Light sensors cause religious row

[Fop 1]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

That's because religion is all about control (it has fuck all to do with God or anything else) - so in the end it doesn't really matter what it was intended to be, just if it works in that way now it will be used as such.

[Guest alex]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

That's because religion is all about control (it has fuck all to do with God or anything else) - so in the end it doesn't really matter what it was intended to be, just if it works in that way now it will be used as such.

It was certainly all about control to start with in the case of most major religions (and still is). Places where it isn't, like in some of the liberal sections of (for example) the Anglican Church, it makes you wonder why they bother as you get the feeling some of them hardly believe any of it anyway.

[Park Life 71]

Unswithoffable bright lights ftw.

[Fop 1]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

That's because religion is all about control (it has fuck all to do with God or anything else) - so in the end it doesn't really matter what it was intended to be, just if it works in that way now it will be used as such.

It was certainly all about control to start with in the case of most major religions (and still is). Places where it isn't, like in some of the liberal sections of (for example) the Anglican Church, it makes you wonder why they bother as you get the feeling some of them hardly believe any of it anyway.

 

It's still about control, go to any church committee in even the most liberal, limp wristed, rightoner than thou of religious establishments and you'll see (and if you're lucky you'll see blood drawn).

 

(although the philosophy tends to still be a system of control in itself, only not in a conservative/hard-line sense)

[Fop 1]

Unswithoffable bright lights ftw.

http://www.fasco-csc.com/works/white/white_e.php

[SloopJohn 0]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

I think this article nails the literalism issue on the head...

 

Last week I co-hosted a poetry evening in one of the last remaining artists’ studios in St John’s Wood, the leafy district of north London which was once home to painters and musicians such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Arthur Bliss and Sir Thomas Beecham. We decided to give it the title “Poetry for Turning Times” – and that was before the election of Barack Obama had turned at least one prejudice on its head. I headed our flyers with the final line of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”.

 

This was once among the most famous and most quoted lines in English poetry, but some responses I received suggested it was now neither well known nor well understood. One respondent made a joke of it, suggesting it had what in some quarters would be called a “duh” quality – yes, and so what?

 

I had assumed no one would read the climax of Shelley’s peroration as a fatuous comment about the changing seasons, or at least simply as that. Of course, the ode is partly about the changing seasons: in a prefatory note Shelley informs us that “this poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains”. So, a poem about a particular wind, written at a particular moment. But any halfway attentive reading of the poem reveals that it is concerned with much else besides meteorology.

 

You may or may not agree with the critic Timothy Webb that Shelley’s “most compelling concern [in this poem] is political”, but you cannot deny that the poem has a strong political dimension. It was written in October 1819, at what Shelley considered one of the darkest points in the recent history of freedom in England. A couple of months earlier, there had occurred what became known as the Peterloo Massacre, in which a cavalry detachment charged an unarmed crowd of 60,000 in Manchester attending a meeting about parliamentary reform (remember this was still the time of rotten boroughs and suffrage strictly for the upper middle classes). Fifteen were killed and 500 wounded; in his great, angry sonnet “England in 1819” Shelley invoked “a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field”.

 

As well as being political, the poem is deeply personal. Some would say embarrassingly so: the line “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” was singled out by FR Leavis for condemnation for its combination of self-aggrandisement (poet as Christ) and self-pity.

 

The point is that the poem is clearly and consciously designed to be read on different levels simultaneously: the meteorological, the political, the personal, the religious (in a broad, spiritual sense). If this did not pose a problem to 19th-century readers but may pose one to 21st-century ones, then the reason, I suspect, has to do with the practice of biblical exegesis, or, in a wider sense, with hermeneutics – the art of interpretation.

 

For hundreds of years people in the west, not just educated people, were used to reading or hearing the verses of the Bible – the chief educational, moral, spiritual resource of the culture – on more than one level. “Medieval hermeneutics”, according to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “ascribed to the Bible four levels of meaning: literal, allegorical, moral and eschatological.” For example, certain verses from Isaiah might be read as, simultaneously, the prophet’s excoriation of the corruption of his times, a comment on individual sinfulness, and a prophesy of the coming of Christ.

 

Hermeneutics expanded in the 19th century, in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, beyond biblical interpretation first to include all texts and speech and then the whole range of human activity and culture. The interpreter’s aim, according to Schleiermacher, is “to understand ... the text even better than its author”. Every text, and every human activity, Dilthey argued, is culturally and historically conditioned; to gain a full understanding involves an imaginative sympathy which must encompass multiple perspectives.

 

You would think all this had thoroughly informed our way of thinking; we take great care not to impose unthinkingly one-dimensional interpretations on other cultures – not to be chauvinists. But the one area where we seem to have become unthinkingly literal is our own culture and its key texts. Few nowadays, apart from zealots and academics, read the Bible or Shelley at all, and if they do they struggle to see beyond the literal meaning.

