While the cognoscenti were busy with their media arguments about how to reconcile religion and science, the “people” just went ahead and started the project -- or possibly they never left off with it anyway, since emotional relationship and the fabric of a familiar ecosystem were -- all along -- the origin and matrix of both science and religion.
It’s a false dichotomy in the first place, dividing human experience between what can be learned by the scientific method (objective question, research, hypothesis, new questions) and what metaphorical constructs emerge from a specific culture about how to survive. The territory is divided by “faith”, meaning committing to which of those constructs work, versus the ability to accept the results of testing which requires skepticism, which may not allow a controlling metaphor system to keep order. But why not do both?
That’s not the problem. The problem is that institutions have populated both aspects of human experience and try to perpetuate themselves by controlling and imposing their version of each side. (“WE have the answer! Come to US!”) Besides promoting schism between religion and science, each side promotes competition among religions or among scientific fields. All struggle to grow by dominating.
There are plenty of people who suggest that science IS a religion in many dimensions. I tend to agree but then one has to ask why science and religion can be in pitched battle. Both institutions are dealing with raw emotion and violent destruction, each trying to capitalize and insist on their diagnosis and prescription of a troubled society. I should do some investigation of the beginnings of the most primal and radical concepts of “religion” and “science” in the times before empires and their armies. Maybe before agriculture.
Chernobyl
But here’s an even more interesting phenomenon, partly produced by the bad results and ineffectiveness of institutions. I speak of the return to human experiences that cross borders, even the schism between science and religion. Some people call it “spirituality,” some call it “rational mysticism,” or “Bioneers” or “the Zen of Physics” or “felt concepts.”
Here are some domains and clues, thrown out as suggestions to ponder:
Sports
Beatification is a matter of medals, which signify not just achievement, but also devotion, discipline, courage in the face of suffering,
Extreme sports supply the drugs that evoke mystical experiences.
Prayer can be seen as self-talk and defining of goals, aspiration.
On the one hand Christianity invades the football field and the rodeo arena, but on the other hand medical response to force warns us about the damage sports can do and no angels heal closed-skull concussions, though the person may hear voices and see bright lights.
This piece might be by Malvina Hoffman
Sex
This is in two parts: intimate connection and fertility. Surely an investigator is overwhelmed by the variety and passion of the gods and goddesses -- and those of no determined gender -- and the ingenious ways of causing a infant to form and be birthed. Yearning for a return to infancy and drive to acquire power create insatiable experimentation.
We are in the midst of a huge shift now, which is quite parallel to a religious conversion by whole nations. First, we have left the dyadic understanding of gender and even genitalia and second, we have the power to block fertility but also the power to chemically give men potency. Not in all cases and not without problems, but it’s still a major shift that affects many other social arrangements, not least economics. (Who is available to do which jobs? Who should insurers cover at what cost? Who can take "communion"?)
Inventions
The creation of shelter (wickiups, tipis, mud huts and thatch), fire, flint-knapping, the wheel, smelting metal -- and we were on our way to cathedrals and eventually outer space, which gave us quite a different feeling about Heaven. And such a bad case of hubris (evil) that we began to destroy nature as we had loved it (evil). The invention of new concepts -- the Devil and the Madonna -- grounded the technology our torture chambers.
Chernobyl
Art
Surely the first art was tattoos. And now, according to some, everything is art. Surely the first art was sacred, and now -- according to some -- everything is art and art is still sacred.
Drugs
The short cut to both heaven and hell, as well as salvation and damnation. Being “high” as a form of prayer. Blissed out. Scientifically, if everything is code, why not learn to code? If everything is molecules, why not grasp molecular experience (i.e. drugs)? Once again the communion.
Animals
The central theme of both science and religion was once to prove that humans were above and separate from animals. We had souls and would not die as we see them die. Now there is a significant segment of the population that has returned to a spiritual connection to animals. Science confirms again and again that we ARE animals, and not in any clear way at all. If one’s gut biome is part of one’s persona, then how much of a conscious individual can anyone be? Isn't death merely shifting the boundaries between life and death?
Chernobyl
Academia
We must constantly develop new disciplines to suit our new knowledge. Heard of "omics?" (Not comics.) We invent new ways to handle statistics and other data in vivid and immediately palpable ways so that less specialized training is needed to understand it. We monitor methods and the distortions each one creates. Thought is deliberately set against elitism in order to support dominated people as justice.
This confirms the idea that what you see is what you look for. We have a generation now that throve in the post WWII academic environment, found it dignified and supportive of reasoned argument. That’s gone, but some don't realize it. It was only part of what was happening anyway. Underneath that cultural stream, surrounding it and bursting up through it was a whole different -- and iconoclastic -- way of thinking.
Maybe it came out of existentialism and maybe it came out of chaos or maybe those were the same thing anyhow. One of the characteristics is the abandonment of labels, the appetite for experience, the joy of looking at everything in “why not?” mode. And all the troublemakers who had been thrown out for asking new questions had now found a mental state they could live with -- despair, agony, adrenaline, and comradeship. Even intimacy.
Terrifying and saddening results have powered recent developments with some institutions digging in to perpetuate themselves in the face of terrorism or new knowledge or systems reform. Each flies the flag of religion, but they have committed to faiths that don’t work anymore. The beliefs no longer are anchored in reality -- just familiarity. This is as true of capitalism as it is in any of the Abrahamic religions that developed alongside capitalism, military force, and schism. This is the territory that is explored so brilliantly in “Game of Thrones,” though the exhibit is not accompanied by much analysis except the private lives of the actors.
Survival is based in one extreme on the gorgeous sidereal realms of endless time and in the other on the human body itself and how it fits into the matrix of biological code which includes sex -- which is the means of reproduction of individuals, species, and the flow of creature life itself. Human knowledge, anchored in human experience, is an interface with whatever reality may be -- an unknowable source of sensory information that responds to how we organize what penetrates our bodies, becoming part of us. Our ability to create instruments that expand our awareness means we must constantly reorganize. Our ability to record what we perceive (piercing received), so that the limits of one human lifetime can be transcended, means we can extend our methods. But we need unifying and stabilizing metaphors that spiritual systems can supply if they aren’t reduced to book and flag.
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