snitsnat wrote:
> At 01:27 PM 6/13/2005, joanna wrote:
>
>> Try to entertain the possibility that both religion and science are
>> forms of inquiry and are only meaningful as such. When either hardens
>> into orthodoxy, it is dangerous and, by definition, false.
>>
>> Joanna
>
>
> How is religion a form of inquiry? Religions are communities of faith.
> Or communities of practice, but how do they encourage people to ask
> questions about anything?
Why is religion necessarily a matter of community? Why could it not be a form of individual inquiry? Should I take someone else's word that there is a god or that there isn't? Why?
(By the way, I don't disagree with Marx's analysis of organized religion. I even think there's a lot of truth to Carrols description of
spirituality as a turning away from solidarity. But I also think that there's more to say than that.)
Once I recognize that my entire thought process is a precipitation of past conditioning and that my whole notion of a future is merely an unceasing projection of or reaction to the past (to the known), perhaps I can see what my experience is like when thought stops. That would be my experiment and inquiry -- to see what there is beyond labels, language, images, anticipations, attachments. I have experienced this very briefly a few times and it was extremely interesting: to call it joy would be an understatement. I, and others, would call it a religious experience. Clearly, organized religion, altars, priests, ritual, dogma is the very opposite of this. Because we are not talking about a form of hypnosis but about a kind of waking up.
Joanna