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Amaros -> RE: Christian Dominants (10/4/2009 11:18:00 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
I guess much of my response is that dualism over-simplifies uselessly as much as it dissects incisively . . . . . . Again, if it helps you, great. But for me, much of the modeling rendered by dichotomization is of limited utility, in part because of that tendency of over-simplify, & to start lumping stuff only loosely correlated, together, with implicitly stronger bonds . . . . .
You still seem to be laboring under the mistaken impression that I invented the concept of duality for this thread alone - I didn't invent it, it's there, whether it oversimplifies things or any of your other criticisms - everything is built on something, and monotheism happens to be built on duality.
I hadn't ever even thought that much about it until I took an anthropology of religion course and attempted to write a paper on the devil - it may be oversimplifying things, but in fact there is dark and light, male and female, heat and cold, pleasure and pain - doesn't mean there are not transitional states - these dualities describe the extreme ends of continuums, but it's simply ignoring the evidence not observe that while some people see the continuum, others obsess over the abstract concept of opposition - in either case the empirical facts remain the same, but depending on whether you conceive of duality as the terminals of a continuum, or whether conceive of it as separate polarized points has a huge amount of influence on any decision you base on that conception.
This is technically anthropology here, whether you are fond of the concept or not is irrelevant, it's there, and it's been here for a very long time.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
It's akin to reductionism. A useful tool in it's place, but reductionism & dualism are both just tools, not some special characteristics of the universe. Or at least not anymore than any other tool / characteristic . . . . . There's so many shapes that fill the universe that I don't get the excessive focus on any one . . . . .
Lovely, and correct, duality is a crude tool, but again, there it is, it'sa recurring theme, just like Phi - sure there are other numbers, but that one has a special significance.
It is reductionism, and it's a linguistic device - remember, abstract linguistics is a unique human development, we had to start somewhere, and making distinctions betwen things is one of the first things that's going to happen - abstract linguistics itself is the process of categorization - Apes can signify this Banana, they appear to have no concept of all Bananas, belonging to a category of fruits, belonging to a category of edible vegetation, belonging to a category of photosynthetic organisms - they just see a Banana, or not a Banana.
The first thing Adam and Eve do is name everything - why start a book and mention that thing specifically - because as you yourself suggest, the brain is a referencing device. In order to talk about anything, you have to establish points of reference, definitions, distinctions, and you have to start somewhere - no?
Sometimes reductionism is necessary if the alternative is Babelian.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
I'm not really attached to any particular 'school' of thought, nor am I especially formally educated in any of this. & I'm most likely to frame stuff, even mystical stuff, in the terms of reason & science. That's part of where the duality thing really becomes problematic, for me. Spirit versus material implies that science & religion can never mix, & that's certainly how adherents on both 'sides' of that 'gulf' seem to be motivated. But I don't buy into that actually being a construct of the true nature of reality. Could be. Might not be. The verdict is still several centuries out on that one . . . . . . That's my cold, scientific evaluation of the data.
Then I suggest you read McLuhan - religion is oral culture - Biblical literalists are constantly promulgating concepts that are found nowhere in the Bible - they're ideas from Augustine, Calvin, Graham, etc., but these people have never read Augustine or Calvin, they may not even know who those people were, they have spun off an oral tradition from a literary one, and these concepts are transmitted and preserved through oral tradition - things are added and altered from time to time, but even humoral theory crops up on a regular basis, which has not been supported in literary culture for at least a century, The Seventh Day Adventists are practically founded on it, and refuse to give or receive blood transfusions because of it, it's not even remotely connected to the Bible, it's neo-Aristotelianism.
The fact is there is very little of duality in Judaism or the Bible, the Devil is mentioned only a couple of times, and not at all in Genesis - the Jewish religion doesn't equate the Serpent with the Devil.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
Um, the metaphor I find useful for thinking about what we don't know is that there were radio waves when we lived in caves. Early hominids were blissfully unaware of radio waves, but radio waves existed despite our lack of knowledge. I know enough science, & epistomology, to have a hint that we're nowhere near the end of what learnings we have in store . .. . . There's a certain cultural meme about us being at the end of history, & there's some pop cultural beliefs floating in the vast subconscious cultural ether that 'we know everything science', but that is so far from so . .. . . Yee-haw . . .. .
You have to start somewhere.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
Personally, I find the most excitement in contemplating that, in the future, that particular dichotomy -- spirit versus matter -- turns out to be an artificial distinction & that the reality could be something far beyond our current comprehension. Trying to wrap my head around that kinda thing is one of my favorite forms of mental exercise . . . . . .
But it's not an artificial distinction, there is still that which has perceivable resting mass and that which only possesses relativistic mass - they remain abstract, theoretical end points even if they remain the end points of a continuum, and even if that continuum is a circle.
In some way,s you are describing the monotheistic impulse - Vedic religion is polytheistic, and hugely complex, there are deities for every stone and tree, it strains the limits of biological memory to try and keep it strait - Zoroaster said, let there be but One god, then he thought about it some more and decided that there is also dark and light, and that this one god must represent light - but there is still the dark, and the whole thing started all over again.
Its sorta like Big Bang theory - at some moment, all energy collapses into a single point of singularity, One thing - the second it divides into Two things, it becomes dynamic rather than static, and all that energy is released once again.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
Nothing personal, Amaros, it's just that the duality thing has been argued extensively, & it so leaves me limp most every time . .. . . It's so much more intriguing to contemplate the weirdly not-very-dichotomous results of the double-slit experiments, where the particles behave as both wave & matter . . . . .
I hate to be short with you , but go bakc a look at the thread titles again - it's very specifically about dominance within a framework of Christian values - I'm asking what are those values - it's dificult to see where Dominance fit into them otherwise.
The Protestant default is to cherry pick the Bible, they have no other literary source, and oral cannon is complex and confused, so I'm doing a little anthropology concerning where some of these oral dogmas originate.
quote:
ORIGINAL: DemonKia
Ah, there you go, a much better physical science example of something that can be described usefully as a duality: matter versus energy. Everything exists as one or the other, & neither can be destroyed. Only altered. Shifted from form to form. On the other hand, everything is both. Depends on how it's looked at as to which is salient.
I stick with the idea that dualism has use as a tool for observing with, but it's important not to reify the tool (any tool) . .....
& isn't 'religion' undue reification of a tool of human capacities (spiritual feelings)? (Ie, I'm inclined to see the current evidence as showing the sequence being: hominids who have spiritual feelings out-survive / -reproduce the less spiritual across populations over generations; spiritual feelings lead to cultural behaviors; add time & human propensities to reify, abstract, attach meaning, ritualize, & some other stuff, & voila, religion is born out of the rich soil of the agricultural age . . . . . .)
I guess another thing about this is that humans are so complicated. To my mind, they operate on hundreds, or thousands, of levels, with a twist of irrationality thrown in. Atoms & particles are 'easy' by comparison, simple, well-behaved, reassuringly linear. & so while reductionist & dualistic tools can be used to parse some of that complexity, they can fail to capture the full picture, too . .. . .
& there's something, for me, about how knowing can get in the way of seeing. If one is full of knowledge (& ya know I know this one, lol) it doesn't leave much room for new knowledge to get in. To some degree, it's the naive / child's mind that's a maximal sponge for information & novelty . . . . .
This is all valid, but in the interests of keeping it simple, we have Man and Woman, dominance and submission, right and wrong, good and evil - when it comes to dicussing Christian D/s those are pretty much the points of reference.
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