In response to this list.
Not to completely miss the point of the post (I'm ignoring the point; it's different), but as someone who actually studies the Bible, I have a lot of trouble taking this article seriously. Pointing out how ridiculous a lot of the Bible is? That's a noble end, and something that people have been doing basically since we had a Bible to point at (it's where we get the Rabbinic tradition of the Midrash, and the Kabbalah [and from that, Hasidic Judaism], and a lot of post-Biblical Christian commentary), and frankly, believers and non-believers alike should get in on the fun. We have way too many people setting the Bible up as The One Cornerstone of Western Civilization without reading it first, and I don't care if you want to rip it to shreds by pointing out the rampant ridiculousness — at least you're reading it.
But that being said, it starts with the inaccuracies in the first example. Elisha was the prophet who summoned holy bears, not Elijah. Moreover, if you wanted to show Biblical immorality and irrelevance through a rape story, it'd be better for your argument to go with the story of King David's virgin daughter, Tamar: not only does her brother Amnon rape her, but the Jonadab (the Jonah Hill to Amnon's Michael Cera) helps him set the rape up and her reward for struggling and being violated? Exile to the house of their other brother, Absalom.
BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE! Unspoken but tacit in the story (at least in the translations I've read) is Amnon's assumption that, because Tamar is beautiful, she caused him to fall in love and, thus, rape her. Now, the text doesn't treat her rape as a good act, let alone a remotely excusable one... but by not calling out this assumption, it leaves it open for rape apologists and victim-blamers to come in and take Amnon's side, especially when Tamar tries to save herself with the compromise of having their father, the king, let them get married legally. (Their father, by the way, does jack shit nothing to punish Amnon for this.)
BUT WAIT. THERE'S STILL MORE! So, Tamar goes to Absalom's house, which means that Absalom must be a pretty good guy, right? …Well, yes, kind of. But he also says to her, "Has that Amnon, your brother, been with you? Be quiet for now, my sister; he is your brother. Don’t take this thing to heart." So, uhm. You know, pardon my projecting of my 21st century values onto the story, but exactly what kind of thing is that to tell your sister after she's just had her life ruined?
Oh, and in the end? The story of Tamar's rape is not only focused on the male experience, rather than Tamar's, but it's just used as a set up to Absalom's murder of Amnon and she ceases to be relevant as soon as she's living as a disgraced woman.
Yes, I am serious. YES, THIS IS IN THE BIBLE. If you're feeling really brave, check out Ezekiel 16 — it's even worse.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
“When something is firmly classed as anomalous, the outline of the set in which it is not a member is clarified.”
I'll get this out of the way: TL;DR: Kassie talks about the cultural importance of rituals and what they're supposed to mean, then ties it back to a thesis she has about how OCD is a pathological manifestation of the human condition.
Mary Douglas & Ron talking about her is supporting my thesis that those of us with OCD are just better at being human than everybody else. As Douglas (one of the founding authors of social/cultural anthropology) writes, every culture has some notion of cleanliness codes, and with them notions of certain things being pure or impure, good or un-good (I say un-good instead of bad, because "bad" has a moral implication that is not necessarily present in all of these distinctions), etc. In Judaism, you get the kosher laws and the emphasis on purity; in Hindu (this is from her work, not mine and I read it last night so I might be misremembering), animals are unclean, but because cows are special and sacred, their genitals can be used to remove a Brahmin's impurities; in most Western society, we have germ theory, whereby we define what's clean and not purportedly by what is "hygienic," ie, what has more or less germs than anything, what is more or less likely to make you sick or promote healthfulness, etc — but if you remove the presumption of sacredness out of all of these examples, you're left with a notion of what she calls "matter out of place."
Like, for example: if you put your shoes on the table, someone is going to go, "Don't put those there; they have germs on them." But let's say that you can theoretically remove all the germs from the shoes — you'll still get told, "Well, they still don't go on the table." Shoes are for wearing on your feet. Shoes go on the ground. Tables are for eating off of, and that means they need to be protected from things that transgress the boundary of "for eating off" vs. "not for eating off." Everyone has different rationale for what boundaries exist, why they exist, what they're doing and so on, but the boundaries are still there.
