[MD] new blog

[Krimel]

Krimel said:
Shouldn't a belief system be judged by the amount of original experience it
gives rise to?

dmb said:
Yes, and that's why I quoted and/or invoked Pirsig, James, Campbell etc on
the problem of literalism, with Christian fundamentalism being the prime
example in our own culture. But, as the references to the "promised land" of
Judaism and the Ganges river in Buddhism showed, this is a problem is all
religions. Each religion has a system of symbols that work to precipitate
this original experience but to the extent that these symbols are read as
facts they fail to function, they become opaque and block the light. Then,
to put it in Christian terms, the resurrection become something you believe
in rather than something that happens to you. Or, to put in terms Judaism,
the promised land becomes a war zone rather than a state of mind. And in our
scientific, technological, rational world this misreading extends very far
indeed.  

[Krimel]
I guess my big problem with what you say here is that you and your posse
seem to think you can dictate the "correct" interpretation of mythical
symbols. Youse guys say that the "promised land" is an internal state and
perhaps it is. But that doesn't mean that those who wrote the Mythos or
those who read it have to share your interpretation or that their
interpretation is invalid. The whole point of a Mythos is that is resonates
differently to different people and to different people in different times
and places. No one has a monopoly on mythical truth.

dmb says:
This would serve as a fine example of the kind of literalism that destroys
the meaning of symbols. The practice of speaking in tongues in an imitation
of a story from bible as it is understood literally. I forget exactly how
the story goes, but basically it's a miraculous redemption of the curse
imposed on humanity in the tower of babel story wherein we are no longer
confounded by language. There is a sudden healing of the rift so that we are
no longer separated from each other by language. In the literalized version
the idea is basically that one spontaneously knows how to speak some foreign
language so as to be able to preach the gospel in their own tongue. But when
this story, or rather these stories, are not taken literally they refer to
that state of nirvana, that pre-intellectual, pre-linguistic unity that Jill
Bolte Taylor experienced. In this view, the holy spirit is not a
supernatural giver of super powers but a state of consciousness wherein the
distinctions between self and other are absent. It's a symbolic reference to
that pre-verbal, undifferentiated awareness, that original lack of division.
But it's never understood that way in the evangelical churches precisely
because it fails to give rise to the experience. I suspect that if the
church leaders ever had a first-hand experience of this mystical awareness
they would see that the story symbolically references it and then they
wouldn't encourage the actual, literal babbling that goes on every Sunday.

[Krimel]
If your point is that truth and facts are not the same then I say amen to
that. The problem with fundamentalism is just that. Much of your ongoing
critique of Christianity is aimed at a kind of gutter faith. There is a
doctrine that supports this gutter faith called inerrancy. It holds that God
Almighty is the personal author of the Bible and that every word contained
therein is literally the infallible Word of God. This is a childish notion,
easily dispensed with through the reading of just a few passages of
scripture and by pointing out that declaring a book to be divine is nothing
short of blasphemy. But it is persistent among the faithful. 

All this is really beside the point. My real question remains: by what
authority do you praise the experience of someone who has had a stroke and
under gone massive brain damage and yet discount the mystical experiences of
millions of Christians? You remind me of a scene from one of Woody Allen's
movies (either Annie Hall or Manhattan) where Woody is talking to a women at
a cocktail party. She said, "God, after all these years I finally had on
orgasm and then I found out it was the wrong kind..."

What's the right kind?

I have never ever denied that people have mystical experiences. They result
from stroke and frontal lobe seizures and ingesting certain chemicals and
through meditation and through certain ritualistic practices and from
attending certain gatherings and from watching the sunset and attending a
childbirth. They are great and wonderful. They feel good. They are life
changing. They are healthy. But my questions still remains, So What? What
conclusions either spiritual, metaphysical or factual can be drawn from
them? We have a wide variety of experience as radical empiricism suggests
but what in radical empiricism suggests to you that a certain class of
experience is privileged as a source of Truth over any other?

dmb says:
Well, then you're not a very good reader because I've provided the
explanations in the words of James, Pirsig, Campbell, Jung and my own. I've
explained it in terms of empiricism, brain science, mysticism, symbolism ,
linguistic and psychology. I honestly don't know how that can fail to work
for you. You seem like a smart guy. 

[Krimel]
Perhaps, I am not the careful reader you suppose me to be but I have not
heard you say anything that suggests anything more that quantitative or
superficial differences about Christian practice that would disqualify it as
being mystical. At a large "altercaller" revival people who are taken up in
the Spirit experience what sounds from their accounts of it like ecstasy;
union and personal communion with the living God. Are whirling dervishes to
be excommunicated by you because they are just spinning in circles. Are the
Huks disqualified because they transmuted ecstasy into a berserker frenzy?
Do native american sweat lodges not count because practitioners believe they
are literally communing with real spirits? Do symbols have to reach some
Dave approved level of abstraction before we're allowed to use them?

Just what kind of orgasm qualifies as the "right kind" for you, Dave. 

I'm with Woody on this one. His response at the cocktail party was something
like, "Wow, that's odd, every one I've ever had was right on the money?"