Steve said to Platt: Faith has many meanings that are easy to conflate, but faith in this context means belief that is not based on evidence. If there is no evidence that could ever be viewed as inconsistent with a belief, then that belief is held on faith.
dmb says:Right. Faith, as it's defined in Pirsig's complaint, is a willingness to believe falsehoods or, as Mark Twain put it, faith is believing what you know ain't so. To put it more kindly, faith-based beliefs are those we accept without evidence or even when the evidence says otherwise. Naturally, the mainstream religions ask people to accept the most miraculous claims on this basis; the virgin birth, the resurrection and such. But Quality isn't like that. It's impossible to not believe in quality. You know it from it experience and requires no faith at all. Science, obviously, is based on what is empirically verifiable and is open to change based on empirical evidence. Now, if you use the term "faith" to refer to a religion generally or to a religious person generally, that would be a different topic. Zen, for example, is a non-theistic religion that doesn't require faith. It is empirically based very much like the philosophical mysticism of the MOQ. So if you get rid of the theistic elements and the other faith-based beliefs, then the MOQ gives us a picture where religion and science are both based in empirical reality. But it seems to me that this sort of debate is perhaps best illuminated by appreciating the historical situation. I mean, we're all in this context together whether we realize it or not. The clash between faith and science pre-dates Darwin and its not just a matter of what you and I believe. The death of God is an historical event that has already come and gone. There are reactionary forces that would very much like to turn the clock back and undo this historical development but reactionaries almost never determine the future. I think the MOQ goes a long way toward explaining the SOM was and is a potent political tool against faith-based traditions and that this was a moral battle but it also explains how amoral scientific objectivity goes too far and provokes the various reactionary movements such as fascism and fundamentalism. SOM and theism are at odds with each other in a seemingly irreconcilable way but the MOQ is at odds with both of them. It is scientific without being reductionistic or materialistic or amoral and it is religious without being theistic or faith-based. I also like the way Joseph Campbell explains this same clash. In the final section of his "Hero With a Thousand Faces", a section called "The Hero Today", he says, "the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research, has so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra; 'Dead are all the gods'. ...It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported. The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. Its ideals are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, butt of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. Isolated societies, dream-bounded within a mythologically charged horizon, no longer exist except as areas to be exploited. And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality and art is in full decay. ...The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two. ..The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul." [I think Pirsig's work brings that light] "Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning vack, or away, from what has been accomplished by the modern revolutions; for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant - or rather (phrasing the same principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these conditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading and even pernicious. The community today is the planet, not the bounded nations; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to co-ordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situations. Its parody-rituals of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numerous saints of this anti-cult - namely the patriots whose ubiquitous photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons - are precisely the local threshold guardians whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass. Nor can the great world religions, as at present understood, meet the requirement. For they have become associated with the causes of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-congratulation. (Even Buddhism has lately suffered this degradations, in reaction to the lessons of the West.) The universal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious organizations into such a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual, position that religious pantomime is hardly more today that a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning. whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week. Such a monkey-holiness is not what the functioning world requires; rather, a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so that through every detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and effective in all of us may be somehow make known to consciousness." "And this is not a work that consciousness itself can achieve. Consciousness can no more invent, or even predict, an effective symbol than foretell or control tonight's dream. The whole thing is being worked out on another level, through what is bound to be a long and very frighten ing process, not only in the depths of every living psyche in the modern world, but also on the titanic battlefields into which the whole planet has lately been converted. [This was written in 1949.] But, ...it is necessary for men to understand, and be able to see, that through various symbols the same redemption is revealed. 'Truth is one,' we read in the Vedas; 'the sages call it by many names'. ...Today all of these mysteries have lost their force; their symbols no longer interest our psych. The notion of a cosmic law, which all existence serves and to which man himself must bend, has long since passed through the preliminary mystical stages represented in the old astrology, and is now simply accepted in mechanical terms as a matter of course. ...Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. ...The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. 'Live', Nietzsche says, 'as though the day were here.' It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse." Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/howitworks?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_hm_justgotbetter_howitworks_022009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