Things that cross these boundaries are often (at least in Western, Judeo-Christian society) called abominations, which has a negative valence because in the Torah (especially the Book of Leviticus), it's constantly repeated with regards to the various "Thou shalt nots" handed to the Hebrews, but the original Hebrew term, To'ebah does not have a negative valence like "abomination" does. In the words of Religious Tolerance.org: The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (circa 3rd century BCE) translated "to'ebah " into Greek as "bdelygma," which meant ritual impurity. If the writer(s) of Leviticus had wished to refer to a moral violation, a sin, he would have used the Hebrew word "zimah."
Furthermore: When "to'ebah" refers to the breaking of a ritual law it might be better translated "ritually improper," or "involves foreign religious cult practice." But neither of these sources get at the heart of the matter: examples of other terms when to'ebah is used include: Egyptians and Hebrews eating together (Genesis 43:32), eating aquatic animals that don't have fins or scales (Leviticus 11:10), women wearing men's clothes and vice versa (Deuteronomy 22:5), and a woman returning to her first husband after taking a second (Deut. 24:4). The common factor in all of these things is that of mixing: Egyptians mixing their customs with Hebrews, eating things that are aquatic but aren't fish (especially lobsters, which are both aquatic and repheshim, or creeping things), defying prescribed gender roles, and trying to have two sets of marriage vows exist concurrently. Even pork not being kosher is like this: "pigs" to the ancient Hebrews would have been more like boars, which are both cloven hoofed beasts (ie, able to be domesticated, like cows and goats) and wild (ie, unsafe); because they are simultaneously both, they are anomalous and therefore, special, not to be eaten.
Or, to sum up, "abomination" as a term gets its negative valence because of mistranslations and how often the term to'ebah is repeated, when really, what it refers to in context, is anomalous things that can be simultaneously one thing and another. Vampires are actually a great example of what to'ebah means: regardless of your opinion on the psychology, philosophical ramifications, and morality of vampires, they are functionally alive, in that they move around, exhibit sentience, interact with the world, etc. …but are still also dead, in that they are reanimated corpses. to'ebah does not inherently have a positive or negative valence; the Levitical and Deuteronomical prohibitions against certain things as to'ebah simply means that part of the ancient Hebrew identity is founded in eschewing these things that cross boundaries, or establishing themselves as a people who have strict definitions for the things around them and who set apart the anomalies because they did not fall into those definitions. Douglas's thesis is that the prohibition on anomalous creatures and behaviors is meant as a way to give them special status; because they cross boundaries, they're too special for humans to eat or engage in flippantly, and recognizing this and following the prohibitions sets the Hebrews apart as being closer to God.
Fun fact: considering this, there is absolutely no basis for using your faith as an excuse to call homosexual activity immoral, or morally wrong. (This specifically refers to male homosexual activity; according to the Bible, lesbians don't exist and I think there's a Talmudic commentary that posits it might be possible for two women to sleep together, but also says that it's either so unlikely we don't need to think about it or that it's just not wrong.) Anyway, all to'ebah means for homosexual activity is that it crosses an established boundary, ie that men have sex with women and not with each other, and that it's improper for men to do so as with womankind, ie in the same way they would with women, ie in a way meant to procreate. You'd think it would go without saying that two cis-men (because physical sex and gender are the same thing in the ancient Hebrew conception thereof) can't have a baby together, so I think that the emphasis on it here is not meant to condemn the homosexual sex acts themselves as much as it is to say that they just shouldn't be used in place of sex that can produce a child. Which, you know, makes sense, considering the Hebrews are an oppressed tribal people that suffered a genocide in their recent memory around the time the narrative surrounding Leviticus took place, and were in exile, having been pretty decimated beforehand, when they started codifying these texts properly.
Okay, so back to rituals. The purpose of rituals — both religious (ie, prayer, sacrifice, etc.) and not (ie, hand washing) — Ron and Douglas argue, is then to present by way of repetitive behavior, an anodyne or a comfort, which reminds the self of its inherent selfness in the face of anomalous things, or any degree of change that makes one question one's identity. In other words, rituals remind you that you are yourself, even when outside stimuli challenge this assumption. In the context of groups, rituals reinforce group identity in the face of the outside world, ie, kosher laws being kept to remind people that they're Jewish, secret handshakes being used to identify members of the He Man No Girls Allowed Club, etc. and specifically in terms of social and religious groups, rituals are a way to return to group identity after encountering anomalies that challenge the established order.
