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Aug. 6th, 2003 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaI posted this as a comment to a post in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
philosophy and wanted to record it here for posterity.
A religious or mystical teaching is an attempt to clarify human experience of the ineffable. Such experience is a proven neurological fact.
Even though we can look at a picture of someone having an ineffable experience on an MRI screen, this does not erase the direct subjective experience when it happens. As such religion is very possibly an inescapable aspect of human existence.
Religious doctrine is what happens when people attempt to fit these experiences of the ineffable into the context of their mundane lives -- and so it is a product of subjective experience plus culture. As such it is difficult or impossible to divorce religion from the culture that birthed it, though modern society has attempted to do this -- and has given us a modern brand of religion that is rootless and therefore shallow.
Creating a chart and putting the teachings of two religions "side by side" is irrelevant because it overlooks the fact of the subjective, ineffable experience that gives religious teaching life. I believe it is more constructive to view each religion in its historical and cultural setting as a particular outpouring of ineffable experiences that are ultimately universal in nature. Instead of saying that religions are the same -- which is not correct, religions are each different and unique -- it is more accurate to say they come from the same source.
I have completed a trilogy of postings inchallenging_god regarding homosexuality in Christian teaching:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/193586.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/195526.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/196751.html
philosophy and wanted to record it here for posterity.A religious or mystical teaching is an attempt to clarify human experience of the ineffable. Such experience is a proven neurological fact.
Even though we can look at a picture of someone having an ineffable experience on an MRI screen, this does not erase the direct subjective experience when it happens. As such religion is very possibly an inescapable aspect of human existence.
Religious doctrine is what happens when people attempt to fit these experiences of the ineffable into the context of their mundane lives -- and so it is a product of subjective experience plus culture. As such it is difficult or impossible to divorce religion from the culture that birthed it, though modern society has attempted to do this -- and has given us a modern brand of religion that is rootless and therefore shallow.
Creating a chart and putting the teachings of two religions "side by side" is irrelevant because it overlooks the fact of the subjective, ineffable experience that gives religious teaching life. I believe it is more constructive to view each religion in its historical and cultural setting as a particular outpouring of ineffable experiences that are ultimately universal in nature. Instead of saying that religions are the same -- which is not correct, religions are each different and unique -- it is more accurate to say they come from the same source.
I have completed a trilogy of postings in
challenging_god regarding homosexuality in Christian teaching:http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/193586.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/195526.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/challenging_god/196751.html
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-08-06 01:24 pm (UTC)Religious experience is coming to dwell inside of a particular tradition by recognizing your experience in the holy writings or the oral teachings of others. Whether that experience is really much like those or not. The moment of recognition is where this stuff gains its meaningfulness. Otherwise, it may seem very /important/ or /intense/ but meaningless. Ex.--People who take a lot of acid, and consider it a party drug or an analogue to meaningless madness.
These experiences are similar and come to the same conclusions only so far as the people who have them are prepared alike. Most "mystics" are exceedingly well prepared, and go through a process of learning to read their experiences. This process structures the later experiences.
Even people who aren't religious will have structures that will allow recognition available to them -- hence no doubt some alien abductions, belief that you've been spirited away to fairyland, etc.
The Big Religions and most of the minor ones have been influenced by related strains of technique and interpretation--some religions look wholly elsewhere for meaning, their valuable experiences are quite different, and often have to be tortured into compliance with assumptions of the universality of religious experience.
Religions serve a lot of purposes that have nothing much to do with these kinds of experiences, and the idea of these being the particularly "religious" element seems a result of specific kinds of secularization. Religious experience retreats towards the ineffable as there are conceptions of other sorts of experience that are not religious.
Elements of social control, explaining natural phenomenon, structuring non-exceptional experience and such are often primary in a religion, and aren't necessarily after-thoughts or impositions. The relation of dogma to experience isn't clear-cut. Often, the letter precedes the spirit.
Mystical meanings often seem to have come after another more prosaic meaning--religions became mystical as people started to find their own ineffable experiences in their writings. This really seems to have happened when various traditions started having members who were influenced by neoplatonism, for instance.
Lu.