From: Erin (macavity11@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jul 20 2005 - 14:26:35 BST
Hi Matt,
Thank you for your thoughts. The warning to not interchange belief and concept makes
sense so I will try to be more careful about that.
When you gave your story what it looked like to me is that you had deconstructed your
beliefs about the concept God and then had this useless concept hanging.
You would like it to fade away but know it won't so would encourage people who do find
it useful to expand it to be less exclusive. Is this a correct
understanding of your position? Let me explain to you mine. See when I was in college I
had a postmodern teacher who did a talk titled "reconstructing God".
Now at that point I think I had deconstructed all the beliefs that were taught to me but it
never occurred to me that I could reconstruct the concept to better
fit who I was and what I believed until that talk. Your expansion of the definition is
different from my reconstruction experience thus for you your attitude
changed toward the concept of God but your concept of God never changed. Whereas
for me it was both that was changed. Now I know reconstructing can create
communication problems or better expressed by Alice;
Humpty Dumpty' "When I use a word it means just what I chose it to mean..nothing less
and nothing more.
Alice " The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things."
See I don't think when I use the word God or Goddess or Divine or Mystery it really
matches with the person I am talking to so do sometimes question whether
reconstruction is the best approach. The positive side is I don't feel any conflict with
interchanging Divine with Quality or with Tao for that matter. They
might have slight variations but enough similarity to be comfortable in the interchange.
So in my web of beliefs I don't feel like the tension but I'd say a
hanging or unresolved concept there is still tension and comes out int he anit-theism
comments.
Funny I don't particularly like using the concept of God but suddenly want to use it when
people tell me to drop it. I don' t know if this is a polar bear
thing (somebody telling you to not think about a polar bear...it's going to happen more
than if you didn't say anything at all) or if there is more to it
(suppression of ideas) So when you say " So in the mean time, we need poetic
redescriptions that alter these beliefs to be less exclusive, and more like the
banal, innocuous, but so importantly true suggestion for living: "Love thy neighbor." I
agree I just think that my poetic redesriptions are more than
expansions but new constructions. If I use the word I may get a lot of sheep
assumptions but the fact that I myself constructed the concept find that hardly
makes sense.
Erin
Matt:
Those are good questions. The first thing I want say, though, is less
directly about what you asked, but something that occured to me while
reading the passage and your questions. It is very easy from that passage
to construe Rorty as suggesting that we can just "change" a belief, that we
can just "will" it. I don't think that's what he's suggesting, especially
in relation to "concepts" like God. The emphasis is on mechanism in the
passage. An intruded belief causes us to reconsider a whole slew of other
beliefs. The reconsideration that we do leads inevitably to the change.
This is simply one way of looking at or describing belief change (one that
emphasizes the "cause" of belief change rather than the "I").
Because of this change in emphasis, I think some of the quirks begin to
disappear from your questions. People don't just erase beliefs, desires, or
concepts on a whim. Erasure occurs after long periods of reflection,
particularly with deeply held beliefs, like perhaps God. And its not like
you walk up to the chalkboard and go, "Well, you gotta' go." It is almost
never like that, like a conscious choice to go another way. Even after an
angry priest renounces God and the Church, I don't think the next day he
would wake up completely unafflicted by the idea of God. His anger keeps
the belief alive. I would think of it less as erasure and more like a
fading away. The more you neglect a belief, the less you use it, the less
it is important to you, the less likely you are to consider it a belief.
You ask, though, how erasure even occurs. For this I think its important to
keep "beliefs" and "concepts" distinct. You unconsciously switched from one
to the other on Rorty. It might make sense for a person to not have a
belief anymore, but, as you say, the only way to not have a concept would be
to be unable to recognize it. But surely atheists, though unable to believe
in God, recognize the concept God? In some sense they do (to what extent,
though, is only for the moment periphery). But say a person, let's
say----me----say this person grew up believing in God, went to Church every
Sunday, was confirmed a Methodist in 8th grade, and then, when pressured
about the existence of God and such, went, "Well, to tell you the truth, I
don't really feel like defending the Guy 'cuz, if I can be honest, He's
never really been that important to me." This person doesn't say he
believes in God anymore, more because he can't see anything important
hinging on it except his membership to the Church (actually, that didn't
even hinge on it; I'm just that lovable). Ask him if he believes in God and
he gets kinda' shruggy: "I guess not. I mean, if belief requires some kind
of activity, like, I actively believe in God, then I don't believe 'cuz it
never crosses my mind. But then, I also don't stand around all day actively
disbelieving in God either." This kind of person has an apathetic attitude
towards the belief in God.
In this sense, since as long as a word is understood by the vast majority of
a culture, people will have an attitude about it, Rorty isn't suggesting
that we can suddenly one day have _no_ attitude towards it: there will be an
attitude, but it will be one of "Weh---should I care?" However, in the long
run of a culture, words can drop out of use so much that people just won't
have an attitude about it, largely 'cuz no one will have heard of it or
understand it. The few people who do understand and will have attitudes
will be historians, but mainly they'll have historian attitudes about the
object: like phlogiston. Most people have to be forced to have an attitude
about phlogiston, and by forced I mean you have to explain to them what it
is. Once they understand what it is, how people could have believed in it
and such, then they can have an attitude towards it. Most likely apathy,
though.
So, when you say, "I had thought it is better approach to encourage people
to evolve their concept of God than encourage to drop the concept," that all
depends on what you think the future of the belief in God is. If I've
alleviated the tension in your web of beliefs that was caused by the
passage, then what we decide to encourage people in believing depends on
what we believe and where that belief is going. In the short run, yeah, I
think its more important to get people to "evolve their concept of God," by
which I mean I think its important that people understand each other,
particularly their religions (particularly the Middle East). In the long,
long run, though, I think we should just drop the whole thing altogether.
Do I think we ever will? No, I doubt it. So in the mean time, we need
poetic redescriptions that alter these beliefs to be less exclusive, and
more like the banal, innocuous, but so importantly true suggestion for
living: "Love thy neighbor."
Matt
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