OCD is an anxiety disorder typified by extremely ritualistic behavior that has no logical or rational explanation. Like, from personal experience: I cannot tell you WHY it gives me comfort to count things in fours, but it does. I separate my M&Ms into groups of four, I try to take bites that are multiples of four, and four and its multiples just give me comfort for no definable reason. Three and its multiples also do this, but to a lesser extent. In terms of the boundary discussion, OCD is a need to reassert the boundary between the self and the rest of the world, even when it isn't being challenged. If we argue that a fundamental part of the human experience is defining categories and boundaries, and trying to preserve our essential selfhood in the face of the chaos that arises when our assumptions about boundaries (especially re: binaries) are challenged, then OCD is an expanded, pathological version of these tendencies.
Again, in my personal experience, an aspect of my OCD relates to being constantly aware of the universe's fundamentally chaotic nature and trying to assert order over it in ways that make sense to me, even though I can't explain them to anyone else because of their inherent irrationality. Religion and science (and by extension, statistics) operate in a similar way: life is chaotic and threatening and inscrutable; religious systems of thought give their adherents a way to think of the world that's less terrifying, and science as we currently understand it is a post-Enlightenment manifestation of the same tendency, which relies on defining some kind of law in the chaos and predicting what is likely to happen based on our objective, observable experiences. Every person has some way of using a system of thought, whether or not it's religion, and OCD is a similar thing... only it doesn't make sense, even to the people who suffer from it, just as our different systems of thought will eventually crumble under the scrutiny of an assumption that everything must at its core be infallibly logical when facing examination.
This is a really existential take on everything, and I don't think I'd have the chance of coming to any of my conclusions if I hadn't read Absurdism, Camus, and Sartre for various conference projects beforehand. But basically, if the human condition is one wherein we constantly seek to define the chaos around us, and to define who we are by mapping out our relationship to the chaos by way of establishing prohibitions and rituals, then OCD is this human behavior taken to an extreme degree, coupled with an uncomfortable recognition of the inherent meaninglessness of how we operate as a species. We who have the so-called disorder have, in the terms put forth above, very sensitive notions of the boundary between ourselves and the rest of existence, as well as an easily agitated notion of order vs. chaos, and regardless of the fact that our repetitive, ritualistic behaviors are inexplicable beyond a purely sensory level (ie, "it makes me feel better"; "things are wrong and this puts them right," etc), they do what everyone tries to do in the world: they remind us that despite the outside input, we're still ourselves.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into things.
(On a personal note, some cases of Asperger's [like mine] also manifest with this ritualistic behavior, but I'm not really read up on what, if anything, differentiates the two experiences.)
Mary Douglas & Ron talking about her is supporting my thesis that those of us with OCD are just better at being human than everybody else. As Douglas (one of the founding authors of social/cultural anthropology) writes, every culture has some notion of cleanliness codes, and with them notions of certain things being pure or impure, good or un-good (I say un-good instead of bad, because "bad" has a moral implication that is not necessarily present in all of these distinctions), etc. In Judaism, you get the kosher laws and the emphasis on purity; in Hindu (this is from her work, not mine and I read it last night so I might be misremembering), animals are unclean, but because cows are special and sacred, their genitals can be used to remove a Brahmin's impurities; in most Western society, we have germ theory, whereby we define what's clean and not purportedly by what is "hygienic," ie, what has more or less germs than anything, what is more or less likely to make you sick or promote healthfulness, etc — but if you remove the presumption of sacredness out of all of these examples, you're left with a notion of what she calls "matter out of place."
Like, for example: if you put your shoes on the table, someone is going to go, "Don't put those there; they have germs on them." But let's say that you can theoretically remove all the germs from the shoes — you'll still get told, "Well, they still don't go on the table." Shoes are for wearing on your feet. Shoes go on the ground. Tables are for eating off of, and that means they need to be protected from things that transgress the boundary of "for eating off" vs. "not for eating off." Everyone has different rationale for what boundaries exist, why they exist, what they're doing and so on, but the boundaries are still there.
