Connection between superstition and education: Did ancient people have greater awareness, or were they just greatly more superstitious? Professor Loyal Rue, on the basis of religion, from his address in session six of the Beyond Belief symposium: In my view, all religious traditions are narrative traditions. They all have at the core, at the centre, way down deep, a myth, a story. And it’s not just any old story, it’s a special kind of story that really brings together and integrates two different kinds of ideas. Every religious tradition has cosmological ideas, that is, ideas about how things are ultimately in the world, and every religious tradition has moral ideas, that is, ideas about which things matter ultimately for human fulfilment. Now, religious traditions bring these together in a centralised, integrated myth. That is to say, ideas about how things are, brought together and confused with ideas about which things matter. I think this is what’s unique about religious mentality, that facts and values are confused. And this is important because it provides the religious perspective with a cosmos that is infused with value, and it also provides us with values that have some sort of cosmic endorsement. If they have cosmic endorsement, then they will work in our minds with the same kind of authority that facts have. Which suggests then, and I don’t think we can over-emphasise this, that the central myth of a cultural tradition provides us with a single, unified vocabulary that gives an ultimate explanation for all facts; at the same time, it gives us the ultimate justification for all values. Now, how does that happen, what can link these two together? In religious traditions, what can bring those together is metaphor. We have these metaphors that can somehow integrate facts and values. The dominant metaphor in the Abrahamic traditions is the metaphor of god-as-person, the personal god. This brings together facts and values; it provides the ultimate explanation for facts and the ultimate justification for values, because in effect God is the creator of the world, the creator of all reality, and also the author of the moral order. One God creates both the world of facts and the world of values. This is in the Abrahamic tradition; other traditions have other metaphors that work to provide the same functions. Indian traditions have the Dharma as that kind of metaphor that performs the same sort of functions; the Chinese traditions, the Tao; in Ancient Greek traditions, the Logos. These are notions that integrate facts and values. But that’s not all there is to religion, because there are strategies. Once ideas are brought together in an integrated myth that brings together facts and values, it’s important for that story to get into the heads of everybody in the culture. And it’s important to get our brains organised in a similar way so that we see the world in a similar way, we’ll be on the same page and then we have the basis to share a culture. So religious traditions have developed all these strategies for refreshing the story, for maintaining the story, for revitalising the story. https://youtube/watch?v=ngVE40frqko
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 11:30:20 +0000
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