Posts by Kracklite
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Blah, blah, blah. You, of course, know what these people, noble savages to a man, believed. It's a basic psychological fact, after all.
That's a straw man argument... and information of these 'noble savages' (hyperbole on your part - I said no such thing, merely that 'primitives' have brains no smaller than our own) is cunningly concealed in libraries. There may be one hidden in your town. Look under 'anthropology'.
Valuing sincerity enables societies to function, to use your words.
OK, but where does 'sincerity' equal 'objective truth comprehensible to a human' as you presented it? Such a connection is absurd. We're savannah apes, with modifications. No more. The savannah is not the universe as it really is.
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After enduring decades of discrimination and abuse, Atheists fight back with words, only to be accused of bad manners.
I find myself ironically amused, as an atheist, to be interested in anti-atheist arguments. An accusation of bad manners is surely better than being burned at the stake. To quote Laplace on God, 'I have no need for that hypothesis', (take that, Pascal!), and anything that has the capabilities of 'God' must be inconceivable to any human being and therefore any human-originated religion or cosmological schema is absurd, but I can only admit to being 99.99999999... % sure of the nonexistence of any transcendent order or being.
This paradox is something that I find amusing.
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storm god sincerely believed that they would make the storm stop by doing so
...which really begs the question of whether sincerity is a virtue in itself by your own argument. If it is nonfunctional, then it is not a virtue.
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You stretch it beyond recognition.
Beyond your recognition. I'm not responsible for your limits.
The people who sacrificed to the storm god sincerely believed that they would make the storm stop by doing so.
Actually, not. Animist religions had/have nothing to do with 'controlling' nature by 'appeasing' it, but serve to articulate a functional relationship and hierarchy. However illusory it might be, psychologically, it enables societies to function despite their fundamental inability to control nature. That is the point of such religions. People who are unable to articulate a functional relationship... are not able to function. It's a basic psychological fact.
Their sacrifice was a solution to the problem of the storm. It didn't work, but they did not know that
It is an arrogant fallacy to assume that 'primitive' equates with 'unintelligent'. 'Primitive' people are, if anything, far more aware than we are that they cannot control nature. Clearly they could observe that the storm could not be appeased or controlled, but they could declare that they were subordinate and should therefore behave accordingly.
And yes, sincerity is a virtue.
Why? What external force or telos validates it?
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To call that a religion is stretching the term somewhat
Yes, my point exactly. The point should be stretched.
would be insincere to use as a tool something in which one does not believe.
So? Is sincerity a virtue? The measure of its value is whether it works on the whole for the species.
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... and Nick.
Sorry if I missed anyone. I'm in a generous mood.
Or, occasionally, indulge it. I regard my irrational thoughts as poetic. They have a place.
Yeah, they're ways of describing, within the bounds of human cognition, a relationship with a cosmos that is not really in any way anthroppocentric. One either throws up one's hands and declares utter disconnection and nihilistic despair, or acknowledges the 'fictional' but affecting sense of existential engagement. Myth and fantasy are not objective falsehoods, they are tools.
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Rich, Stephen, Scott, Philip...
heartily agree.
Please don't get me started on Part or Tarkovsky, otherwise I'll never stop in my raptures...
Or Lovecraft.
Strogly recommend S. T. Joshi's biography of the man, if you can get it on abebooks.com
(Hic).
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Thoughts on religion. Slipped into Scotch-induced garrulous rambling mode...
Also, collaterally, too drunk to be arsed finding links mode...
There was announced recently a project to research religion from a scientific basis... why the hell do we shaved monkeys do that sort of thing and so on... the immediate objection was, 'well, what do you mean by "religion", exactly?'
While John Gray is (aha, thank you Robert Fox) is definitely, deeply, annoyingly frustratingly unhinged, his book Black Mass has some damn good points to make, he does go over the top and shoot himself in the foot (which is almost as bad as mixing metaphors, or diluting Scotch, but I digress).
Apocalyptic or transcendental religion is of a different category than, say, animist religion. I mean, the former is based on a specific expectation of there being a grand cycle of time and a superior overseeing forces, which the overtly religious see as being governed by a (usually) monotheistic God or in its covert manefestations, the 'invisible hand' of market forces, or Marx's historical inevitability. I think Gray is right to characterise Marxists as covertly religious with their myth of an impersonal force governing human affairs, a telos as it were, and of course an apocalypse in which all would be revealed and all of the unworthy conveniently eliminated (in satisfyingly appropriate and painful ways).
