HAMSTERS AND POPES

For the last few days I’ve been following “Uncouth Reflections,” a blog consortium of highly educated and aesthetic men that was one of the earliest blogs I ever subscribed to.  They were “Blowhards” then.  Often they were way ahead of me, but that didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of their explanations and photos of fine architecture and so on.  Sometimes I was way behind the curve, mostly with politics, math and economics.  

Bruges

But they fall short when it comes to religion.  They seem only to know five big-name religions, and to claim only the originally Zoroastrian-influenced Abrahamic middle-eastern systems without any sense of what that means in terms of wells, grain storage, walled cities.   They argue about what is "true." There are other contexts where the correspondents are only interested in what the world was like before the agricultural revolution.  In their minds crops are the biggest thing since the discovery of smelting copper but not necessarily a development that has been good for human beings.  Perhaps it was the beginning of the structure of society that makes all the wealth accumulate one category of people, usually related family circles controlled by rules of inheritance, which they claim are dictated by Gods.

Some of these very modern guys believe there is no worthy religion that doesn’t include the supernatural while others believe just as intensely that there is NO supernatural dimension to religion -- that the key is morality.  I was accused of a new fault:  a “woman’s” tendency to create apologetics for a system that is only a hamster wheel, because females supposedly can’t figure out how to survive without the old system.  This is the way they explain it on https://heartiste.wordpress.com:

"I think we’ve seen plenty of examples of self-gratifying spinning in the comments on this blog, not to mention just about anywhere in the informational universe where feminists congregate to kvetch. And the spinning is not just limited to feminists. Most losers in the mating game have experienced the crush of 5 Gs in their hamster wheels. I find these kinds of people fall into two camps: the pity whores (woe is me, i’m a loser, there’s nothing i can do about it, so stop trying to help people like me, you’re only leading us astray with your advice), and the delusion zombies (i’m not a loser, i have everything i need in life, single cougarhood, five cats and a niceguy beta orbiter are exactly what i’ve always wanted)."

spinning

There are some assumptions in this provocation.  One is that spinning isn’t fun.  (I thought it was something you did half-clothed in a room full of glamorous people on bicycles who go nowhere.)  Another is that the spinning doesn’t do anyone any good -- but if you ask me, dishwashing is only a form of hamster wheel.  SOMEBODY has to make it go cycling.

The main thing the inventor of this pejorative image wants noted is that hamsters are a lower category of being -- even an exemplary hamster is not of much value -- and since the original comments included the Pope, the demand is how else to get the hamsters enlightened and writing novels except by a strict overseer Pope?  One needs Papa.

Going to a link I saved yesterday, the characteristic of conventional religion that always comes up is the supernatural.  There ARE religious systems that don’t include the supernatural.  (I would argue modern science is a pretty good example.  Except that they just call the supernatural the unknown.)  But George W.W. Martin deals with it rather differently. http://www.businessinsider.com/george-rr-martin-role-of-religion-got-game-of-thrones-westeros-2015-4

“Working magic” (Magic that works.) is Martin’s link between religion and sci-fi/fantasy.  He suggests that bringing people back to life is one of the most intense supernatural phenomena.  In terms of individuals returning as they were, that’s certainly true of Christianity, but not Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and a host of other systems.  It’s interesting to think about sci-fi’s relationship to religion.  And then I had earlier downloaded a post about “imagined communities” which seems relevant.  http://www.amazon.com/Benedict-Anderson/e/B000APBSDI/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1429742923&sr=1-2-ent

The Red God from "Game of Thrones"

So now I call up the idea that television and film communities, imagined as they are, horizontal as they are, resurrectable as they are, must speak to much the same needs in us as religions.  So if religions are ecological, arising from the specific circumstances of time and place, then maybe we could profit from a comparison of “Earthsea” with “Westeros”.  What sort of governance should an archipelago like Puget Sound and its islands have in comparison with Martin’s historical Europe where only one “nation” is separated by water?

There are dragons in both imagined communities but they are quite different though they both have wings and fire breath.  Why is that?  Are there no tubby green dragons with webbed feet who merely bubble?

by Elizabeth Malczynski

PBS and the BBC are stirring all this up with “Wolf Hall” which braids religion, government and fertility into the historical record of nations.  It is very Pope conscious.  I suppose the peasants are the hamsters and their running in wheels is a good way to keep warm.

What I am always after is ways to question and shake-up all the many assumptions that restrict us.  For instance, writing  (the Book) dominates some religions.  Baha’i honors all books of the various religions, but ignores oral-based systems.  This serves the academic and legal communities and excludes indigenous people very conveniently.  It also challenges non-writing art forms, though many will have scripts or scores.  

One of the best series on religion I’ve ever seen was Ninian Smart’s “The Long Search.” (1977)  The Buddhism hour is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3r202etWLE

He made this useful list of the dimensions of religion:

The Seven Dimensions of Religion (Ninian Smart)

Ritual: Forms and orders of ceremonies (private and/or public) (often regarded as revealed)

Narrative and Mythic: stories (often regarded as revealed) that work on several levels. Sometimes narratives fit together into a fairly complete and systematic interpretation of the universe and human's place in it.

Experiential and emotional: dread, guilt, awe, mystery, devotion, liberation, ecstasy, inner peace, bliss (private)

Social and Institutional: belief system is shared and attitudes practiced by a group. Often rules for identifying community membership and participation (public)

Ethical and legal: Rules about human behavior (often regarded as revealed from supernatural realm)

Doctrinal and philosophical: systematic formulation of religious teachings in an intellectually coherent form

Material: ordinary objects or places that symbolize or manifest the sacred or supernatural

“The Long Search” was meant for the Boomer generation, but maybe it’s coming back into meaningfulness.  This is a place where the video series can be bought.  It’s not on Netflix.  Someone bump PBS.  There's also a book.

http://www.ambrosevideo.com/items.cfm?id=869  

Technically, this series is NOT religious.  It is the secular STUDY of religion.  This is what interests me, but it is VERY hard to explain to ordinary hamsters or highly educated men.  One says, “Religions don’t have to have gods.”  They agree and go right back to talking about the nature of God.  You say, “Not every religion has a morality we would recognize,” and they say, “All good people would protect infants.”

Ninian Smart ends his series by saying that finally there is only silence.  Quietly he makes a cup of tea.  The idea is to withdraw from mystery that cannot be known in order to take care of one’s needs for survival.