Hi Erik

If I understand your point correctly, you are advocating a place for religious symbology as a valid method of pre-processing real-world experience. Do you propose that this is a social function in the classification of 'communication'? If this is so then I assume you are proposing that religion is a post-weened programme to promote social integration. A powerful compound-meme.

It seems possible to me that the abstract model of individual consciousness should change as society changes. This could mean that we could develop ourselves until some historical ideology becomes irrelevant. This implies that the historical religious payload of our society diminishes in relevance as centuries pass. Surely e have already seen this with the evolution of Western religious belief to monotheism. The discomfort of a frank look at our barbaric past gives us a clue to our rational future.

IMHO Mr Spock did 'rationalists' no favours. Many non-rationalists could describe a cavalry charge as having a beauty or grandeur. A rationalist would describe it as horrific and destructive. However, a rationalist would readily appreciate the beauty of Beethoven's 9th even if the revolutionary message has disturbing implications. Because of Mr Spock, logic has been popularised as simplistic yet logic equally applies to the most complex (and often beautiful) systems.

Jonathan German-Morris

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Plato's Cave: Moral - If you manage to get out of then
cave . . . . Don't go back in and shout about it!
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From: "Erik A. Mattila" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: On Debating Religion
Date: 11/04/1999 22:56:51
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It is my understanding that Ernst Cassirer, who is not a postmodernist, described what you call 'superstitious (religious) behavior' as 'mythical thought, which he further describes as one of humanities 'symbolic forms.' Functionally, 'mythical thought' operates in a way that orgainzes the world of raw phenomena, as does language.  To oversimplify, it is another way of thinking.

I would say an individual's inability to resolve myth and language in mental life is indicative of a disintegrated personality, given the great antiquity of mythical thought, language and art as our 'symbolic forms.' The hypothetical person you are describing appears to me to be incomplete, much like how Captain Kirk regards Spock  (as if the most rigorously disciplined logician would not get goosebumps inside Chartres Cathedral).

Regards,
Erik Mattila

:
Cassirer, Ernst, 1874-1945 title: (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen). English The philosophy of symbolic forms; translated by Ralph Manheim. Pref. and introd. by Charles W. Hendel. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1953-c1996. 4 v. 24 cm. Contents: v. 1. Language.--v. 2. Mythical thought.--v. 3. The phenomenology of knowledge.--v. 4. The metaphysics of symbolic forms. Vol. 4: Edited by John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene; translated by John Michael Krois.Includes bibliographical references and index.
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