Subject: Re: music as a process of religion
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Sat Jan 08 2000 - 20:39:53 EST
<< It seems pretty reasonable to me. Put a large group of people together
to form an isolated and primitive society, and they will eventually
develop some sort of religion/mythology. Put one person in isolation,
(s)he will not.
I'm sure I could go on for quite some paragraphs listing the reasons
why. The most blatant is that religions/mythology do not spring up in
individuals. They evolve over generations. The second most obvious (to
me, anyway) is that language must exist (which I guess you could argue,
but I won't go into it in this email) in order to develop
religion/mythology and, like religion/mythology, language doesn't spring
up in the mind of individuals, it evolves over generations. -- robbie>>
I think you're creating a fiction here. It is true that our only knowledge
of religions is in societal contexts. No argument there. But we have no
knowledge of what individuals would "come up with on their own" apart from a
societal context. So your comments about an individual "not being able to
come up with religion on their own" lack support and credibility. We simply
have no way of knowing. If a person lived apart from all society, we would
never hear of them, would we? If a person had lived so separate from
society, in fact, that he or she did not develop speech, on what rational,
factual basis can we assert "anything" about what they "would think"?
It seems more reasonable to go with the evidence we have (societal -- which
keeps coming up with religions) rather than evidence we're inventing (the
imaginary individual that we have no evidence of).
<>
Nope, when I'm nasty to people I am directly so. I've told people on this
list to "fuck off," quite directly. I do have tendencies toward sarcasm,
however, and that can come across as hostility.
I was just being a smart ass :)
<<That passage that you included in your message was not meant to account
for the existence of religion in the individual. It was meant to
account for the existence of religion in society. Note the use of the
words "we" and "our." I was referring to the minds of many individuals
forming a collective, as the minds of people in large groups tend to do.>>
Are you saying that no individual would ever try to account for their own
deaths or for the existence of the big old bad world unless he or she had
societal pressures directing them to do so? Why should I believe this?
<<Religion/mythology first reared its head countless ages before the
Scientific Method did. Were this not so, religion/mythology wouldn't
have so readily established itself.>>
I think a lack of experience and reading is working against you here. The
guy who created "formal logic" (Aristotle) did so within a very specific
cosmology and theology (read his Metaphysics). The Scientific Method was
only capable of being developed because of the intellectual rigor of Monks
ranging from St. Augustine to William of Occam, to Anslem...the list goes on.
Many of these guys had more in common intellectually with people like Darwin
than they do with people like Falwell. But you have to read them to
understand that.
<<I'm not arguing that irrational belief is unnatural, certainly not
supernatural. I'm arguing that it is unnecessary and irrational.
Being, as you yourself called me, an antisupernaturalist, I would be
uncomfortable calling ANYTHING possible unnatural and certainly never
supernatural. Massive bodies repelling each other rather than
attracting each other would be unnatural; people drinking urine or
raping goats or murdering each other or believing silly superstitions
are not unnatural. I may call them unnecessary, or even damaging in one
way or another, but unnatural isn't a term I like to throw around
casually when speaking in huge generalizations.>>
It seemed like a point in your argument, but I may have missed you on this
point..thanks for the clarification. But why is "necessary" a "necessary"
trait? On what grounds do you determine what is "necessary" and what is not?
<>
I think you're having trouble with the whole concept of nature. If nothing
but nature exists, why is a nurturing mother on any different grounds than a
killing one?
<<You didn't include a smiley this time, pal. And now you're getting
nasty.>>
Nope, it was a reasonable conclusion based upon my reading of your text, and
its a conclusion I still hold to. "Not understanding" is not a terrible
thing...I've been guilty of it myself and still am about a great many things.
<< I understand my philosophy perfectly, I'll have you know, and I
also understand religion. I'm simply bright enough to notice that
spirtual beliefs, as a rule, never have any sort of proof whatsoever.
If there is no evidence that something it exists, I will not be
convinced that it does. The divinity of Jesus Christ, the existence of
Zeus, the existence of Yojo, the existence of Rah, and the existence of
Zippy the Monkey Goddess (that I just made up) are all provable to the
exact same degree; that is, not at all. Believing in one or believing
in the next is entirely arbitrary, so I remove myself from the silliness
entirely.
How, please tell me, is that not thoroughly rational?>>
1. Pick up an introductory philosophy textbooks and look for descriptions of
the problems with empiricism as a philosophy.
2. I'd never ask anyone to believe in God without direct personal experience
of their own. That would be a horrible faith to have.
