[MD] MOQ is good. What is it good for?

[Ant McWatt]

Mary,

You said yesterday:

"Someone who is distractingly named John on MD..." 

Ant McWatt comments:

In the early 21st century Ms Friend, you will still find the name "John" (as with "Dave" and your own monicker "Mary") relatively common in social circles in what many people call the "Western world".

Anyway, this John (who is no distraction IMHO unlike "your" John Carl who is a basically a "waster" - for the culturally uneducated, that is slang term for "someone not worth dealing with"; circa, 1995, Lewes, Sussex, England  - where the formulation of the 1776 US Declaration of Independence also started from btw, with Thomas Paine) though, as can be seen in some of Mr Carl's debates with Dan Glover, not always.

Secondly, the "second John" you are talking about is John McConnell.  This John (unlike your John - as he presents himself at least) is sincere in his beliefs and genuinely wants to know some answers about the MOQ.  I don't agree with much of what John McConnell said on this Discussion board recently but I think he had guts in placing his SINCERE thoughts to this Discussion group like he did and I respect him for THAT.

Mary continues: 

"but is not our John at LS..."

Ant McWatt comments:

Firstly, not that I am THAT precious about these sort of things but LS (aka LilaSquad) is just one of the former names of MOQ Discuss.  As such, you'd think someone setting-up another Pirsig philosophy discussion group on the Internet could have at least thought of an ORIGINAL name.  Be a BIT Dynamic (to use the MOQ terminology)!  What about a name on the lines of (and the brighter of you will spot the pun here...): "Friends of Pirsig"?  You might not realise this Mary but it's embarassing for academics like me for MOQ Discuss to be confused with similar - on face value - a crank organization.  I guess it's a weight I'll have to carry (as Lennon-McCartney observed...) but - at the same time - don't expect much respect about you or your "discussion" group from me either.  You haven't read the Pirsig material closely (as I can see from the stupid, lazy remarks of yours such as writing a post on your "discussion group" stating that I had confused "romantic quality" with Dynamic Quality" of all things!) and I suggest that you put the "hard work" in to get a handle on it or, guessing that your are indeed too lazy to do this, just join the Moonies, Jehovah Witnesses or something similar and talk about why Dr McWatt is such a bastard.  But, whtever you do Mary, put the HARD WORK in, and THEN state your opinion what you might think I might or might not have said about the MOQ.  Otherwise, you'll remain as a fringe crank; not worth listening to.  Certainly from this quarter.


Mary "Friend" continues: 

"but is not our John [McConnell] at LS said":
 
'If I'm misunderstanding the MOQ, please show me.  But I don't see how I can
be mistaken.  It clearly stops at the intellectual level and clearly says,
"That's all there is."  But that's not "all there is" for me!
>From my view, the transcendent experience of faith and worship is more
Dynamic than intellectual experience, and its patterns are further advanced,
Dynamically, than intellectual ones.'


Ant McWatt comments:

A lot of "clarity" CLEARLY going on there John (Mc)!  That initially suggests to me that YOU aren't actually CLEAR  in your own mind about the MOQ.  Fortunately, just like Jesus 2000 years ago, it's a good thing I "dropped by" today to "set you straight"!  

Firstly, the MOQ is a contradiction-in-terms.  ZMM & LILA (together) are designed to answer a Zen koan; "What is the Good?" (a pity Plato didn't realise that either but never mind) which is analogous to another, much older Zen koan: "Does a dog have a Buddha nature?".  Anyway, read the letters between me & Bob (1993-98) to read that for yourself.  You have the disc with this PDF on it.  Look at it.  There's numerous other Pirsig related documents on there which you will also find helpful.

Moreover, Pirsig thinks the MOQ is a contradiction-in-terms because it is a STATIC metaphysical system (and the only one in the Western world that I know of) that manages to incorporate indefinable DYNAMIC Quality (aka LOVE, GOD, NO-THINGNESS, MOTHER NATURE depending on the cultural "space" or lens that you are looking at IT from).

So why the hell you think the MOQ stops at the intellectual level just shows to me that you need to go back to the original source materials and, maybe my PhD about the MOQ from the secondary.


