[MD] John's Reading of Absolute Idealism Confirmed by Bob

[david buchanan]

John Carl said:
... but then one thing I gleaned from the reading is the absolute detestation of any terminology smacking of theism, so I certainly won't be making THAT mistake.
Lu wondered:
I don't really understand why theistic terminology is so detestable. I mean, I understand the rejection of "religion", or religious terminology, but it seems that too often the baby is thrown out with the bath water.


dmb says:

If we stick with that analogy, I think that theism is the bath water to be thrown out and actual religious experience is the baby that ought to saved. 
One could also make a case that theism is the social level version of SOM. In the same way that SOM construes truth as a correspondence between a subject's understanding and the objective reality to be understood, theistic religion construes spirituality as a proper relationship between one's soul and the God that created it. 
One thing worth noticing, I think, is the consistency in Pirsig's attitude toward Bradley's idealism, Hegel's Absolutism and even what he saw as James' attempt to fuse religion and science. In each case, he's basically objecting to the various attempts to sneak God in through the back door. In the case of William James, however, Pirsig changed his mind after a second look at James' work. I don't think that Pirsig says anything about the difference between early James and his more mature work but it looks to me like James was increasingly less sympathetic to theism as the years went by. In "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, he hadn't yet worked out any way for people to make any claims about their own spiritual experiences that could reach beyond their own private truth. By the time he was writing his essays on radical empiricism, by contrast, he had worked out a coherent system which demanded a place for these experiences and yet it also ruled out the assertion of trans-experiential entities like "God" and "the Absolute". 
Chapter 30 of Lila is quite specifically and explicitly about these issues and in a way it is the culmination of everything he's said up to that point. There you'll find some very interesting stuff about the relations between religion, insanity and mysticism. A re-reading of that chapter might not supply the answers you're looking for but it would probably prompt more specific questions or more focused objections. The relationship between the saints and priests, for example, really gets at the heart of his objections to theism. He offers some explanations about the relationship between mysticism and Dynamic Quality there and I think that is key to understanding the whole MOQ.
I would also point out that things like Zen Buddhism are quite literally godless religions. See, he's not opposed to religion per se, just the theistic kind. He's not opposed to spirituality, just the supernatural kind. The MOQ is itself a form of philosophical mysticism and in that sense one could even say it constitutes a religion. And as a form of the perennial philosophy, I think, the basic idea is that religions are static forms that follow from actual spiritual experiences and historically the problem has always been that they are too static, too rigid. So much so that they tend to forestall or prevent the very kinds of experience they're supposed to preserve and foster. Or, to put it more harshly and simply, theistic religions tend to retard spiritual growth rather than facilitate it as it should. 
And finally, if we step back from these philosophical issues and just assess organized theism in our own culture, based on what we know from reading newspapers and such, these institutions are pretty darn sick. They've hitched themselves to reactionary political causes, robbed countless old ladies of their cash and molested our children. Not to mention terrorism. These are among the last people who should be yelping about God.
Thanks for asking,
dmb 


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