<< And if you claim to have no experience with rational atheists, you are
either a fool, a liar, or possesing a painfully limited world view.>>
In your last comment you are attributing to the individual what I meant to
attribute to the philosophy. But I'm probably as much to blame for that as
you. What I meant to say is that I've never met arguments presented by
atheists against the existence of God that were thoroughly rational. They're
usually self-contradictory. Freud was the worst.
<<As I alluded to earlier in this email, the development of the Scientific
Method has gradually taken the necessity of religion away from it.
Faith (which is imperative to EVERY religion and theological belief) is
antithetical to logic by its very definition. Logical Faith is an
oxymoron. Faith is HIGHLY discouraged in scientific circles and
religious belief, then, is all but ruled out.>>
You need to read more. Read Hume. Read Kant. I don't think you really know
what logic is. You're mistaking premises for the methods we use to process
the premises from which we work. Logic can't tell us anything. We tell it
first, and it tells us from there. The premises are always supplied by faith.
Think about how much faith you're working on here. You are assuming language
is adequate to process these issues. You're assuming the English language,
specifically, is adequate. You're assuming your sensory perceptions -- the
ones that you're relying on to read my post and respond -- aren't fooling
you.
You can't logically "prove" any of these things. You have to assume them a
priori. There is no thought system, no matter how rigorous, that does not
proceed on some a priori beliefs. So there is no system of thought that does
not rely on some degree of, gasp, faith.
<<Thoroughly rational Atheists? How about Albert Einstein? Stephen
Hawking? James Watson? Francis Crick? Hell, Isaac Asimov? Want me to
continue?
One needn't call themself an Atheist to be one. One may even refer to
or invoke the name of god (Einstein's oft-quoted "God is not malicious,"
"God does not play dice" soundbytes). All one needs to do in order to
be an Atheist is live life without a belief in the literal existance of
an all-powerful, personal god, or some other such supernatural deity.>>
What does that mean?
But again, despite my poor use of language, the real referent of my comments
was not the person but their reasoning **on this particular point.**
<<And anyone who prides themself as logical or rational but believes in
some such entity, which, by its nature, cannot have its existence
proven, is, quite frankly, a hypocrite.
I will go as far as to say that being an Atheist is *NECESSARY* to being
thoroughly rational.>>
You believe in much that you cannot prove. You do so on a daily basis. Most
people I know believe in God on the basis of a personal experience. This is
not subject to proof any more than, "the chili I just ate for dinner tasted
good to me." How could I rationally prove that? I had an experience of the
chili tonight that I am communicating to you. You can believe my account or
not, but I believe it because I experienced it.
Now, if you had never eaten or heard of chili...just think how nonsensical my
statements about dinner tonight would be.
There are many rational reasons to believe something that aren't subject to
communicable, logical arguments.
However (and again it would pay you to read an introductory philosophy
textbook), there have been logical proofs for the existence of God. One --
the ontological argument -- has even been declared airtight by logicians
after being subject to computer analysis.
But who cares? That's no reason to believe anything important.
<<<< P.S. Within atheism, why should the individual male care about how
women are treated? >>
Because Atheism is not Nihilism. Your beliefs of what Atheism is are
entirely off-the-mark. I, as an Atheist, have no dogma or religious
belief forcing me to care about how women are treated. But I, as a Homo
sapiens (a highly social animal), have an intrinsic compassion,
particularly for women and children. If I did not have said compassion,
I would be what one calls a sociopath; possesing a very serious, and
more rare than most people imagine, variety of mental disorder.>>
I believe I addressed some of this in another post. I'll address the rest of
it now.
But that's just it -- if we try to define what a Homo Sapiens is simply based
on what we observe in nature (and that is all you can do if there is no
supernature) -- then you have to admit we may be very sociable, but usually
not very compassionate. Most of human history is bloodshed, rape and murder.
On a scale unmatched anywhere else in the observable natural world.
You can only value compassion because you were raised in a tradition that
believes there's more to being human than just nature. Just as every atheist
who has ever lived...
<<Why do you think Bugs Bunny and nearly every imaginable "GoodGuy"
cartoon character has big eyes and puffy cheeks? And often a small
nose? What subconscious mechanism existing within the minds of
cartoonist incites them to include these features in "cute" characters,
and which same mechanism in the minds of every human allows us to
recognize them as cute? Could we logically deduct that, as these are
unmasculine features, as they are features usually apparent in women and
very young children, then we humans are hard-coded to be sympathetic
toward them?>>
You're mistaking modern American cultural norms for something absolute... :)
<>
Of course I understand and did address this in another post...
Jim
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Feb 28 2000 - 08:38:07 EST