I think it’s even more complicated than that: I think it’s even possible to have the trait, but still to think that any particular expression of it is, in the scientific mode, hogwash.
Cite: the inside of my own head. Though I have heard what seems to me similar things from some other people, including some Pratchett.
I think i mentioned my friend who is a Lubuvitcher (a weird Orthodox strain of Judaism). He was a convert to that sect, he grew up a somewhat ordinary conservative Jew. He had a close relative who converted to Catholicism and became a nun, and another close relative who became a militant atheist.
So i think i agree with your judgement. And i think his family tended towards a very high degree of religiosity.
I’m not sure we meant quite the same thing. I mean that it’s possible to have the — the closest way I can say it is emotional connection, though I’m not sure that’s quite right — while thinking, not just that a particular expression of it is scientifically hogwash, but that all the expressions of it are scientifically hogwash.
Like Pratchett talking about needing to believe the big lies, in Hogfather.
Having the religious trait but switching which expression of it you insist is true does happen. But I don’t think it’s the same thing.
ETA: I suspect this is getting rather off topic. I don’t know whether anybody wants to get into it further; if so, tell me and I’ll start a linked topic, or you could do so.
I love the way you think. Do elaborate.
Continuing the discussion from They are trying it again- Ten Commandments:
@ParallelLines I started a linked topic, moving it to MPIS because I don’t really see a debate in it, and it wound up starting with just the post I was quoting. So I tried to edit to add text and typed quite a bit, which I hope I have saved, and got an error message about not being allowed to access something — I’m sorry, I forget the exact wording.
Maybe you can fix it?
I’ll try; but I’m not sure how coherent the attempt will be, because to some extent I’m going to be trying to put into words something that comes, or feels like it comes, from a part of the mind that doesn’t use words.
I mean, it’s all me. There aren’t two people in here, one of them wordless and operating on some entirely different logic than the other; any more than my being two bodies because my heart and stomach don’t do the same thing. But it feels like there’s part of me that uses words (and is talking all the time, and tends to take over, or to rationalize that it’s in charge though it may not be); and a part that may use words but doesn’t really think in them, but thinks in some other fashion entirely. They’re in communication. Again, it’s all me. But I call them the front and the back of my head.
And it’s the back of my head that understands sacred; that understands holy. And that says these things are massively important. The front of my head says “sacredness and holy places don’t make any scientific sense at all.” And the back of my head says “of course not, they’re in a different mode.” And the whole of me says that both modes matter; and matter crucially. But they need to be used differently.
Does that make any sense to you at all?
@ParallelLines again — I went back and tried again and this time got told I’d missed the edit window. So I discarded the edit, opened a reply window, and pasted the text in (I had succeeded in saving it.) And that worked, so there isn’t really anything to fix. But if you could move relevant posts over that would be great.
Thanks.
It sure does. It makes an interesting contrast with how I handle a similar setup. For me, the dimensions are inner and outer. A point in the center of my chest feels more inward than the rest of me. Like you, the whole of me says that both modes matter. Unlike you, I don’t manage to maintain a boundary between them. I was once inspired to write a poem that explains why. It isn’t the best poem I’ve written, but it is the most personally meaningful to me. The title is “Sudden feeling.”
This divine love
reaching out, taking me in
so bright
it dissolves all the boundaries
It makes perfect sense to me. There are things that simply can’t be explained rationally. That’s why we have emotions.
To me, “religion” (as opposed to “faith”) is an attempt to put those things in a nice, tidy package we can wrap our brains around. The result is flawed, of course, but we’re putting our puny brains against the universe. What can we expect.
By posting that encouragement to go ahead, I didn’t mean “Please continue hijacking this thread,” though it was taken that way. I meant “Please start the new thread now.”
Wow. I’m glad that made sense to somebody; I was afraid it wouldn’t.
I think a lot of the problems come when people think that nice tidy package is The Truth. It’s often a truth, in religious mode if not in scientific; but it’s not The Truth. The universe doesn’t fit inside a human mind. But we seem to be so constructed that we keep trying to comprehend it; which can indeed lead to finding out lots of useful fascinating stuff, but carries the danger of starting to think we’ve succeeded.
And another problem is that often when people think they’ve found The Truth, they stop looking. And in the process, stop being able to sense the genuinely sacred; or at least, fail to see any form of it that doesn’t fit in their particular tidy package.
But we do in some sense need the packages, to fit what we can into our individual selves.
-– I’m not sure whether I’m getting to tired to work on this, or whether I can only work on it when I’m tired.
I didn’t take it that way, I did start the new thread. I just ran into problems with it. I should probably have dm’d instead of asking for help in the originating thread; apologies.
Not at all; you started the thread just fine as far as I could see. It was One of Those Who Sit in Judgment who misconstrued my encouragement to you.
Science is not about feelings or religion or metaphysics or anything like that. Has it ever been?
Both you and @Johanna are fine, I thought it was a neat topic and deserved it’s own thread. No one was yelled at, and I removed the moderation as part of the voluntary split.
– He who Lies In Bed in Judgement from with His Tablet
The key thing about thorny locust’s idea that attracted me is the dissatisfaction with any concrete expression of the spiritual. This is akin to my distrust of all theology. On reflection, I’m just continuing thoughts from millennia ago: The tao that can be spoken is not the tao.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. If you mean that the validity of a scientific result isn’t affected by how the scientist feels about it or what if any religion they practice, then sure. (The design of the study, and whether it gets published, might be; but they shouldn’t be.)
There’s a good deal of science being currently done about feelings; and I don’t think all cultures have separated them. But I meant that they’re two different types of things; both important.