Things that cross these boundaries are often (at least in Western, Judeo-Christian society) called abominations, which has a negative valence because in the Torah (especially the Book of Leviticus), it's constantly repeated with regards to the various "Thou shalt nots" handed to the Hebrews, but the original Hebrew term, To'ebah does not have a negative valence like "abomination" does. In the words of Religious Tolerance.org: The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (circa 3rd century BCE) translated "to'ebah " into Greek as "bdelygma," which meant ritual impurity. If the writer(s) of Leviticus had wished to refer to a moral violation, a sin, he would have used the Hebrew word "zimah."
Furthermore: When "to'ebah" refers to the breaking of a ritual law it might be better translated "ritually improper," or "involves foreign religious cult practice." But neither of these sources get at the heart of the matter: examples of other terms when to'ebah is used include: Egyptians and Hebrews eating together (Genesis 43:32), eating aquatic animals that don't have fins or scales (Leviticus 11:10), women wearing men's clothes and vice versa (Deuteronomy 22:5), and a woman returning to her first husband after taking a second (Deut. 24:4). The common factor in all of these things is that of mixing: Egyptians mixing their customs with Hebrews, eating things that are aquatic but aren't fish (especially lobsters, which are both aquatic and repheshim, or creeping things), defying prescribed gender roles, and trying to have two sets of marriage vows exist concurrently. Even pork not being kosher is like this: "pigs" to the ancient Hebrews would have been more like boars, which are both cloven hoofed beasts (ie, able to be domesticated, like cows and goats) and wild (ie, unsafe); because they are simultaneously both, they are anomalous and therefore, special, not to be eaten.
Or, to sum up, "abomination" as a term gets its negative valence because of mistranslations and how often the term to'ebah is repeated, when really, what it refers to in context, is anomalous things that can be simultaneously one thing and another. Vampires are actually a great example of what to'ebah means: regardless of your opinion on the psychology, philosophical ramifications, and morality of vampires, they are functionally alive, in that they move around, exhibit sentience, interact with the world, etc. …but are still also dead, in that they are reanimated corpses. to'ebah does not inherently have a positive or negative valence; the Levitical and Deuteronomical prohibitions against certain things as to'ebah simply means that part of the ancient Hebrew identity is founded in eschewing these things that cross boundaries, or establishing themselves as a people who have strict definitions for the things around them and who set apart the anomalies because they did not fall into those definitions. Douglas's thesis is that the prohibition on anomalous creatures and behaviors is meant as a way to give them special status; because they cross boundaries, they're too special for humans to eat or engage in flippantly, and recognizing this and following the prohibitions sets the Hebrews apart as being closer to God.
Fun fact: considering this, there is absolutely no basis for using your faith as an excuse to call homosexual activity immoral, or morally wrong. (This specifically refers to male homosexual activity; according to the Bible, lesbians don't exist and I think there's a Talmudic commentary that posits it might be possible for two women to sleep together, but also says that it's either so unlikely we don't need to think about it or that it's just not wrong.) Anyway, all to'ebah means for homosexual activity is that it crosses an established boundary, ie that men have sex with women and not with each other, and that it's improper for men to do so as with womankind, ie in the same way they would with women, ie in a way meant to procreate. You'd think it would go without saying that two cis-men (because physical sex and gender are the same thing in the ancient Hebrew conception thereof) can't have a baby together, so I think that the emphasis on it here is not meant to condemn the homosexual sex acts themselves as much as it is to say that they just shouldn't be used in place of sex that can produce a child. Which, you know, makes sense, considering the Hebrews are an oppressed tribal people that suffered a genocide in their recent memory around the time the narrative surrounding Leviticus took place, and were in exile, having been pretty decimated beforehand, when they started codifying these texts properly.
Okay, so back to rituals. The purpose of rituals — both religious (ie, prayer, sacrifice, etc.) and not (ie, hand washing) — Ron and Douglas argue, is then to present by way of repetitive behavior, an anodyne or a comfort, which reminds the self of its inherent selfness in the face of anomalous things, or any degree of change that makes one question one's identity. In other words, rituals remind you that you are yourself, even when outside stimuli challenge this assumption. In the context of groups, rituals reinforce group identity in the face of the outside world, ie, kosher laws being kept to remind people that they're Jewish, secret handshakes being used to identify members of the He Man No Girls Allowed Club, etc. and specifically in terms of social and religious groups, rituals are a way to return to group identity after encountering anomalies that challenge the established order.
