMA
as a respectful-condescension designed to sidestep the
science vs religion debate. His motive is pure, but ...
Steve:
> What I couldn't figure out from
> your post is what these two different projects are. It was clear that
> you see science as our best attempt at honest inquiry, but what is it
> that you see religion as doing or supposed to be doing?
mel:
It seems to me that persons engaging in either religion or science
are often unclear themselves about what they are trying to do.
Their motives are often mixed. It was not until I began reading Pirsig,
ZMM in 74-75 and Lila a decade or so later, that in the MoQ I found a
new light to shine on this Gordion knot. It illuminated in the tangle
the four colors of the different strands that make it up and it became
clear to me why the black&white SOM version of such problems are
less easy to see the complexity of.
Science is very good at describing the way the universe close-at-hand
looks and works. The cleaving insights of reductionist techniques are
marvelously strong and yield such beautiful pieces to look at, and such
wonderful descriptions to consider.
There is a movement afoot in science to begin looking at the universe in
a constructivst sense. The feeling is that the cost-benefit of further
reduction
is largely a diminishing return. But the studies of fractals, complexity,
and
emergence seem to indicate patterns of connection that we ill understand
and that may provide a different order of comprehension of the universe.
Cool. (This individual pink-tongued monkey likes to watch really big brains
work out the hard problems and tell us what they mean.)
However, religion, as I said before is a bit less clear about it's mission
and methods--writ large. Within the realm of religion is a tangle of all
four levels of reality that tumble, knotted up, all over themselves.
Okay, this is going to be a little wierd, bear with me. Years ago I heard
someone repeat that JSBach compositions look like someone took a
stencil of a pattern of notes and simply moved it up and down the scale.
It accounts for the lovely-to-some tedious-to-others repetative construction
of his works. Now, in religions there is always the seeming similarities
of themes that are a combination of physical-bio-soc-intellectual that
cross and echo in repetition within, among, and between faiths. It has
about it the appearance of a Back score, where someone began to turn the
stencil every-which-way and scale be damned--in four colors of ink.
It would leave a competent musician twitching on the floor in a multi-
puddle seizure and lead to holy war... That's my religion set-up, the
background if you will. Getting back to the question you asked:
[W]hat [do] you see religion as doing or supposed to be doing?
First, I'm going to take apart the question in a way you did not intend
to show a commonality of assumption that is implicit. Then I will
reform the question and use it to poke around at the religious impulse.
The question as it is structured above has an implication of 'utility'
that is so very modern western in tenor. The implication is that
religion has a use. (I used the same formulation in my earlier post.)
It takes religion as a tool-for-a-purpose. It implies that religion has
limits, benefits, advantages, disadvantages, proper-improper uses.
That is a reult of the ordered view we have of the universe, now, as
children of the Greek ascendancy in the regular, logical patterns of
thought, and of the back-flow of the American tendency to use what
works to get the job done.
None of the traditional religions were born in this regime of thought.
None were restricted to this pattern of use. There is a dynamism in
the language, allegory, metaphore, and application of life onto faith
or faith into life, that beggars all limitations. Common definitions fail.
Common terminologies twist and deform into their antitheses. And
each culture that takes a faith bends it in forms all its own, as does
each generation.
Wrestling with the subject of religion more closely resembles the
sculptures of Laocoön wrestling serpents than of Archimedes with
his careful application of the lever.
Cleaving away the physical, bio, social, for now, and focusing on
the practice we refer to as "spiritual," we need to simplify for an
intellectual appreciation.
So, to reform the question. The ultimate commonality of religion is
that each individual person is the nexus of an uncreated vector back
to { }. This is not a null set, but rather a variable unknown to
the individual and only generally set by the traditions' origins.
Maybe it is the manifesting, the origin, the void, emptiness, grace,
god of various description, transcendance, a simple focus beyond
the skin...the name is unimportant.
The reformed question: What does the individual without limit?
It is a very dense framework of a question that unfolds iteratively
through all of one's life. An easier question is a sub-question of
this form: Where does the individual "go" to find meaning?
or maybe in MoQ terms it might rhyme with:
Where does the individual find the Dynamic?
Returning to the physical, bio, social portions of religion; each
is filled with endless tools-of-analogy for the individual to use to
reproduce what has worked for earlier generations in the history
of a tradition. And they are nested so very deep they can be all
but impossible to untangle, but when the "right shaped key" turns
in the "correct lock," the experience for the practitioner can be of
the quality of the miraculous, endlessly awesome.
But it is a personal experience and numerically rare.