Mary "Friend" (if you put this name in a novel, in this context, the editor would probably say, give this CHARACTER a more subtle surname - PLEASE!) then continued:

This argument is around a lot.  If science or the MoQ doesn't validate
religion - my religion anyway - then there's something wrong with science or
the MoQ. My experience of the divine is completely real, it is said, and I
know I've experienced God, etc., etc. 

 
John McConnell cont'd:

you haven't excluded religion???
C'mon!!  The only religion you haven't excluded is Buddhism.  You have made
it patently clear that you and Pirsig are anti-theistic.  The MOQ tolerates
religion but does not accept it as anything more than a flawed social
pattern.  You have dismissed faith in God as "garbage, low quality".
(Pirsig seems somewhat more tolerant.)


Ant McWatt continues:

Well, religion is a crutch.  If it gets an individual or a society to a path of true spirituality where you directly commune with the Divine then that is OK as far as it goes.  But, then to get another a person to get in-between this special type of communication then starts to be a minor form of evil.  Ironically, your guilty of EXACTLY the same charge that you put to Dave Buchanan.  Your own Church introduces intellectual patterns (i.e. "interpretations of God's thoughts") BETWEEN an individual and the Divine.   In this sense, the whole Roman Catholic Church is redundant.  It's fundamentally a fairground show; a BIG RIDE and people such as yourself have invested a lot of time and resources into it over the last 2000 years.  In other words, there's been a HUGE investement in keeping this particular show going.  However, I'm sorry about this but the FUNFARE (i..e the Universe) goes on quite happily whether your particular ride stays open or closes down tomorrow.  Churches can be great social places fopr numerous reasons but they don't need priests or bishops.  The latter are for children and people without self-confidence in their own spirituality.  Maybe you need to just need to grow up a bit in this regard.  I don't know; that's an personal issue for you to think on with.

Moreover, I suggest you might want to take a closer look at what David Buchanan says in his posts here, and why Pirsig and myself believe, out of anyone, that Mr Buchanan "gets" the MOQ better than anyone else that you care to find on the Internet.  You might learn more from him than you care to believe...  Paul Turner (an MOQ myth in his own lunchtime; read him in discussion with John McConnell at robertpirsig.org), Arlo and Horse also come a very close second IMHO and are always worth listening to.  Dan Glover is rapidly catching-up with them (judging by his recent conributions here) as are most sincere regular contributors here from Andre, Jan-Anders, Ron Kulp and Craig Erb.  I don't know about Bob himself but I'm seeing some real intellectual progress here recently.  (I suggest that anyone who thinks differently, head to the nearest WC to them asap, put their head "deep" in the basin as possible and keep flushing until "enlightenment" in this regard is achieved.   Don't forget to send me the photographs of the said event and I'll gladly publish them in full - with a dedicated page on their own - at robertpirsig.org.)  


John McConnell cont'd:
 
 Pirsig avers that the four levels of the MOQ embrace all of evolution and
of human experience.  Well, it deliberately (and I think arbitrarily)
excludes the most significant dimension of my human experience!  I feel like
someone who sees colors, and you see shades of grey and insist that seeing
color is "very low quality".  I agree that some "very low quality" patterns
have been of religion and in the name of religion. What's very low quality
is subversion of color vision (faith) to social institutions that screw it
up, or to bad intellectual constructs that are used to judge and abuse other
people.  But seeing color isn't a bad thing just because you don't!


Ant McWatt coments:

And, this is what happens when you don't read original source materials properly and also have a "pet love" that you want to see incorporated in the MOQ.  In Rev McConnell's case it is a THEISTIC God which I'm afraid does not exist - at least not in the "Spirituality for Kids" context that his Church has espoused since the Roman Emperor Constantine (the not-so- Great) threw out women and their point of view about Jesus in the 3rd century AD.  

 Though to be fair to Constantine, maybe he was surrounded by church women like Mary Friend.  He still shouldn't have done what he did but I think CAN understand why now.

Thanks for the trip,

Ant


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