OCD is an anxiety disorder typified by extremely ritualistic behavior that has no logical or rational explanation. Like, from personal experience: I cannot tell you WHY it gives me comfort to count things in fours, but it does. I separate my M&Ms into groups of four, I try to take bites that are multiples of four, and four and its multiples just give me comfort for no definable reason. Three and its multiples also do this, but to a lesser extent. In terms of the boundary discussion, OCD is a need to reassert the boundary between the self and the rest of the world, even when it isn't being challenged. If we argue that a fundamental part of the human experience is defining categories and boundaries, and trying to preserve our essential selfhood in the face of the chaos that arises when our assumptions about boundaries (especially re: binaries) are challenged, then OCD is an expanded, pathological version of these tendencies.
Again, in my personal experience, an aspect of my OCD relates to being constantly aware of the universe's fundamentally chaotic nature and trying to assert order over it in ways that make sense to me, even though I can't explain them to anyone else because of their inherent irrationality. Religion and science (and by extension, statistics) operate in a similar way: life is chaotic and threatening and inscrutable; religious systems of thought give their adherents a way to think of the world that's less terrifying, and science as we currently understand it is a post-Enlightenment manifestation of the same tendency, which relies on defining some kind of law in the chaos and predicting what is likely to happen based on our objective, observable experiences. Every person has some way of using a system of thought, whether or not it's religion, and OCD is a similar thing... only it doesn't make sense, even to the people who suffer from it, just as our different systems of thought will eventually crumble under the scrutiny of an assumption that everything must at its core be infallibly logical when facing examination.
This is a really existential take on everything, and I don't think I'd have the chance of coming to any of my conclusions if I hadn't read Absurdism, Camus, and Sartre for various conference projects beforehand. But basically, if the human condition is one wherein we constantly seek to define the chaos around us, and to define who we are by mapping out our relationship to the chaos by way of establishing prohibitions and rituals, then OCD is this human behavior taken to an extreme degree, coupled with an uncomfortable recognition of the inherent meaninglessness of how we operate as a species. We who have the so-called disorder have, in the terms put forth above, very sensitive notions of the boundary between ourselves and the rest of existence, as well as an easily agitated notion of order vs. chaos, and regardless of the fact that our repetitive, ritualistic behaviors are inexplicable beyond a purely sensory level (ie, "it makes me feel better"; "things are wrong and this puts them right," etc), they do what everyone tries to do in the world: they remind us that despite the outside input, we're still ourselves.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into things.
(On a personal note, some cases of Asperger's [like mine] also manifest with this ritualistic behavior, but I'm not really read up on what, if anything, differentiates the two experiences.)
Women! Am I Right?: Tiamat, Eve, Pandora, and the Terrifying Vagina... I mean, Chamber of Secrets.
Or: On the issue of mankind’s place in the world and Western society’s misogynistic creation myths.
OR: a somewhat disorganized tirade about gender, definitions, and mankind's quest to find a place in the world.
Humans have trouble agreeing on things and, barring myriad series of events right out of various science-fiction novels, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes, our children’s, or their children’s. True, we can find some kind of common ground on some issues, but our species has an alarming tendency to take that and find some way or another to go right back to taking issue with one another. Take religion, for example: even people who find accord on certain notions, such as a certain Galilean prophet being the religious leader with the best idea of how things worked, find other things to quibble over, such as whether the best way to follow his teachings is through the use of elaborate, symbolic ceremonies or through faith alone. Ultimately, the different religions all answer some need or set of needs in their adherents, but different people come to the similar texts or ideas with different backgrounds, needs, and ways of projecting onto what they’re reading (or hearing, or having explained to them via pictograph, etc.), and so matters that some people think have little importance end up being the focus of someone else’s entire theology.