Invoking Sturgeon's law and casting it exponentially, in terms
of the "spiritual core" 90% of religious folks leave the whole
box of religion on a shelf to get dusty, and when they do open it
they spend 90% of their time on the non-core phys,bio,soc portions
of it instead--it's easier.
To delimit it diffferently and hopefully illustrate the divergence
of the two:
If the religious practitioner is sitting, and the patterns of meaningful
habit "still the conventional world-perception," and the habitual divisions
fall and open emptiness or meaningfullness arises.
That is a kind of jumble of words that sort of points towards where
a person is in genuine, core spiritual function of religiousness.
It is in no way dependent upon what functions science serves and
it neither gains from science, nor dimishes it, nor informs it, nor is
itself informed. or
Using "...nexus of an uncreated vector back to { }..." as a
description of religion. Remember a vector is a line of infinite length
but it has only the dimension of length (2D), it has no third dimension.
In the geometry of our universe the religious experience may be infinitely
deep in the way of the vector's length, but on the level of merely a single
conceptual plane, the 359.9(infinity) degrees the vector has no possible
intersection or it all but does not exist. In other dimension and planes it
similarly does not exist, but it is still a figure of infinite depth.
For the moment I'm done poking at the religious impulse.
(Haven't even needed a God to do this, so far...)
Steve:
It seems to me
> that if there are truths to be known whether they are about human
> flourishing or the orbits of planets, then we can try to know them. Why
> do we need religion if we have in hand an MOQ idea of science as the
> study of stable patterns of value? We have sciences that studies
> inorganic patterns (physics and chemistry), sciences that study
> biological patterns (biology and zoology), sciences that study social
> patterns (sociology and psychology), and sciences that study
> intellectual patterns (mathematics and linguistics). What would we need
> religion for? Oh, yeah, I left out Dynamic Quality! Is that what
> religion is supposed to be about? Maybe, but it's supposed to be, but
> is it? Is it really????
mel:
Why do we need religion? A question as deep as the infinite vector.
All of these things you mention are cut pieces of the wonderous tiffany
construct of the growing inquiry of science. A beautiful window indeed.
When religion tried to swell itself into a third dimension, it quickly
becomes prey to a sort of static errancy. Humans, being more than
2D, themselves may need a certain buttressing or guy-wire support
to find their particular vector, but wholesale domination of self-created
social structures of religionists origins as they try to dominate other
social structures is a negotiated growth of rival structures and at best
it is enriching when structures augment and decorate one another,
but abject domination is war, too often.
Social domination of the intellectual we know is immoral.
Steve:
> Why can't science study the benefits of different uses of attention
> (meditation, prayer, affirmations) on human well being?
mel:
It can. But just like science can study the benefits of bicycling
on human well being. For you to benefit, you have to get on,
learn to ride, and that is a whole diferent experience.
(But a bicycle agnostic, like myself, may forego the bike
experience and swim laps instead, or run...aside from
my getting snarky with a bicyclist who might try to run me
over I wish him or her well. Of course if they run over me
in the pool, I will insist on an explanation, because there's
got to be a great story there.)
Steve:
> If morality is concerned with human flourishing, why can't
> science study which cultures are successful or unsuccessful
> in achieving that goal? Why do we have to think of morality
> and spirituality as out of bounds to rational inquiry? If there
> is a purpose for religion in society in promoting human
> well-being as a social pattern, then it seems to me that
> science can study that and some day say what that purpose
> is and why it is or is not important.
mel:
The best tack for me to take on this question is by analogy.
In acquaculture, there are the notions of turbidity and
turbulence. Fish that hunt by sight need clear water, but
they are fine with generally turbulent flow. Fish that hunt
by scent have little need of clear water, they are fine in very
muddy conditions, however high turbulence won't allow them
to easily find the origin of a scent. Morality is a function that
both reduces turbidity (increases clarity) socially, and soothes
the turbulence (increases peace) personally and lets us focus
more on what we do rather than what is done to us.
(One is freedom the other liberty.)
The difficult search for the infinite vector is a delicate matter
so religious traditions seek a certain clarity and peace or
they become wildly pathological (cultural Jihad instead of the
individual's personal Jihad against his coarser nature).
Any social or intellectual activity requires some continuity
some lack of disruptive disorder...
Morality isn't inherently only a religious function. Ordered
patterns of value serve all social structures, but it's easier
to tell the child 'cause God's watching or Santa is making his
list' than stunning a child with a description like this.
Sorry to run on like this, but once I got the firehose
unrolled I figured why not just turn it on full...
Thanks for running me through the shutes.
thanks--mel
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