i stopped being angry (who can stop being mad? :) pretty quickly, though I gather you still don't know why I was irked ... but anyway, I posted a reply to the list about how I forgave you because of the line "you go to war with the textual memory you have...." busted a gut -- and r did too.
Anway, your comment focused on something else entirely: "which scientific discipline studies meaning and values? bio? chem? physics? where do meaning and vaues come from? where *should* they come from (and note that's a value question! d'oh!)?"
The answer to all is that the social sciences probably all have an arm that studies these things, and they also implicitly also are about where they _should_ come from. After all, if what a sociologist is up to is explaining how values emanate from society and social processes themselves, then the sociologist is saying, "so they probably shouldn't be said to come from god or the kangaroo." IOW, to those folks on the Politics List or the health list I was once on who think you can't really have values if you aren't Christian, the social scientist is offering up (!!!) the sociology of morality and/or religion as the _real_ explanation for where values come from.
and, of course, if you buy that, then you also understand that every discipline is involved in the production of values. We are involved in them in this very conversation, mostly just reproducing them.
on this view, durkheim wedded to goffman (the symbolic interactionists), religion (and even those who say they are spiritual) consists of two inextricably intertwined aspects:
1.rituals 2.a shared belief that the world is divided, ultimately, into the sacred and profane
Rituals aren't practical actions, they don't have a goal. Rather, rituals are part of everything we do and they are an end in and of themselves. Rituals are performed in the presence of things and ideas people believe are sacred.
Why do people the world over and throughout history divide the world up into this dualism? The existence of society itself. It is not an illusion to think there is something 'out there' that is greater than the individual. Everything we do and everything we thing came from something that exists prior and will exist after us: society. It gives us language, words, meaning, our name, ideas about who we are, are sense of a unique identity, etc.
As societies become more complex, the notion of god becomes more abstract, moving from very concrete representations (totems), to personified "guy in the sky", to impersonal representations that can only be described in negatives or superlatives: unbounded, infinite, unending, supremely good, all powerful, etc.
The sacred, then, is something we experience within and without us. Durkhein went on to argue that what religion is all about in contemporary western societies is the sacredness of the individual. Because, as the more complex society becomes, the more likely it is that we have highly differentiated experiences -- which then encourage us to think of ourself as highly unique.
Western individualism, then, isn't about some cultural uniqueness. It is about the complexity of society. The more complex society, the more complex its operations, the more difficult it was to see how people worked together to produce the things we use and consume every day (the division of labor), the more societies came to see the individual as the sacred.
Goffman goes on to show how the rituals of everyday life uphold this notion of the sacredness of the individual. "It's my opinion! Leave it alone. How dare you challenge my opinion." "This stuff belongs to me! It's mine." "Well, these studies may ssay such and so about how scientists think, but in my experience...." "Or, I'm not like that...." We constantly compare and contrast ourselves to others, to studies, to data about others. We like watching shows about others and we say to ourselves, "I'm like that, but not like that."
And as we utter them, people respond to us and actually do so in a way to shore up the belief in individual sacredness. After all, if you do not, then you are profaning the notion of the individual and individuality itself, and thus making yourself feel uncomfortable. Which, for psychoanalysts interested in this stuff, explains reaction formations and a lot of other crap taht goes on. :)
It is not, therefore, that difficult to see why Buddy Freddy's Buffet style religion and expression of spirituality exist -- or why the divinity students you encountered adhered to that salad bar of beliefs.
If you really want to know how values and morals tie into all this, I'll give you a recap, but I dont want to lecture. I mostly wrote it because I thought carrol would find it interesting.
Kelley
"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
-- rwmartin