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

[david]

John said to Andre:

I think John McC might have had a different point in mind than the one picked out here. [..."gripe seems to be that the MOQ does not fulfill their innermost longing."]  I think his point might have been something along the lines of the following essay, composed by Royce in homage to his friend and mentor, William James:


dmb says:

I responded to nearly of John M's points and none of them reminded of James. If he had been talking like James, there would have been no good reason to make so many corrections. In fact, Royce's description of James only helps to explain those corrections. 


John McConnell had said to dmb:

 But 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.)


dmb replied to John M:

...As a 
matter of fact, it was Pirsig who used the those words ("intellectual 
garbage" and "low quality" ) to describe "faith". And that's the KIND of
 religion that Pirsig rules out. I'm talking about "excluding" 
faith-based, social level religion precisely because it has no respect 
for the Dynamic Quality or for intellectual quality. In that sense, the 
MOQ is anti-theistic. But the MOQ is also a form of mysticism, is a 
non-theistic religion, a form of American Buddhism, an advocate of the 
perennial philosophy (which says the esoteric mystical core of the all 
the great religions are in agreement).  ...I tried to show the CONTRAST between mystics (those with
 actual experience of the "divine") and the traditional faith-based 
religions, how Christianity misconstrued mysticism as some kind of 
blasphemy, which has been in the business of prohibiting and interfering
 with the possibility of having an actual experience for yourself. For 
many centuries this prohibition was even enforced with the threat of 
death. That's what's wrong with social-level, faith-based religion. It's
 idolatry. It's the unreflective, unexamined worship of a set of dogmas,
 rituals and traditions. That's why it is neither Dynamic nor even 
intellectual.


dmb replies presently:

It's pretty easy to see this same idea in Josiah Royce's description of William James's view. "The old-world types of reverence for the external forms of the church find no place in his pages," Royce said. "In James eyes, the forms, the external organizations of the religious world simply wither; it is the individual that is more and more." These are the static forms that Pirsig demotes in favor of direct experience. John M continued, explaining that 
"one of the key issues with the MOQ" for him is that  Pirsig "deliberately excludes the most 
significant dimension of my human experience!" and how the MOQ "comes up short and says, 'Your experience doesn't count.  It isn't valid, and there's no place 
for it in the MOQ.'" "Where did you get that idea? Nothing could be further from the truth," I said."
 The MOQ absolutely does NOT say any such thing. Quite the opposite, in 
fact."


I doubt very much that John M was defending the importance mystical experience. I think the "inner experience" he treasures is all wrapped up in a particular religion, faith of a certain form and Christian theism in particular. That is the static stuff that we do NOT find in James 's work on religious experience. This is all about the difference between static quality and Dynamic Quality, which are the centrals terms on which James and Pirsig agree. 


Finally, I think you (John) like the quote from Josiah Royce's "William James and the Philosophy of Life" because you want to see yourself as the contrarian genius who has been unjustly persecuted, as opposed to a regular person who doesn't understand very much.  I strongly suspect you quoted the passage from Royce because you want to identify with "religious geniuses everywhere.  World-renowned saints of the historic church," and with the "obscure and ignorant revivalist, with faith healers, with poets, with sages, with heretics, with men that wander about in all sorts of sheepskins and goatskins, ...who, by inner experience, have obtained the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." And why wouldn't you? It's so much better to be counted among "the religious geniuses (like the Zuni Brujo, no doubt), the unpopular inquirers, the noble outcasts," and other heroes than it is to be counted among the confused. 


This kind of persecution complex is very useful when the purpose is self-aggrandizement or when trying to generate immunity from criticism, provided that people find it convincing. But you're motives are far too transparent for that, John. You're not fooling anyone, except maybe yourself. You should give it up - or get much, much better at it.