 

The phenomenon of literalism is an inheritance from the Protestant reaction to the medieval church’s arrogance in appropriating the Bible for its own use. It started from a laudable desire to restore a direct and unmediated relationship between the devout Christian reader and the words of the Bible. But it has ended up flattening the multi-dimensional way of interpreting that we need to understand ourselves and the world.

[Guest alex]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

That's because religion is all about control (it has fuck all to do with God or anything else) - so in the end it doesn't really matter what it was intended to be, just if it works in that way now it will be used as such.

It was certainly all about control to start with in the case of most major religions (and still is). Places where it isn't, like in some of the liberal sections of (for example) the Anglican Church, it makes you wonder why they bother as you get the feeling some of them hardly believe any of it anyway.

 

It's still about control, go to any church committee in even the most liberal, limp wristed, rightoner than thou of religious establishments and you'll see (and if you're lucky you'll see blood drawn).

 

(although the philosophy tends to still be a system of control in itself, only not in a conservative/hard-line sense)

Not all aspects of all religions are all about control, in my view. Which isn't a defence of religion per se. It's just different people get different (often harmless) things out of them. No bad thing really.

[Guest alex]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

I think this article nails the literalism issue on the head...

 

Last week I co-hosted a poetry evening in one of the last remaining artists’ studios in St John’s Wood, the leafy district of north London which was once home to painters and musicians such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Arthur Bliss and Sir Thomas Beecham. We decided to give it the title “Poetry for Turning Times” – and that was before the election of Barack Obama had turned at least one prejudice on its head. I headed our flyers with the final line of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”.

 

This was once among the most famous and most quoted lines in English poetry, but some responses I received suggested it was now neither well known nor well understood. One respondent made a joke of it, suggesting it had what in some quarters would be called a “duh” quality – yes, and so what?

 

I had assumed no one would read the climax of Shelley’s peroration as a fatuous comment about the changing seasons, or at least simply as that. Of course, the ode is partly about the changing seasons: in a prefatory note Shelley informs us that “this poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains”. So, a poem about a particular wind, written at a particular moment. But any halfway attentive reading of the poem reveals that it is concerned with much else besides meteorology.

 

You may or may not agree with the critic Timothy Webb that Shelley’s “most compelling concern [in this poem] is political”, but you cannot deny that the poem has a strong political dimension. It was written in October 1819, at what Shelley considered one of the darkest points in the recent history of freedom in England. A couple of months earlier, there had occurred what became known as the Peterloo Massacre, in which a cavalry detachment charged an unarmed crowd of 60,000 in Manchester attending a meeting about parliamentary reform (remember this was still the time of rotten boroughs and suffrage strictly for the upper middle classes). Fifteen were killed and 500 wounded; in his great, angry sonnet “England in 1819” Shelley invoked “a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field”.

 

As well as being political, the poem is deeply personal. Some would say embarrassingly so: the line “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” was singled out by FR Leavis for condemnation for its combination of self-aggrandisement (poet as Christ) and self-pity.

 

The point is that the poem is clearly and consciously designed to be read on different levels simultaneously: the meteorological, the political, the personal, the religious (in a broad, spiritual sense). If this did not pose a problem to 19th-century readers but may pose one to 21st-century ones, then the reason, I suspect, has to do with the practice of biblical exegesis, or, in a wider sense, with hermeneutics – the art of interpretation.

 

For hundreds of years people in the west, not just educated people, were used to reading or hearing the verses of the Bible – the chief educational, moral, spiritual resource of the culture – on more than one level. “Medieval hermeneutics”, according to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “ascribed to the Bible four levels of meaning: literal, allegorical, moral and eschatological.” For example, certain verses from Isaiah might be read as, simultaneously, the prophet’s excoriation of the corruption of his times, a comment on individual sinfulness, and a prophesy of the coming of Christ.

 

Hermeneutics expanded in the 19th century, in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, beyond biblical interpretation first to include all texts and speech and then the whole range of human activity and culture. The interpreter’s aim, according to Schleiermacher, is “to understand ... the text even better than its author”. Every text, and every human activity, Dilthey argued, is culturally and historically conditioned; to gain a full understanding involves an imaginative sympathy which must encompass multiple perspectives.

 

You would think all this had thoroughly informed our way of thinking; we take great care not to impose unthinkingly one-dimensional interpretations on other cultures – not to be chauvinists. But the one area where we seem to have become unthinkingly literal is our own culture and its key texts. Few nowadays, apart from zealots and academics, read the Bible or Shelley at all, and if they do they struggle to see beyond the literal meaning.

 

The phenomenon of literalism is an inheritance from the Protestant reaction to the medieval church’s arrogance in appropriating the Bible for its own use. It started from a laudable desire to restore a direct and unmediated relationship between the devout Christian reader and the words of the Bible. But it has ended up flattening the multi-dimensional way of interpreting that we need to understand ourselves and the world.

