roseweird posted:babyfinland posted:for the love of god read talal asad
what would you like me to read
anything really but i guess formations of the secular would be good to start
babyfinland posted:for the love of god read talal asad
lol "Using a genealogical method developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and made prominent by Michel Foucault"
Lessons posted:babyfinland posted:for the love of god read talal asad
lol "Using a genealogical method developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and made prominent by Michel Foucault"
lol!
roseweird posted:babyfinland posted:roseweird posted:babyfinland posted:for the love of god read talal asad
what would you like me to read
anything really but i guess formations of the secular would be good to start
alright i'll consider it but could you like at least give me an idea of what you want me to look for
no. just go read it. its your loss if you dont, i dont care if you dont care enough to not sound like a clown
roseweird posted:religion is and arises from human actions and artifacts—speech, music, dance, storytelling, farming, making, being. the truth is that very powerful experiences can be produced by groups of people in ritual action that simply cannot be produced otherwise... these experiences have powerful effects that bind us to each other in relations, harmonious or otherwise. these experiences and the means of producing them are in themselves divinity.
Telling people that religion is the real secret reason behind everything thats good is an old and evil trick that there's no excuse to believe anymore. Its unfortunate that "spiritual" has come to mean a really good experience like seeing a nice view, but also sort of funny that it's been used so vaguely for so many different things that it doesn't mean much of anything anymore.
roseweird posted:AVE_MARIA_GRATIA_PLENA posted:individualized spiritualism isnt religion in any sense and i wish youd stop pretending it is
i am not talking about individualized spiritualism, i am simply pointing out that religion holds individuals in tension with their communities. good religion does this productively and harmoniously. bad religion does not.
im a confucian too though
roseweird posted:Skylark posted:roseweird posted:religion is and arises from human actions and artifacts—speech, music, dance, storytelling, farming, making, being. the truth is that very powerful experiences can be produced by groups of people in ritual action that simply cannot be produced otherwise... these experiences have powerful effects that bind us to each other in relations, harmonious or otherwise. these experiences and the means of producing them are in themselves divinity.
Telling people that religion is the real secret reason behind everything thats good is an old and evil trick that there's no excuse to believe anymore. Its unfortunate that "spiritual" has come to mean a really good experience like seeing a nice view, but also sort of funny that it's been used so vaguely for so many different things that it doesn't mean much of anything anymore.
that's not what i said at all, if you read closely you'll see i pointed out that there is good and bad religion, and of course all religion has mixed effects because it acts on human beings, who are morally ambiguous. religious experiences are not good or bad, they are just very intense and have a powerful role in defining your relationship to the world and other people. also i don't think i used the word "spiritual" once. i am not talking about "spirituality", i am talking about religion, about congregations of people engaged in worship and the sharing of common values. religion is not inevitably good, it is simply inevitable, and therefore it is our responsibility to shape it for good
What I was saying was that the part I quoted,
roseweird posted:religion is and arises from human actions and artifacts—speech, music, dance, storytelling, farming, making, being. the truth is that very powerful experiences can be produced by groups of people in ritual action that simply cannot be produced otherwise...
isn't true, and is the same as when someone claims that, say, seeing the sun set at the beach is a necessarily "spiritual" thing (not that it can't be). Its dishonest and manipulative.
roseweird posted:they are judged by the way they transform the world, both in terms of what they do and how they do it. the best are those that justify themselves by their actions in reality while minimizing the suffering of their agents.
so good things are good, and bad things are bad?
- DaKewlguy
roseweird posted:jools posted:roseweird posted:they are judged by the way they transform the world, both in terms of what they do and how they do it. the best are those that justify themselves by their actions in reality while minimizing the suffering of their agents.
so good things are good, and bad things are bad?
yes, you are equipped with a mind and are fit to judge these things, aren't you?
Liberal decides theyre the grand arbiter of which religions are good and which are bad, film at 11
roseweird posted:AVE_MARIA_GRATIA_PLENA posted:In conclusion, religion is a land of contradictions. Some religions are good, while others are bad. Good religions are good because they are good. Bad religions are bad because they are bad. Thank you Mrs. Malloy I hope you have a great summer
heh, guess you popped my balloon, mr. movies
thats ms prop d to you
derpina: "uhh.h..... i read foucaults pendulum"
le me: O___________________________O *earth's axis shifts several degrees under the collective weight of every real intellectual on the freakin planet facepalming simultaneously*
roseweird posted:babyfinland posted:how can a thing be both the signified society, the signified acts and then also a discrete thing which is good or bad. jews.
it is a process whose substrate is humans, whose effects are moral sorting and the direction of human life, and which reflects on and judges itself, i don't see what is so hard about this
you're reaching for the thing but asad already did it. http://www.iupui.edu/~womrel/Rel433%20Readings/01_SearchableTextFiles/Asad_ConstructionOfReligionAnthroCategory.pdf
In what follows I want to examine the ways in which the thcoretical search for an essencc of religion invites us to separatc it conceptually from the domain of power. I shall do this by exploring a universalist definition of religion offered by an eminent anthropologist: Clifford Geertz's "Religion as a Cultural System" Ireprinted in his widely acclaimed The Inter/JretatiOll of Cultures (1973)). I stress that this is not primarily a critical review of Geertz's ideas on religion - if that had been m}" aim I would have addresscd myself to thc entire corpus of his writings on religion in Indonesia and 1,.,lorocco. My intention in this chaptcr is to try to identify some of the historical shifts that have produccd our concept of religion as the concept of a rranshistorical essence - and Gecrtz's articlc is merely my starting point.
It is part of my basic argument that socially identifiablc forms, prcconditions, and effects of what \vas regarded as religion in the medieval Christian epoch were quitc different from (hose so considered in modern society. I want to get at this well-known fact while trying to avoid a simple nominalism. What we call religious powcr was differcntly distributed and had a different thrust. Therc were different ways in which it created and worked through legal institutions, differcnt selvcs that it shaped and responded to, and different categories of know- Icdge which it authorized and made available. Ne\'crrheless, what thc anthropolo· gist is confronted with, as a consequence, is not merely an arbitrary collection of elements and processes that we happen [0 call "religion." For thc entire phcnom- enon is to be seen in large measure in the context of Christian attcmpts to achieve a coherence in doctrincs and practices, rules and regulations, even if that was a state never fully arr.lined. My argument is that thcre cannot be a universal definition of rcligion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships arc historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursivc processes.
A universal (i.e., anthropological) definition is, however, precisely what Geenz aims at: A religion, hc proposes, is "( I) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in mcn hy (3) fomm· lating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (90). In what follows I shall cxamine this definition, not only in order to test its interlinked assertions, but also to flesh out thc counterclaim that a transhis· torical definition of religion is nO( viable:.