From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 00:18:34 GMT
DMB> No. I'm afraid the Christian trinity and the MOQ's
>divisions are compatible only by way of the most painful contortions. I can
>almost hear your spine breaking as you bend over backwards to make it fit.
My point was that it is no more absurd than dividing up Quality into
Q/SQ/DQ. I certainly think they are more than compatible, as they describe
the very same reality.
>In any case, the main point of making a distinction between mythic and
>intellectual thinking is to point out the two ways to read such doctrines;
>the former as an actuality and the later as a symbol. This is precisely the
>confusion that causes the literalistic and fundamentalist religions of our
>time.
Theology is as richly symbolic as any intellectual pursuit. Theologians are
generally not fundamentalists, though they may be equally pious and
disdainful of immorality, it comes from different places.
>Johnny moral said:
>And isn't the Fall analogous to the arrival of the intellect, or perhaps
>the
>
>social level (we're still debating those), and leaving the biological bliss
>behind? Isn't it more than an analogy, but a literal description of what
>happened (perhaps apart from Satan the talking snake, God walking around
>looking for them, etc, which are colorful and efficient ways of describing
>the cause and effect of knowledge on people.)
>
>DMB says:
>Pirsig takes this on directly. in chapter 24 he doesn't use the phrase "the
>fall", but he refers specifically to "original sin", which is an intimately
>related concept and part of the same doctrine. He mentions this in the
>context of a fair and impartial re-examination of "the old Puritan and
>Victorian social codes". When these codes are "dusted off" to to see what
>they were trying to do, we are operating at the intellectual level. The
>codes are read as SYMBOLS, not as actual events. They no longer operate AS
>myths. Again, this confusion marks death of the religions of the modern
>age.
>
>
>"Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life. But when it
>threatens to dominate and destroy society, biological quality becomes evil
>itself, the 'Great Satan" of 20th century Western culture. One reason why
>fundamentalist Moslem cultures have become so fanatic in their hatred of
>the
>West is that it has released the biological forces of evil that Islam has
>fought for centuries to control. ... Suddenly we have come full circle at
>the Anmerican culture's founders, the Puritans, and their overwhelming
>concern with 'original sin' and release from it. The mythology by which
>they
>explained this original sin seems no longer useful in a scientific world,
>but when we look at the things in their contemporary society they
>identified
>with this original sin we see something remarkable. Drinking, dancing, sex,
>playing the fiddle, gambling, idleness: these are BIOLOGICAL pleasures.
>Early puritan morals were largely a suppression of biological quality. In
>the MOQ the old Puritan dogma is gone but its practical moral
>pronouncements
>are explained in a way that makes sense." (Emphasis is Pirsig's.)
>
>DMB continues:
>See? The mythology is not useful in a scientific world. Puritan dogma is
>gone. But we can still re-examine them and glean the moral practicality in
>a
>way that makes sense. This kind of intellectual refinement is what prevents
>us from either rejecting or accepting myth and dogma blindly. As Campbell
>points out, the atheist and the religious believer are both wrong insofar
>as
>the both mistake myths for facts. To the atheists, the facts are not true.
>To the believer, the facts are true. But the fact is that myths are not
>facts. In any case, I think its clear that the MOQ makes intellectual sense
>of "original sin" by describing it as biological quality, which is rightly
>kept under control by social codes.
>
>Of course, its more complicated than that. Both the fall and original sin
>are part of the Garden of Eden and that, in turn, is part of the creation
>story. As a guy very interested in mythology, I could go on and on, but I
>won't.
>
I wish you had given more thought to my point about how the Fall is the same
as the birth of the intellectual level (and no more absurd once stripped of
the talking snakes), before just quoting pirsig, so I'll try again.
Original Sin was not sinning for the first time, it was eating the apple of
the tree of knowledge. Is gaining knowledge unrelated to starting to "think
about" stuff and being intellectual? I think the original sin is the
knowledge of quality itself, resulting in the separation of direct
experience of Quality with intellectual knowledge. Even as a story, a story
about how we as a human race gained knowledge and fell out of paradise is
clearly the result of thinking about things, no? And it was not just a
story, it was a true account of how the earth was created.
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