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I have a lot of time for Ramsay Dukes' perspective on science and religion, art and magic. He posits that they are each different ways of observing and interacting with phenomena. If you asked a scientist to describe a landscape, they would likely present you with a very different set of observations to what you would get if you asked an impressionist painter the same question. Does this totally invalidate the painter's rendition of what they perceived and were attempting to describe? From the perspective of science, it does, absolutely. From the perspective of art, a different set of judgement criteria come into play. The artist is not attempting to convey scientific truth through the painting, but a poetic understanding of a thing.
I look at this idea of conflict between Science and Religion in much the same way. My religion involves speaking to various Gods and Spirits on a very regular basis. I'm not at all interested in attempting to prove or disprove the objective existence of these deities to anybody in scientific terms. It doesn't matter. I'm not practicing science here, I am practicing religion. I'm interested in how the processes of magic and religion impact on human consciousness and thereby upon the world at large. I'm interested in how interacting with things that are apparently "imaginary", from the perspective of current science, produces effects within me and within my world that are very real and tangible.
I can look at the last ten years of my life and I can see how my involvement with "magic" and "religion" has directly shaped my consciousness and promoted real growth, hard won understanding, difficult but necessary change, a balancing of my personality, a strengthening of the weaker areas of myself, and countless other changes. This change is both internal, but also very much external and within the world - as the whole life I have created has been conditioned by these deep internal shifts that have been precipitated by magical and religious visionary experience.
So is that all unscientific hokum? From the perspective of science, yes it probably is, just as the impressionist painting from the analogy above is an unscientific baby scrawl rather than an accurate diagram. But that doesn't change the fact that something has happened to me that I have found meaningful, and which has changed my life along what I feel are positive lines. There is a real phenomenon here - somewhere within this - a certain understanding of self and other that can be gained from the religious and magical experience. This is what I'm interested in looking at and trying to understand more about. It happens. It has always happened. So what's going on with that?
I think its more progressive to try and understand this universal phenomenon of the religious experience from the perspective of someone involved in it, rather than building a sci-fi helmet to recreate the alleged "God-experience" in laboratory conditions. The living experience of a life-long relationship with the Divine cannot be duplicated in lab conditions, just as Van Gogh's Sunflowers would never have been plotted on a graph. There is a certain Mystery that resists being pinned down by the language of science, and that is why we have developed the languages of art, religion and magic to try and comprehend more of the totality of existence than that which can be weighed and measured. You can make straw men out of the religious and paint them as cretins, or you could take the time to talk to a few of them about what they believe and practice, why it is important to them, and what it does for them. You might find that what people believe, and what you think they believe, are two separate things.
I don't think any of my religious beliefs contradict contemporary science in any way whatsoever. I don't believe in creationism or intelligent design. I don't have any written dogma at all that I adhere to or feel any need to defend. Religion is an activity that I do, not something that I believe in. In a nutshell, it is "Introspection into the Mysteries." There are a variety of creation myths within my religious tradition, and I don't feel that I need to accept any of them as literal scientific truth so much as metaphors that might tell us something useful about ourselves if they are contemplated closely.
I can't see any big conflict between my religious beliefs and science, any more than I can see a conflict between my appreciation of psychogeographical art and the necessity of having an accurate A-Z to navigate the streets. Both things exist alongside one another and provide different forms of data upon the same external phenomena.
The sticking point is, of course, the matter of Spirits and Gods. However, I can accept the possibility that these deities function as the narrative hook that human consciousness requires to fathom parts of itself and its place in the universe. We tell ourselves stories all the time as a means of comprehending phenomena we are exposed to. Even science has its preferred narratives, and these scientific narratives change and develop over time, as we gather new evidence and certain narratives begin to seem more plausible than others. It is possible that the Gods might be a necessary narrative device that allows us to comprehend and interact with certain areas of consciousness and human experience that would otherwise be difficult to fathom without this poetic narrative device employed as a tool.
But I'm also happy to entertain the notion that these intelligences I interact with on a regular basis have some form of objective existence, not as physical beings, but perhaps almost like artificial intelligences that have emerged out of the field of human emotion poured towards something like love or war or death over the years. I don't know. I don't think I will ever be able to prove any of these working theories - even the more scientifically compatible ones - in scientific terms or under laboratory conditions. But that's not what I'm trying to do. That is not the intent of my endeavour.
What I am interested in is the direct results and impact that my magical and religious activity has upon my life on a day-to-day basis, how it promotes change and growth, the kind of understanding and insight into the mysteries of self and world that it gives me, the unfathomable depth of mystery that unfolds from looking into this stuff, the sense that I could spend my whole life exploring the rooms that this practice unlocks and only glimpse the tip of the iceberg of the grand mystery of existence. I didn't realise any of this was there before I started looking for it. Yet it reveals itself day-by-day like Isis slipping off her garments one-by-one in the strip club. My life is enriched for it. I am changed by it. I feel a close kinship to living parts of nature that a few years ago might as well have just been cardboard decorations in the street for all the attention I paid to them. I am continually being brought to stark confrontation with parts of my being that would be far easier to shy away from or leave unexplored, and put in a position where I must assimilate and find equilibrium with these buried, neglected or malnourished facets of my self. I have found an internal resilience and sense of direction that was not present before, and has come into being entirely as a result of my explorations of magic and religion.
These are my experiences of what you are dismissing out of hand, and I don't personally think that any of this is irrational or cretinous. It is simply another tool that I am employing - alongside science, not in opposition to it - in order to understand something about the world and my place within it.
Well, actually, i kind of think the answer to that has to be "yes". I mean, believing (especially with the religious concept of "faith") in the truth of precept X really does mean that you have to deny the truth of any precept which contradicts precept X, doesn't it?
Only if you are approaching conflicting religious beliefs in absolute literal extremist terms. It frankly disturbs me that so many people seem to think that all people who have a religious life must automatically have this extreme rigidity about what they can and cannot find truth within. I don't personally have any problem with looking at religious mysteries from numerous different angles. Not a problem. I can see how, say, Indian Tantra has an emphasis on areas that the religious tradition I practice does not dwell on so much - and that is interesting. Certain aspects of Indian Tantra might be directly contradictory to the tradition I practice - and that is also interesting. You can often comprehend more from looking at the differences between traditions than you can from the similarities. It's not a pissing contest. All of the world's religions are attempting to describe similar processes from different cultural perspectives, and all have their blind spots. I am in no sense an advocate of fly-by-night pick'n'mix consumer religion - but I think a comparative stance is essential for anyone involved in these areas.
If you speak to a religious extremist, you will get a different answer. But that rather illustrates my point. Statements are being made in this thread about "Religion" and its woes, but religion is such a mixed bag of ideas that all mean different things to different people. I'm sick of seeing things like creationism and intelligent design being rolled out as magic spells that are supposed to totally invalidate all manifestations of religious belief or activity, when all that they invalidate are the most pernicious and extremist of religious beliefs and activity. It is annoying. Not everyone who is interested in exploring the nature of reality and consciousness through the medium of religion does so with a mental age of four. |
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