Likewise, the point of religion has been a constant source of trouble for humans attempting to discuss it without resorting to violence, name-calling, or so on. There is an observable need in Homo sapiens that religion caters to — a desire to find some way to place ourselves in the universe, to give ourselves some tangible role in our global (often cosmic) systems. It’s a basic question: why are we here? What does our existence mean, if anything? Not simple questions, but asking them distinguishes us from our simian cousins and, in myriad ways, they’ve been essential to human existence since someone had the bright idea to start writing things down. Even atheists and agnostics rely on finding something else to adhere to, even if this predominantly happens because they meet with resistance from the various theists; the explanation that our world and its inhabitants are most likely a fantastic accident writ large, which exist on the planet lucky enough to be at a comfortable distance from our sun, evolved through a combination of luck and natural selection favoring certain traits over others, and might be alone in the universe (though it’s too soon to tell) but are certainly inconsequential to its larger designs because our lifespans (let’s take the Biblical/Dantean route and assume seventy years) aren’t even blips on the grand timeline of universal history.
In the paraphrased words of nigh on god-like superhuman, Doctor Manhattan1: the entire human race could cease existence, our Earth could become devoid of all life, and the universe wouldn’t notice; everything outside our world would continue on as it always has because Creation — the whole of Creation — has so many galaxies with so many stars, so many processes both large and small occurring regardless of whether or not humanity blows itself into oblivion (or is demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass), certain political forces can’t agree over which “rights” are or are not guaranteed to all human beings by the fact that they exist and what the limits to those rights are, or Johnny takes Suzy to the Valentine’s Day dance. On a cosmic level, all of these events have the same amount of importance and that is none at all.2
If one wanted to get politically correct about it, then one could argue that the founding texts of our various religions, both living and dead, are all distressingly Terracentric. Projecting Western ideas onto other cultures without consideration for their traditions and modes of thinking is ethnocentric, as is assuming that our stories will have some universal truth that carries over into all cultures.3 “An ideological focus on males and men,”4 especially in topics where the male perspective is not the focus of the discussion is androcentric, and the corollary with females and women is gynocentric; related terms include phallocentric (as in Sigmund Freud and his infamous cigar) and anthropocentric (ideologically focusing on human beings, potentially but not necessarily including a belief in human superiority and/or humanity as the most significant aspects of reality).5 In the same vein, then, consider that we’re examining a system of belief (out of many) which posits that some supernatural entity — of varying degrees of power and ability to be comprehended by his/her/its human adherents — chooses to ignore the great, unfathomable expanse of the universe in order to focus on one mid-sized planet, in one star system, in one galaxy out of a potentially infinite number, often focusing on one particular group of people above all others… then isn’t it fair to call these modes of thinking Terracentric, or “ideologically focused on Earth and earthlings, to the potential exclusion of other issues”?
Well, yes. You can read it that way — but doing so really only serves to make my point for me.
Read the rest here.
_____________________________________________
1: Of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1987 graphic novel, Watchmen.
2: In all due academic fairness: as all things, these preceding interpretations of scientific observations can be spun however the reader wants to see them spun. For example, if there are so many processes going on, and so much random chance involved in human intercourse and conception, and each human being still exists as an individual, with the chances of someone ever being exactly like them being so infinitesimally small as to be statistically negligible— despite the differences that exist between us because of cultural influences, similar experience, and so on — then is that not potentially evidence for the existence of some design, and thus a designer, whether or not it’s “God,” as zie is commonly understood.
3: I’m specifically referring to anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s account of discussing Hamlet with the Tiv people of West Africa, seen here: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html
4: definition from the Wikitionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism
5: I want to note, for the sake of humor, that I’d first put “homocentric” in place of “anthropocentric.” Considering the Latinate proper name for human beings, Homo sapiens, I’d hoped that the term for “ideologically focused on human beings” would be a simple combination of prefix and suffix. Technically, it was, but it turns out that “homocentric” means “sharing a common center.” I learned something today.
OR: a somewhat disorganized tirade about gender, definitions, and mankind's quest to find a place in the world.
Humans have trouble agreeing on things and, barring myriad series of events right out of various science-fiction novels, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes, our children’s, or their children’s. True, we can find some kind of common ground on some issues, but our species has an alarming tendency to take that and find some way or another to go right back to taking issue with one another. Take religion, for example: even people who find accord on certain notions, such as a certain Galilean prophet being the religious leader with the best idea of how things worked, find other things to quibble over, such as whether the best way to follow his teachings is through the use of elaborate, symbolic ceremonies or through faith alone. Ultimately, the different religions all answer some need or set of needs in their adherents, but different people come to the similar texts or ideas with different backgrounds, needs, and ways of projecting onto what they’re reading (or hearing, or having explained to them via pictograph, etc.), and so matters that some people think have little importance end up being the focus of someone else’s entire theology.