On the other hand, 'animist' religions are a form of cognitive mapping. These are religions that anthropomorphise nature... the storm appears because it has a will and needs and must be appeased. You can make sacrifices to that storm god and objectively the storm is no such thing with no such needs, but the community needs to find a way to articulate its relationship with nature. This serves no 'objective' goal, but satisfies existential needs and is in many ways more pragmatic - there's no expectation of justice in this world of the next, less of a need to slaughter the unbelievers and the basic mode of thinking, which is -how do we find a way of articulating our relationship with nature' is the basis of modern science, which eventually evolved its empirical self-checking methods.
I suspect that the real conflict is not between the 'superstitious' and the self-declared 'rationalists' (amongst whom I'd include the crypto-religious Marxists, actually), but between the transcendentlist and apocalyptic and the the animist and proto-scientific. Possibly this survey means that we have a natural tendency towards animism despite the transcendentalist/apocalyptic conditioning of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic metanarrative and that there is a long-term shift going on as 'New Age' spiritual systems start to turn people away from transcendentalist/apocalyptic formal religions to a sort of animist hybrid.
Personally, I aspire to a sort of agnostic empiricism, but the evidence from evolutionary psychology is that our brains are not destined to create rational worldviews, but ones that enhance our functioning as a social species. Thus, religion will always be with us in overt or covert forms. 'Ratiionalism' is, excepting the empirical self-correction of hard science, just another religion, one that is anthropocentric but which also allows us to cognitively integrate ourselves with the matrix of the natural world.
I think we have to acknowledge the irrational, and the fact that people are irrational.
OK, back to the booze...
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But there's so much blurring around the edges, really, that I sometimes think the all these categories are ultimately unworkable.
Indeedy indeedy.
Another theorist, Brian Attebery, has come up with the term 'fuzzy sets' in his study, Strategies of Fantasy - all the borders are blurred and definitions refer only to an approximate centre about which various examples of a genre cluster, nearer or farther from it according to their idiosyncrasies.
Your publisher/s/critics do - but an author *cant.* And if it tries (I am assured)it is immediately discountenanced.
Oh well, I suppose that her 'campaigning' here was to do with ensuring that Oryx and Crake was not disqualified by being SF when it might have been a Booker candidate rather than overtly being promoted as a deserving Booker winner.
I have a considerable collection of kK/YA fiction
Or Catherine Storr? Marianne Dreams is YA but makes terrific adult horror. Pratchett's fiction for adults versus young adults, as far as I'm concerned, is distinguished only by the ages of the protagonists. I think a number of 'YA' and 'children's' writers say more or less the same thing.
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A very, very interesting discussion went on while I was away in First Life (and alas, I won't be able to follow much more of it as I have to mark four streams of student work before the weekend).
OK, on definitions of sf:
Brian Aldiss (former young turk, now fitted with OBE and pacemaker) comes up with:
Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode .
A bit wordy and legalistic, but look at the key words: "which will stand... science" Saving the last word, it would apply to any genre, but that last word is crucial as a distinguishing marker of the genre.
Darko Suvin, a Marxist critic, uses the term 'cognitive estrangement', which in a nutshell means, if a Martian were to look at what you're doing, they'd think it was pretty weird and silly - and maybe they'd have a point. SF is supposed to make people consider their thinking in a radically new context revealed by science and wonder therefore if it is not maladaptive.
A sociobiologist or evolutionary psycholgist would say for example that the instincts of a short-lived savannah ape do not prepare us for the challenge of long-term climate change. I'm interested therefore in the kind of cognition that would allow comprehension of such challenges.
In fact, I find written SF most interesting because so much of it is written by scientists indulging in speculation provoked by their research but which they cannot publish in refereed journals.
Of course, when we look at so much written and televisual SF, in my opinion, I see a confirmation of Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud__."
'Space Opera' is rather more problematic, as is the ambiguos definition of 'science fantasy'. Star Wars (which I confess, merely entertains me and does not stimulate any more thought that I don't get from reading Joseph Campbell) I do not consider to be SF because science-influenced thinking is utterly extraneous to the form and narrative. This is the case with BSG to a lesser degree, though actually BSG's speculations on the nature of 'true' human intelligence versus AI pull it back into the category, I think. For all its quasi-religious mythologising, I think that it conforms to Suvin's definition well.
But then of course, there is just sheer entertainment and bright lights and loud noises and I'll probably go and see the upcoming reboot of Star Trek before having a good cold shower of Stanislaw Lem (whose sixties speculations on military applications of cybernetics are now beloved of the Pentagon).
I've long been amused by Atwood's remarks about robots and chemicals. We have those. A documentary about a Toyota car assembly plant and paint shop would be SF by her definition. It has to be remebered however that she was campaigning for a Booker when she said that (what, they're political?) and when Aldiss was on the judging committee, he noted that if any SF-inflected candidate came up (maybe by Christopher Priest or J. G. Ballard?), he'd have to invent labels such as 'magic realism' to overcome prejudice by other members.