How can you be sorry for someone you haven't listened to yet?!by ndd 10/01/2011, 9:43am PDT
Because you're too busy "winning."
Mischief Maker wrote:
ndd wrote:
Since you seem to have difficulty seeing through my evasive style of communication, I'll spell this one out: I stopped siding with the strict materialists a while ago; aside from the whole "dead to wonder" thing, they are dicks and sometimes unconscionably shallow.
Last Christmas I bought this CD for my niece and was telling some people excitedly about it, singing this song as an example. Their response was a wistful look and comments about how I was taking wonder out of the poor girl's life. I was stunned. On one hand, you have a model of our solar system as a process in motion, a great coalescence of matter into an enormous fusion reaction producing heavy elements, surrounding matter coalescing together into planets whose relative size and distance from this star create radically different worlds, devouring smaller matter that passes through their orbit. Though mostly clear, there is still debris from the blazing birth of our solar system wandering into the orbit of our world, caught up in the gravity, then streaking in a flaming bolt across our sky in a dazzling display of the wonders of our material world.
On the other hand, you have the "wondrous" explanation where you lie to a kid and say, "every once in a while one of those stars hanging up in the sky comes loose from its moorings and *thbbbt!* falls down."
I explicitly explained to you my cosmology, which is entirely scientific and aware of the natural wonder of the universe in both its directly experiential sense and its theoretical underpinnings, and you declared as a consequence that I was not religious and also that I was lying about being religious.
When I tried to make the case that you were being surprisingly orthodox about what is and is not religious, you just laughed and walked away, "bored."
I'm going to try this one more time and then you will have to fucking eat that you are too invested in the definition of "religion" as a term to understand what I'm talking about. Because that is specifically the problem and has been the problem this whole time: you need some words to mean some particular things and you won't accept any changes in those meanings, even if the changes are sound, functional, and interesting.
The Normal Case Of Philosophy, the case familiar to the sort of people who buy TMBG albums for their younger relatives, is that one's philosophical view of the world operates on a continuum from A to B.
A) the superstitious, supernatural, god-propitiating, magical-thinking, essentially human-centric religious view of things
B) the rational, empirical, fact-identifying, objective, essentially natural-world-centric scientific view of things.
One moves further from A into B or further from B into A, and in the middle there is the lukewarm wasteland of bet-hedgers who believe a little of whatever works for them. On this basis I can understand why you're so pissy that I appear to be migrating to A and subsequently away from B. However that's not at all what's happening.
I am making the continuum a circle and declaring the natural to be the supernatural referenced in worship. In place of a symbol or godhead I'm declaring the identifiable existence and efforts of life in and of itself to be the object of reverence. This is admittedly atypical, which is why it does us no good to stick to orthodoxies if we're going to actually talk about it. In fact it's so atypical that the more I talk about it, the more risk I run of alienating the few allies I have here. However the Parable Of Jordi Savall And The Dicks is useful to us at this point.
We're looking at the same thing: the natural universe in all its profound glory. Just like The Dicks and I listened to the same music in the documentary. We're both filled with similar awe in contemplation of the thing itself.
The subjective, personal experience of this awe comes in different degrees and we are going to call it different names. You're sticking with simple awe and I am willing to go to church over it. This isn't because we have completely incompatible notions of the experience - i.e. the difference isn't that I'm at A and you're at B - it's because I have a desire and/or compulsion to celebrate and worship and wallow in transcendent emotional states. Look, sorry, I just do. I'm at point AB.
That's it. That's all. That's why I keep saying "this isn't something that everyone needs to do and it isn't something that ought to inform any non-religious policy." In the crudest terms, this difference is like me being quietly a huge fan of everything happening in the documentary - even the irrational dewy-with-meaning words of the musicians - against a room full of scoffers. Right now you're one of the scoffers. Possibly because the language is ridiculous to you. Yet the wonderful thing doesn't stop being wonderful just because it's spoken of in terms you cringe at.
The heart inclined to reverence will find something to revere. I went to terrific lengths to pretend that this was not important to me and that the strictly rational and material was all that mattered. My life outlasted my reason, and my emo fires of crusaderly fury now have an object proper to their affections. I found a denomination in which I am allowed to think this way even while absorbing other doctrines and concepts and Gutsby's Dramatizations Of Primal Meaning, one in which I'm in complete political accord and in spiritual accord so far as it matters, and as an added bonus this denomination seems to have some job openings for people who imagine themselves to be moralists and who enjoy talking at excessive length when they are not changing adult diapers or patting backs or reading books.
This situation couldn't possibly be any more win-win. Except that Mischief Maker would rather call me a deluded liar than alter in the least way what he thinks of as "religion."