And the name of God isn’t spoken because putting any human name on God would be limiting and inaccurate.
Though that’s one of the gods I don’t believe in. Whether there was a Moses, and something spoke to him, I don’t know. But if so, I think the translation into Human didn’t come out right. Maybe it can’t come out right.
What I find deep within my heart cannot be shared to anyone as it’s intensely private. The idea of not only transmitting it to the public but building this into a social-political structure is completely untenable. I don’t think I could or should involve anyone else in it. I feel like it’s nobody else’s business. All I know is that deep in the deepest part of me is something that keeps me going no matter what. Reliable like nothing else. I respect that. The rest of me is a hot mess, but that innermost bit is all right.
I receive the email summary, so I am usually late to the discussion and out of sync it with it. The topic caught my eye becauseI just preached on John 20:19-31 (the Doubting Thomas reading) and explored (briefly - we’re Episcopalians with a lot of prayers to say) faith vs. facts. Excerpts below.
Many years ago, the hospital lab I was working in had its three-year inspection, including a review of the operations manual for each section of the lab. One of the inspectors wanted to know where our procedure for writing procedures was. There was some eye-rolling because we had a self-explanatory template for writing procedures, so a procedure for writing procedures was not needed. That moment of defining a definition recalled conversations I have had with hard-core rationalists who claim that the only things that are true are what we can quantify. So, for example, I can measure out a pound of ground beef to make chili. How do I know it’s a pound? The scale I use tells me so. How do I know the scale is accurate? I use a standard weight to calibrate it. Who made that standard? How did they ensure that it was exactly one pound? You see where this is going, that we can go crazy trying to find the source of certainty. The uncomfortable truth is that even science and rational thought are based on faith, and we actually rely on faith to claim that the world is as we perceive it to be. This leads someone to declare “This is one pound, and all scales will use this as the definition of one pound.” And because we do this, it is hard to change our perception of the world and the truths we find in it. Just when we think we have a firm grasp on the truth, God challenges our spiritual definitions and the world challenges our factual ones.
This morning’s gospel reading brings us to that eternal dance between faith and fact, the spiritual and the physical world, one that has been a part of my life for a while now. Jesus defines faith for us as what we have not seen, yet believe is true. The important word here is “believe,” because in terms of our faith that Jesus rose from the dead, we have not seen or measured it. Thomas is stuck in rational thought and he needs to see proof before he accepts the truth that Jesus appearing in the room is not just some mass hallucination. He gets to touch Jesus, to see with his own eyes the wounds that he saw Jesus endure on the cross, and that satisfies him. But what about us? We don’t have the benefit of using our senses to assure ourselves that Jesus really was resurrected from the dead the way Thomas did. Thomas stands for us in this passage, asking what we ask naturally in our rational, technological, scientific time. Thomas struggles with what he just knows is impossible, falling into the hole of wanting to explain how this resurrection happened
…
We’ve established the fact of [the words that are] written in scripture, but what about looking at it through faith, as John asks us to. What does this passage mean to you? How does it deepen your faith in Jesus and in God? Facts and faith can and do co-exist, and they only fly apart when we see them as antagonistic or mutually exclusive. Does it matter how we define the Resurrection, and then define the faith that justifies that definition? Or does it matter more that our faith gives us hope and a way to find peace in a broken community or nation? Or hope in the face of death? Where the facts of the world fail us, hope from faith in the resurrection sustains us. This perspective gives us the ability to say no to the power struggle of either/or and find room for both/and. We are Thomas, holding together what seems like a contradiction between the fact of Jesus’ death on the cross and faith in his resurrection. We understand both death and resurrection more deeply while holding them together in tension than letting them fly apart. Whether it is a pound or a resurrection, we know what they are to us through faith, and faith cannot be measured.
I think it’s even larger than that. “Spirituality” is a different construct than “religion”, which demands “faith.” The world is amazing and the universe far more so, partly because they are inconceivably large. We are individually very small. Our senses are inadequate to process the world. For virtually all of human existence, our combined efforts produced no good explanations of anything and everything we encountered in our day-to-day lives. How could anyone not conclude that something larger, more powerful, more understanding existed something close but just beyond?
I differentiate “religion” from “spirituality”. Religion is belief codified and used to contain and control, to identify and separate them and us, and to establish hierarchies of virtue and authority. Not coincidentally, what we think of today as organized religion is highly correlated with the rise of urban areas, which required a type of order not necessary in smaller bands of humans.
Scientists, from everything I’ve read about them, are closely attuned to the largeness and scales of existence. Individually, they make small contributions to the explanations that once were lacking. The major difference between science and religion becomes the way that science is collective and consensus, not in the least faith-based. Every person with the appropriate knowledge is welcome, even encouraged, to test that knowledge and confirm it, contradict it, or tweak it. And then every person - of every culture, of every belief, of every political stance, and of every religion - is encouraged to examine any changes. Science is now like a vast ocean. The surface is a froth of stormy contention about details, but underneath is a gigantic mostly stable base of consensus built over centuries and universally agreed to. There are no schisms in science, no new churches, no excommunications or jihads. Every aspect is public, albeit subject to the frailty of individual practitioners.
Culture moves slowly. Despite the near-universal use of science and technology - we’re doing this on the internet, after all - science deals with truths but not answers. “Why” is not normally a science question, except to to be answered “this happened and then that happened and seemed to follow some rules we’re identified.” That’s more like a food pill than a meal; nutritious perhaps but not satisfying.
Stephen Jay Gould called science and religion “different magisteria.” My tweak would be that science and spirituality are different magisteria. Organized religion is basically no different than traffic laws, and should be equally subservient to the real world.