• Category Archives Commentary on Religion

  • Pragmatically Speaking

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                     Full Wild Moon

    “Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” – William James

    William James helped found and expand the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism.  This is not a publicly well known school of philosophy, partly because it does not lend itself well to sound bites like dialectical reasoning, theory of forms, Occam’s razor, cogito ergo sum.

    His quote teases us toward an important element of pragmatic thought, namely that truth is something we live into or toward rather than an absolute.  In fact, as this quote suggests, we can even change our own truth by changing our minds, our ways of thinking and the directions of our thoughts and in so doing, change our lives.

    Pragmatism is a very American philosophical system, relying on the rough and tumble of human interaction with the world to get at what other systems find through deductive logic.  It’s messy and inexact, but it binds itself tightly to the human experience.

    Here’s a nice paragraph from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy that will give you the flavor of James’ thought.  Pay special attention to the last sentence.

    “James’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” sets out his voluntaristic epistemology. “We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117), including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution” (P, 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of process in the claim that “for pragmatism [reality] is still in the making,” whereas for “rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity” (P 123). Pragmatism’s final chapter on “Pragmatism and Religion” follows James’s line in Varieties in attacking “transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiable account of God, and in defending a “pluralistic and moralistic religion” (144)based on human experience. “On pragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (143).”


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters 📎and tagged

  • A Bit On Science

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

    As the Great Wheel turns, as the earth flies in its unimaginably long ellipse around the sun, we go on pretending in a terra-centric universe.  The sun rises?  The constellations rotate through the sky?  The moon rises and sets?

    It’s no wonder the Catholic church was so reluctant to buy it.  I mean, who was this guy Galileo and this other guy Copernicus compared to the Church Fathers?

    Woolly Buddy Tom Crane surprised me at our recent retreat on a matter related to this.  I’d read a New Yorker article about the execution of a man in Texas convicted of arson in the death of his children.  The point of the article was to demonstrate that an innocent man had died as a result of our use of capital punishment.  It did this by using a renowned arson investigator who critiqued the arson investigators who sealed the man’s fate.  (I just did a quick look and I can’t find the article right now.  If I find it, I’ll post a link here.)

    Anyhow, I mentioned it to Tom, a forensic engineer, and he said, “Oh, yeah.  Evidence-based science.  That’s we talk about all the time.”  He went on to say that it was a great tragedy.

    What struck me though was this notion of evidence-based science.  My first reaction was, is there any other kind?  Then, I realized:  intelligent design, climate change deniers, any time ideology substitutes conviction for evidence, we risk non-evidence based science.

    It was Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum who made the wonderful analogy about method.  If, he said, your method chose the wrong path for you on which to run, running faster would only take you further from your goal.  He proposed that method was all and that the empirical method was the right one for science.  This idea did not catch on overnight and there are still realms it has not penetrated, most notably of late of course, the GW Bush Whitehouse.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality GeekWorld Great Wheel 📎and tagged

  • Vitriol Set Aside

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                               New Moon (Wild)

    I wrote a vitriolic piece on sulfide mining that the better angels of my nature said to set side for a bit and let it cool off.  Let me just say this:  if there is an issue in our time comparable to the Boundary Waters struggle of the mid-70’s, this is it.  While climate change is, admittedly, the uber issue of our time, in terms of local environmental politics, the question of sulfide mining and its nasty  side affects looms over all else.  I’m opposed to it, at least until they can demonstrate a safe  technique.

    Birthday phone call from cyber mage Bill Schmidt.  Bill and I share a philosophical and theological education and a similar journey, one you might call, Leaving the Hermeneutical Circle.  That is, we have both stepped outside the tradition of interpreting Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition as pointing to a reality beyond themselves.  Neither one of us has a missionary sensibility like say, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, in fact, we both appreciate the need for folks to make their own way in these matters.  Still, it’s nice to have a friend who understands the  ancientrail.


    Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Politics 📎and tagged

  • Contemplative

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                Waning Cold Moon

    Ancientrails hits the road again this afternoon for sunny eastern South Dakota, high above the plains.  There I will reside, for three nights, in a local instance of a 1,300 year plus institution, the Benedictine Monks of the Roman Catholic Church. It’s interesting to me that the international website for the Benedictines has St. John’s in Collegeville as its host.  I have always found the monastic or even the hermetic life appealing which is why I eventually made my peace with Andover and its relative seclusion.

    The quiet, contemplative atmosphere encouraged by monastics the world around and in various faith traditions serves a calm heart to a frenzied world, a place to which we can retire if we need.  I’ve had a long stretch with no regular  contemplative or meditative practice, this weekend I plan to enter a new phase, one appropriate to this time in my life.

    Aging itself requires a contemplative spirit, an accepting spirit for the challenges that it holds include the inevitable and long shunned confrontation with death.  (Ironic note:  In the midst of this thought I got a robo-call from Congress Michele Bachman which I allowed to trigger upset.)

    Kate and I need to check our answers for Chapter 2 right now.  Back at ya.


    Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • Holy, Water. Bathman

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                              Waxing Cold Moon

    Namaste.  The restaurant.  Where we ate lunch and discussed Stealing the Mona Lisa, an impenetrable book most thought, a romp in psychoanalytical language cursed with the stodgy background of Freud rather than an expansive peyote fueled Jungian.  We entertained ourselves with a good two-hours of conversation on the nature of art, whether art exists when we don’t see it, whether any of us made art and bollocks.

    It’s always a good experience to be with these folks, some idea gets knocked loose and rattles around, sometimes settling down as a learning.  Next month the Walker.

    We’ve had snow, more of the nuisance variety than a real street and artery clogging invasion.  The temperature stays down though so we may continue to get snow for a while.  I hope so.

    Here’s a headline you don’t see every day.  In today’s Washington Post.

    117 Russians in hospital after

    drinking holy water


    Art and Culture Commentary on Religion News of the Strange Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Haiti

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                 Waning Moon of Long Nights (New Moon tomorrow)

    The day before the journey.  Not a big journey as things go, but a trip.  Ruthie and Gabe, Jon and Jen.  Family.  As we grow older, family tends to take more and more of our focus.  Why?  Because the work world fades away, home and its memories remain.  This is, I imagine, much as it always has been.  I recall a theory from evolutionary biology that says grandparents were a reason for population increases and longevity increases.  We were around for child care.

    The usual before trip minutiae:  a stuck garage door, cardboard recycling, packing, picking up a connector to make a keyboard usable on the net book.  This and that.

    The death toll in Haiti adds catastrophe to the already multiple problems of a failed state, a failed state within our sphere of influence.  See the Monroe Doctrine.  I’ve not followed Haiti closely so I don’t know the history, how things have become the way they are, but I do know that we have a moral responsibility as a neighbor.

    Acts of God.  Bah, humbug.  These are acts of nature, just like the great Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century.  That one caused a great deal of consternation in various Christian communities.

    “The 1755 Lisbon earthquake (see engraving) created a crisis of faith in Europe and beyond. The catastrophe occurred on a holy day and destroyed many of the city’s magnificent sanctuaries. The destruction caused many to renounce religion; others interpreted the event as a sign of God’s displeasure, thus a sign of His omnipotence. Enlightened souls who considered the world innately good took a jolt. Voltaire contemplated the implications. Immanuel Kant devoted several tracts to Lisbon and its consequences.”

    To read acts of the natural world as anything but what they are is folly.  In Haiti’s case a strike-slip fault–the San Andreas is such a fault–stored up energy since, oddly, about the same time as the Lisbon event, and yesterday a tectonic shift sprung free.  A great analogy in the newspaper compared a strike-slip fault to a person moving a heavy piano.  They push and push and push, nothing happens.  Then, suddenly, the piano moves.  In this instance however the piano then falls on you.

    It is peculiar that we blame God for acts of nature but won’t take responsibility for our own acts against nature, like climate change.


    Commentary on Religion World History 📎and tagged

  • Theodicy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                      Waning Moon of Long Nights

    Explanations of theodicy run aground on Haiti, just as they do on the Holocaust, Rawandi, Sudan.  When a nation as poor and crippled as Haiti gets hit with a major earthquake, how does one reconcile that with a loving and just God?  No intellectual fancy footwork can answer that question.

    I’m reading a book sent to Kate by Jon, Children of Dust.  It’s a memoir of a young Punjabi who makes several circuits through various perspectives on Islam from conservative to fundamentalist to ethnic and, I understand, eventually out.  This is the second memoir I’ve read recently, the other being Escape, about the FLDS.

    With this one I have doubts about the accuracy of it.  Memoirs are tricky at best, memory changes as we remember, in fact it changes before it becomes solid memory.  Eye witness accounts are, according to some criminologists, the most unreliable testimony.

    There is, of course, the need all of us to be the heroes in our own story,  the need to smooth out the most raggedy parts of our performance as a human being.  There is a desire to be accepted that goes beyond this tendency to encourage putting the very best light on what we do.  In addition, the most memorable moments are emotionally  highly charged and therefore subject to distortion in the moment, much less over time.

    And each of these can loop back on themselves to create another level of distortion.  That is, I admit my tendency to smooth out the raggedy parts so I show you raggedy parts.  In fact, I may make them grimmer than they were in order to convince you I’m honest, which I’m not.  Anyhow, the labyrinth here is difficult at best.

    Children of Dust is worth a read, perhaps less as a memoir than as an impression of the complex lives Muslims live in contemporary world culture.  It succeeds brilliantly in doing that.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Hard Battles

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                   Waning Moon of Long Nights

    “Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Plato

     

    I have, over my life time, found this hard to remember, but oh so true.  Even the admired, the successful, the beautiful, the quick and the bright have their doubts, their relationship problems, their perceptions of bodily imperfections, their concern about the future.