I don't see why you need to believe in a God, in Jesus, etc. to achieve the last bit. You also have the problem of people who lack the intelligence to make their own interpretations and go beyond what they are told to believe in. Therein lies the problem, as you can point to any number of theological arguments but they are going to be lost on your average religious froot loop.

In any case, I was only putting forward my own pov, which is what relgion, belief, etc. is all about.

[NJS 4447]

Not all aspects of all religions are all about control, in my view. Which isn't a defence of religion per se. It's just different people get different (often harmless) things out of them. No bad thing really.

 

There tend to be two sides imo - a genuine quest for spirituality/meaning which is often combined with the control side mainly due to historical/political reasons.

 

I have issues with both but only object to the former when it's used irrationally to affect others - or indeed as in this case as an opt out from mainstream rules/laws.

[Guest alex]

Not all aspects of all religions are all about control, in my view. Which isn't a defence of religion per se. It's just different people get different (often harmless) things out of them. No bad thing really.

 

There tend to be two sides imo - a genuine quest for spirituality/meaning which is often combined with the control side mainly due to historical/political reasons.

 

I have issues with both but only object to the former when it's used irrationally to affect others - or indeed as in this case as an opt out from mainstream rules/laws.

A lot of Church stuff and so on is a social thing, which is part of what I was getting at. Most harmless really. I think anyone who believes any of it has a tile off, however.

[SloopJohn 0]

even Goethe, Newton, Tolstoy, Pascal?

[Fop 1]

Not that I advocate taking religious texts literally - far from it - but a lot of what is written is clearly (in my view) meant to be taken literally. Also, if you say much of it is meant to be metaphor, you then get into enormous problems about how to interpret metaphors written (in some cases) 1000s of years ago that have undergone dozens of translations. Basically neither option has any grounding in reality as I see it.

 

That's because religion is all about control (it has fuck all to do with God or anything else) - so in the end it doesn't really matter what it was intended to be, just if it works in that way now it will be used as such.

It was certainly all about control to start with in the case of most major religions (and still is). Places where it isn't, like in some of the liberal sections of (for example) the Anglican Church, it makes you wonder why they bother as you get the feeling some of them hardly believe any of it anyway.

 

It's still about control, go to any church committee in even the most liberal, limp wristed, rightoner than thou of religious establishments and you'll see (and if you're lucky you'll see blood drawn).

 

(although the philosophy tends to still be a system of control in itself, only not in a conservative/hard-line sense)

Not all aspects of all religions are all about control, in my view. Which isn't a defence of religion per se. It's just different people get different (often harmless) things out of them. No bad thing really.

Yup many get belonging and such, but there's always someone controlling them somewhere in the end.

[NJS 4447]

A lot of Church stuff and so on is a social thing, which is part of what I was getting at. Most harmless really. I think anyone who believes any of it has a tile off, however.

 

The danger in recognising the community role of "nice" religions like the CofE which I wouldn't dispute is that it leads people to assume its the same everywhere for all faiths - this is Harris' view of the moderates "protecting" the extremists.

[Guest alex]

even Goethe, Newton, Tolstoy, Pascal?

I'm not saying it makes you stupid, I just think it's madness. Difficult to think of a religious zealot in the modern world who doesn't strike one as being a bit mental though, which is why you haven't used modern examples maybe. In the past it's understandable to use God, etc. to explain the unexplainable. Indoctrination would probably explain their beliefs too though.

Buddhism, for example, is different because of the focus on inner enlightenment rather than worship of divinity and I can relate to that more.

[Guest alex]

A lot of Church stuff and so on is a social thing, which is part of what I was getting at. Most harmless really. I think anyone who believes any of it has a tile off, however.

 

The danger in recognising the community role of "nice" religions like the CofE which I wouldn't dispute is that it leads people to assume its the same everywhere for all faiths - this is Harris' view of the moderates "protecting" the extremists.

Yeah, I wouldn't argue with that or indeed Fop's notion that it's all about (or at least largely about) control in terms of the intent from the creators, leaders and so on. I.e. all about telling people what to think.

[Renton 22493]

even Goethe, Newton, Tolstoy, Pascal?

 

That's an odd thing to bring up. They all date from a time when the Christian religion was accepted unequivocally, and they all predate Darwin. Today, it's not really possible to be a credible scientist and theist at the same time. Of course, a lot of people 'decompartmentalise' their minds into a logical, objective section that believes only in empirical truths; and another credulous, irrational, faith-based section that does not require material evidence, but ultimately they are compromise themselves in one way or another imo. Which is one reason it is possible to have more respect for the ultra-orthodox or evangelical types, and at least you know never to talk to them socially.