[Seth-Trips] Fwd: [SANE] - 4/25 - God, The Limbic System and Knowledge

[Seth David Schoen]

Sumana Harihareswara writes:

> > ***
> > a brief abstract (from Burl):
> > It is significant that sacred propositions and numinous experiences are the
> > inverse of each other. Ultimate sacred postulates are discursive but their
> > significata are not material. Numinous experiences are immediately material
> > (the actual physical and psychic states) but they are not discursive.

This position is expressed in (among other things) _Snow Crash_ by
Neal Stephenson (in case it sounded familiar to any science fiction
fans here).  I have seen it elsewhere.

The argument is that the founder of a religious tradition had a
mystical experience.  These are "common" in that even notorious
skeptics like Bertrand Russell have claimed them.  (I think I had a
low-grade one myself in 1998, but nothing to compare with what some
people have experienced.)

But then, the argument goes, people try to _share the significance of
their religious experience with others_, and it gets corrupted, or,
one might say, "loses something in the translation".  There is a risk
that a religious hierarchy may form which may lose connection to the
original experience that inspired its existence!

One reason that this argument is famous is that it's a small portion of
the charges raised by the Reformation against the Roman Catholic
Church.  Those charges have gotten a lot of publicity in America.
(There are practically ad agencies set up to repeat them, actually,
but that's another story.)

I should read _The Varieties of Religious Experience_, which is also
partly about this topic.  William James is very interested in what
religious experiences have in common, and in similarites in the
religious ideas that people have derived from their experiences.

It's interesting to see how differently people have interpreted the
implications of an idea like "everyone has religious experiences": for
some people, this is grounds for adding "God" to the end of
Aristotle's "All men by nature desire to know".  For others, it shows
that religious experience is natural -- so, not supernatural.

Burl's concern will probably be -- you have this experience (like in
NetHack: "You suddenly feel that you are being watched."); then how do
you decide how to interpret its significance?  Were you unduly
influenced by someone else's theological ideas?


Anybody up for a trip to HSC, Sweet Tomatoes, and CostCo in Santa
Clara this Saturday (April 28) or the one after (May 5)?

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5