[lbo-talk] An Appeal to Ignorance

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[lbo-talk] RE: An Appeal to Ignorance
>joanna 123hop at comcast.net
>Mon Jun 13 11:35:21 PDT 2005
<snip>
>>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?
<snip>
>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.

I don't believe that the sort of experience that you describe is "the 
very opposite" of "organized religion" -- mystical, meditative, 
and/or monastic practices in a number of faith traditions (such as 
Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so on) promote 
attainment of such experiences.  If you find such experiences 
valuable, and if you approach various mystic, mediative, and/or 
monastic orders with an open mind, you may even find what looks (to 
outsiders) like senseless dogmas and rituals are actually time-tested 
ways to discipline bodies and minds in such a way that you would be 
able to achieve an experience "beyond labels, language, images, 
anticipations, attachments" as you put it.

For a majority of the religious (whether or not they favor the kind 
of "religious experience" that appeals to you, whether they are 
politically on the right, the left, or the center) today, what they 
find most valuable in religion is precisely the fact that it's 
organized, i.e., voluntarily organized by communities of people who 
seek to share more or less the same belief system (even as they argue 
about it and change it -- sometimes only a little, other times 
drastically), confront social problems together in light of its 
ethical ideals and principles, and care for one another in the spirit 
of mutual aid.  For a majority of the irreligious today, too, 
religion that matters in society (especially to the point of 
affecting their relation to the religious), for better or worse, is 
such enduring collective practices rather than fleeting private 
experiences of transcendence of "labels, language, images, 
anticipations, attachments" (which do not affect others one way or 
another).
-- 
Yoshie

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