Likewise, the point of religion has been a constant source of trouble for humans attempting to discuss it without resorting to violence, name-calling, or so on. There is an observable need in Homo sapiens that religion caters to — a desire to find some way to place ourselves in the universe, to give ourselves some tangible role in our global (often cosmic) systems. It’s a basic question: why are we here? What does our existence mean, if anything? Not simple questions, but asking them distinguishes us from our simian cousins and, in myriad ways, they’ve been essential to human existence since someone had the bright idea to start writing things down. Even atheists and agnostics rely on finding something else to adhere to, even if this predominantly happens because they meet with resistance from the various theists; the explanation that our world and its inhabitants are most likely a fantastic accident writ large, which exist on the planet lucky enough to be at a comfortable distance from our sun, evolved through a combination of luck and natural selection favoring certain traits over others, and might be alone in the universe (though it’s too soon to tell) but are certainly inconsequential to its larger designs because our lifespans (let’s take the Biblical/Dantean route and assume seventy years) aren’t even blips on the grand timeline of universal history.
In the paraphrased words of nigh on god-like superhuman, Doctor Manhattan1: the entire human race could cease existence, our Earth could become devoid of all life, and the universe wouldn’t notice; everything outside our world would continue on as it always has because Creation — the whole of Creation — has so many galaxies with so many stars, so many processes both large and small occurring regardless of whether or not humanity blows itself into oblivion (or is demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass), certain political forces can’t agree over which “rights” are or are not guaranteed to all human beings by the fact that they exist and what the limits to those rights are, or Johnny takes Suzy to the Valentine’s Day dance. On a cosmic level, all of these events have the same amount of importance and that is none at all.2
If one wanted to get politically correct about it, then one could argue that the founding texts of our various religions, both living and dead, are all distressingly Terracentric. Projecting Western ideas onto other cultures without consideration for their traditions and modes of thinking is ethnocentric, as is assuming that our stories will have some universal truth that carries over into all cultures.3 “An ideological focus on males and men,”4 especially in topics where the male perspective is not the focus of the discussion is androcentric, and the corollary with females and women is gynocentric; related terms include phallocentric (as in Sigmund Freud and his infamous cigar) and anthropocentric (ideologically focusing on human beings, potentially but not necessarily including a belief in human superiority and/or humanity as the most significant aspects of reality).5 In the same vein, then, consider that we’re examining a system of belief (out of many) which posits that some supernatural entity — of varying degrees of power and ability to be comprehended by his/her/its human adherents — chooses to ignore the great, unfathomable expanse of the universe in order to focus on one mid-sized planet, in one star system, in one galaxy out of a potentially infinite number, often focusing on one particular group of people above all others… then isn’t it fair to call these modes of thinking Terracentric, or “ideologically focused on Earth and earthlings, to the potential exclusion of other issues”?
Well, yes. You can read it that way — but doing so really only serves to make my point for me.
Read the rest here.
_____________________________________________
1: Of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1987 graphic novel, Watchmen.
2: In all due academic fairness: as all things, these preceding interpretations of scientific observations can be spun however the reader wants to see them spun. For example, if there are so many processes going on, and so much random chance involved in human intercourse and conception, and each human being still exists as an individual, with the chances of someone ever being exactly like them being so infinitesimally small as to be statistically negligible— despite the differences that exist between us because of cultural influences, similar experience, and so on — then is that not potentially evidence for the existence of some design, and thus a designer, whether or not it’s “God,” as zie is commonly understood.
3: I’m specifically referring to anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s account of discussing Hamlet with the Tiv people of West Africa, seen here: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html
4: definition from the Wikitionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism
5: I want to note, for the sake of humor, that I’d first put “homocentric” in place of “anthropocentric.” Considering the Latinate proper name for human beings, Homo sapiens, I’d hoped that the term for “ideologically focused on human beings” would be a simple combination of prefix and suffix. Technically, it was, but it turns out that “homocentric” means “sharing a common center.” I learned something today.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)