[MD] New Model Army, Mystic(DQ) Experience, and Religion (SQ) as Power

[david buchanan]

Case said:
>There is a body of evidence from the neurosciences suggesting that our
>brains have multiple ways of processing sensory input. There is a rational
>component and an emotional component. It makes sense to talk about a 
>culture
>having a preferred mode as Benedict does. But I find the idea of pre and
>post misleading. As if we were mentally ill, then got rational for a while
>and now we are over it. We are now not sure where we are going but it's up.

dmb says:
The idea of pre and post rationality will be very confusing if you try to 
think of it as the distinction between emotion and rationality. And mental 
illness has nothing to do with it. The idea is very simple. A baby is born 
without rationality and as the cognitive abilities grow, they move through 
various stages of development. Rationality is achieved at age 11 or 12, for 
example. Its not correct to say that 10 year old children are mentally ill 
or stupid or any such thing. And a post rational mind is not one that 
reverts to a child's mind, of course. Its just that she's achieved cognitive 
skills that go beyond mere logical consistancy and can begin to see things 
from multiple perspectives, can handle a greater degree of abstraction and 
the like. The transrational mind retains rationality, but also adds 
something more to it. The pre-rational mind just hasn't arrived yet. Sadly, 
most people do not develop much beyond rationality. In fact, some people 
would simply say that its a misleading idea or otherwise deny that there is 
such a thing. But, unless Ken Wilber is a world class fraud, this idea is 
based on a heaping helping of psychological data from many different 
sources.

Case said:
>Religion tends to take emotions seriously. Science takes rationalization
>seriously. One may be preferred over the other; but things work out best
>when the left brain knows what the right brain is doing.

dmb says:
i think this is a false dilemma. And I think its irrelevant to the pre/trans 
fallacy. See, scientist can get very emtionally involved in their work. 
Physicists are warm people who drink beer and tell jokes just like everybody 
else. I'm just saying that the validity of one's beliefs can't rightly be 
measured in terms of how good they make us feel. The philosophical 
justifications for our beliefs simply can't be assessed in those terms. This 
is not a denial of the importance of emotions. This is not a condemnation of 
people who have feelings because everybody does. But if a scientist fakes 
his data to fit his theory or ignores the data that challenges his theory 
simply because its personally meaningful, then he's full of shit too. He's a 
bad scientist and a dishonest person. Same thing with religion. In either 
domain, some assertions can be well justified and some...  um, not so much.

dmb had said:
...this is basically the difference between traditional theism on the one 
hand and philosophical mysticism on the other. One is pre-rational while the 
other is post-rational. And since both are NOT
rational, people get confused and think they are the same. This confusion is 
pretty much the definition of tragedy.

Case replied:
Perhaps, I am confused. How do they differ; in the Quality of their 
emotional content or in the Quality of their rationalizations?

dmb says:
They differ in their relationship to rationality. One comes before and one 
comes after. One is based on what you're told by tradition and the other is 
based on what you know from experience. Ironically, the tradition was 
originally based on the experience and is suppose to refer to it and lead 
you to it.

And the word "rationalization" is an insulting term isn't it? I mean, isn't 
a rationalization is a form of self-deception? Its where you convince 
yourself that its alright to do something when you actually know that its 
wrong. Isn't a rationalization basically a bullshit excuse that we cook up 
for ourselves? Anyway, you seem to be using it as a substitute for 
"justification" and so I've just been taking that way and not as the mockery 
it might otherwise be.

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