[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 12:13 AM +0000 6/12/07, Stefano Mori wrote:
>
>This statement from David is from a mind thinking about literature:
>(Subjective "I" domain of Art, at the rational-level)
>
>"Pride and Prejudice is the most important novel written in English"
>
>
>This statement is an example of placing blind "faith" in a religion:
>(Subjective "I" domain of Art, at the mythic-level)
>
>"When I die I will be judged, and may go to Heaven."
>
>
>This statement is from what we normally call science:
>(Objective "It" domain of Science, at the rational-level)
>
>"F=ma"
>
>
>As you can see, two statements are not in the "It" domain of 
>science, but those two statements are very different nonetheless, 
>simply because one is located or coming from a mythic-mind, and the 
>other from a rational-mind.

	I think your reasoning here is transparently circular. Define 
art and religion as being obviously different at the beginning, then 
proclaim how you have proved they are different at the start.
	You have proved nothing other than your prejudices about 
religion (which, I can see, are necessary to fit religion into its 
appropriate place in the spiral dynamics hierarchy - another case of 
its imposed hierarchy being less than useful). People can think about 
religion with their rational mind, and do all the time. I have a 
friend who is a very confirmed rational atheist, but has a theology 
degree. He founded his university atheist and sceptics society, got 
into a lot of arguments about religion, decided to know his enemy a 
bit better, and got a whole degree in arguing about religion.


>Very broadly speaking, a mind that can think about phenomena, 
>whether the phenomena is rocks or feelings, and change it's mind in 
>the face of new phenomena, to form a more accurate picture, is a 
>rational mind in the sense that Mark means. It's rational.

	religious thinking can change in response to new phenomena, 
it happens all the time - the only difference is that for the most 
part such phenomena are subjective (just like, oh, peoples feelings 
about art)

>
>But being able to say something rational about Art, doesn't mean 
>that everything said about Art is rational. "Carravaggio is 
>blasphemously depicting Christ with dirty feet, let's hunt him down" 
>is not a rational-level art criticism, it's a mythic-level art 
>criticism.
>
>We can't really use our acceptance of rational-level art criticism, 
>("Hamlet is great"), to justify mythic-level faith, ("God is 
>great"), just because both are in the subjective domain, and not in 
>the objective domain of Science. Yeah, they're both in the same 
>domain of subjectivity, they're both "not-scientific", but they're 
>on very different levels.

	Aesthetics and religious experience BOTH involve both 
rational and subjective thought. Fundamentalists have a different 
basis of reasoning, but that does not mean they don't reason. Of 
course, plenty of them are stupid and ignorant, but religion as a 
whole has its share of great minds and thinkers, who use rational 
argument to explicate religion. Almost every major religion has its 
tradition of scholarship.
	But for the most part, both aesthetics and religion have 
their fundamentals in subjective experience not rational experiment. 
As I said, yes, religion and science are different at a fundamental 
level, sure -- but the mistake that Mark (and others) are making is 
in thinking that its religion that is special. Its not - its science 
that is special. Aesthetics, ideology, ethics, religion, most spheres 
of human thought outside the scientific, ultimately fall back on the 
individuals subjective experience and intuition.

>And actually, Mark is using the word "scientific" to mean the 
>rational-level in general, regardless of whether it's rational Art, 
>rational Ethics, or rational Science.

	If he thinks there are schools of art or ethics that are 
based solely on rationality and do not ultimately require the 
acceptance of a few arguable precepts, he'd be wrong - or at least, 
there are things that purport to be such (Immanuel Kants theory of 
morality springs to mind) and few people believe do an adequate job 
of explaining what they purport to explain, and in general they do a 
worse job of guiding people in practical ways. There certainly isn't 
a magic dividing line that makes such theories more 'rational' than 
rational Religion (we mentioned Descartes - he has some, now regarded 
as incredibly dodgy but influential at the time, 'proofs' of the 
existence of God that purport to be from pure reason, for example).
	I say again - you can't separate out religious thought as 
being less 'rational' than aesthetics, or ethics, or ideology etc. 
What you can do is separate science out as special, for rejecting the 
subjective and the non-reproducible.
	Cheers
		David
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