    Just a quick survey of folks in my life right now would include the neighbor with M.S. who went off the deep end and dragged his wife and daughter with him.  Little Gabe and his parents trying to figure out hemophilia.  Frank who finds the bitter cold hard on his heart condition now has trouble with his hip.  Kate’s back is better, but her hips are worse.  One docent friend has a daughter with lung cancer.  Another Woolly and his wife care for her aging parents in their home.  My first cousin, Melissa, 40 years old with a young son, died  suddenly of a blood clot.  As Plato points out, these are not the exceptions, they are the rule.

    We are fragile creatures, beset with doubt and aware of our end.  The short span between birth and death contains tragedy, affliction and woe for everyone.

    Albert Camus, more my spiritual father than Plato, talked about us all headed toward the great river of death, the equalizer.  He believed it was our responsibility to make the journey toward death as peaceful and compassion-filled as possible, for everyone.

    In this sense Plato did not go far enough.  Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle that they will lose.

    Here is the wondrous thing.  Once we know the truth, our condition, and everyone’s condition, our existential predicament, we can break free from confining cultural mores, from the demands of religion or custom.  We can break free and act as the independent agents we are.  We can take arms against the sea of troubles and if not end them, then we can at least link arms with each other.

    We can choose to be  kind.  We can choose to resist evil.  We can work to heal illness.  We can enfold the dark emptiness of death and make it part of our life, a reminder and a prod to do what we can, while we can.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Fundamentals

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                   Waning Moon of Long Nights

    Thoughts on fundamentalists of the mosque, church and street

    excerpts from a BBC article forwarded by my brother, Mark:

    Three churches have been attacked in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur

    …some vocal groups, including the Muslim Youth Movement, Abim, have cast the use of the word Allah as a surreptitious effort on the part of Christians to try to seduce Muslims away from Islam.

    The government will take whatever steps it can to prevent such acts  Prime Minister Najib Razak.

    Church officials say that although the word Allah originated in Arabic, Malays have used it for centuries to refer generally to God, and Arabic-speaking Christians used it before Islam was founded, reports the BBC’s religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott.

    —

    Mass nationwide demonstrations failed to materialise on Friday, but protesters at mosques in Kuala Lumpur carried placards reading “Allah is only for us” and “Heresy arises from words wrongly used”.

    “I hope the court will understand the feeling of the majority Muslims of Malaysia,” said Ahmad Johari, at the National Mosque.

    “We can fight to the death over this issue,” he told Associated Press news agency.

    ==========

    Comment:  Some Islamic  communities seem to react like street gangs in south L.A.  Disrespect comes from every angle and must be met, not just with resistance, but with deadly force.  This pattern is difficult to break because the thought world that underlies them both is a suspicion of inferiority covered over by a thin layer of superiority.  Even plain conversation about the issues involved can be read as condescending, insults delivered in a plain brown wrapper.  Without conversation, dialogue, there is little to no chance of defusing their  blasting cap sensitivity.

    This is the same phenomenon that fuels the Hindu nationalist parties reaction against Muslims in India.  It is the same phenomenon that fuels the gay-bashing and abortion clinic violence in the US.

    These are out groups who recognize their relative powerlessness and seize upon one or two issues as central, defining wedge matters.  They then focus their frustration and despair on any who violate the boundaries of Allah use, or sign throwing or color wearing, of being Muslim in India, of having same sex preferences or active participation in abortion in America.

    This is the kind of politics that created the Moral Majority and the Karl Rove wins in Texas and the US for GW.  At the level of its manipulation by a man like Rove or Richard Nixon it is naked demagoguery.  At the level of the street gang, the Islamist community, the gay bashers and the abortion clinic bombers it is inchoate rage, a form of speech uttered when no words will form.

    Both forms are dangerous and can, witness 9/11, upset civilizations, so they cannot be taken lightly.


    Commentary on Religion 📎and tagged

  • Monks and Prisoners

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    An interesting Christmas note to my brother Mammoths from a monk at Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota

    winter-solstice-1

    MERRY CHRISTMAS JIM AND ALL WOOLLY MAMMOUTHS (sic),

    Thanks for those elegant photographs, Jim. As much as I hate winter, I have to admit a work of art when I see one.

    Recently I went to a meeting at the prison in Appleton, Minnesota. The facility is closing the first of February. At present there are only 230 inmates in a building that can  accommodate 1500. I suggested to the inmates that maybe they could finish out their sentences at Blue Cloud Abbey because we have plenty of room and so few vocations.

    One of the guys asked his fellow inmates, “Would you like living with a bunch of old monks?” One of them answered, “It might be better than  living with a bunch of old convicts.” Some people think the prison will reopen soon because crime is increasing. Monks are decreasing but convicts are increasing.

    The cat just came into my office. This fall someone dropped off a cat and fled. Brother Chris has assumed the care of the winter-sol-2cat.  It lives in the garage but when doors are left open, Da Cat (that’s its name) strolls down the ramp and into the house.

    A Blessed Christmas to you and yours (and stay out of the blizzard)!

    Benet

    (note:  these pics are by Woolly artist Jim Johnson who does not know whether he is a falcon, a storm or a great song.)


    Art and Culture Commentary on Religion Great Wheel Holidays 📎and tagged