Flinn, who several times has appeared as an expert trial witness to present a legal definition of religion, says he identifies three essential characteristics of a religion. It must possess a system of beliefs that explain the ultimate meaning of life, must teach religious practices and norms for behavior and conduct rites and ceremonies, and must unite a body of believers.
Would the CoV be considered a religion under these criteria?
Perhaps we could make it a ritual to disavow the old rituals every so often and make new ones. In a matter of speaking, it could be like a celebratory cleansing of cultural myths; a rejection of tradition by means of constant rejection and re-writing of said tradition. Essentially, no tradtion becomes tradition.
Then we could kick back and allow the warm blanket of tax-free standing fall over us.
The last thing we need is rituals. It seems the standard that when a group abandons the ways of the old that they create new ways, which turn out to be the old ways regurgitated in an updated manner. This is precisely why we would deny marriage, yet create a pair bonding ritual. "Pair bonding" was founded in spiritualism (namely religion) and has become such a common part of life that even the non-spiritual participate in it. This is dogma at its worst. Unplug from the Matrix my friends (the one created by Plato and maintained by the Christians), deprogram, or whatever you need to do to get the weakness of symbolism and the traditions of the superstitious out of your heads. Symbolism only serves to obscure reality. It is romanticism (which is emotionalism) and it is weak. Marriage mostly serves to assuage our fears of the other person leaving us by locking them "till death do us part." It gives us the peace of mind that the other person is mine and ain't going nowhere, at least not without going through the humiliating obstacle of divorce.
I say abandon all symbolic ideas, like marriage, and heritage, and perhaps even true love (I think Al Pacino said it best as the devil in The Devil's Advocate: "What is love... biochemically no different than consuming large quantities of chocolate"). Let's deal with the world directly, not through ceremonies and traditions. What's the worst that could happen, that we have to deal with what (not who) we really are? The side effect of billions of years worth of the laws of physics doing their thing (probably).
Since the beginning, Man has been trying to deal with his existence through creating invisible spirits, gods, rituals, ceremonies, traditions, theologies (which are really mythologies) when none of these offer any actual answers or real assistance in our survival, except to pacify us.
Below is an article that I pulled from BuildFreedom.com that describes the problems we have with (1) recognizing the validity of the ideas that we've been programmed with; (2) socially breaking away from those ideas; and (3) removing the impulse to think in the manner that those ideas still compel us to long after we have removed ourselves from their influence.
The Universal Hammer
Imagine a world in which the hammer is regarded as a kind of "universal solution." At an early age, all children have a hammer attached to their right hand in such a way that the hammer for all intents and purposes can never be taken off. It effectively becomes part of their body.
People in this world see practically every problem as solvable by hammer. Indeed, they seem to solve most of their problems by using their hammers. They see the world in terms of hammer-problems and hammer-solutions. Anyone who doesn't think and behave the way they should is simply hammered into submission or hammered to death.
From early childhood, everyone is brainwashed to believe in the necessity, virtue, and inevitability of hammers. Practically all their thinking, communication, and behavior become hammer-oriented and hammer-pervasive.
Now somebody comes along (from another world?) and starts questioning the virtues of hammers. He also talks about possible alternatives to hammers. Eventually some people even start talking about "minimal-workable" hammers.
Eventually there are a thousand anti-hammerists. One day, one of them discovers a way to take off his hammer. So he takes it off and he throws it away. He walks around, showing people his bare right hand: "Look; no hammer!"
But among all the anti-hammerists (and many more pro- hammerists), only one in a thousand can see that the non-hammerist really has no hammer, but an empty hand. Every one knows that you can't possibly live without a hammer. When they are shown an empty right hand they can't believe it -- "Maybe he's using a trick to somehow hide his hammer!" -- "Maybe he somehow made his hammer invisible!"
Years go by. The number of anti-hammerists has grown to ten thousand. And nine more of them have shed their hammers. There are now ten non-hammerists.
Because all these people have for centuries lived in a hammer culture, and even though one in a thousand has learned about the virtues and vices of hammers, and one in a million has taken off their hammer, they all still suffer from "hammer-in-the-brain." It's much more difficult to take the hammer out of your mind, than it is to take it off your hand.
After many years there are a million anti-hammerists and a thousand non-hammerists. Then something interesting happens: one non-hammerist realizes that even though he removed the hammer from his hand many years before, he still thinks with a hammer in his head. Because hammer thinking had been so deeply brainwashed into him (and everyone else in his world, of course), it takes him seven years of strenuous mental effort to remove the hammer from his mind.
Meanwhile he talks to anti-hammerists and non-hammerists about "removing the hammer from your mind." Practically everyone thinks he's crazy.
But, as the years go by, the numbers of anti-hammerists and non-hammerists increase. Eventually there are ten million anti-hammerists and ten thousand non-hammerists. And lo and behold, there are now ten people who have largely or completely removed the hammers from their heads. They have hammer-free brains and minds.
So there are three levels of hammer freedom: 1) You discover the nature, virtues, and vices of hammers and the consequences of using them (anti-hammerism); 2) You physically remove the hammer from your hand (non-hammerism); 3) You remove the hammer from your thinking (hammer-free mind).
You forget- before the advent of ritual, humanity lived in small family-based groupings. Any sort of communal activity was discouraged due to fierce competition for scarce resources in an ice age Europe. This was one of the times in which homo sapien as we know it hovered alarmingly close to extinction. It wasn't until we pooled together in larger groupings that we learned to allocate our resources in order to better survive a nearly insurmountable environment. Something was needed to overcome centuries of nomadic hunter-gatherer instinct, though. Something was required that could tie these communal gatherings of early humans together. Could this have been the birth of the ritual? The development of ritualistic practices may very well have been an evolutionary adaptation designed to ensure homo sapien's newfound foothold in the war for survival.
You forget- before the advent of ritual, humanity lived in small family-based groupings. Any sort of communal activity was discouraged due to fierce competition for scarce resources in an ice age Europe.
You aren't going back far enough, FREQ_FORCE. Most evidence is that humans naturally live in tribes of 30 to 100, with a certain amount of constant mixing between tribes. The Ice Age harshness may have temporarily changed this but that would be the exception rather than the rule.
Besides, we have evidence of human ritual going back to the Ice Ages. Living during an Ice Age did not discourage humans from painting on the walls of caves.
Further back, when humanity left Africa 150,000 years ago (now well mapped via mitochondrial DNA) those who went north became almost entirely separated from those who went east for nearly 100,000 years. Nevertheless every known human culture from every age has elements of ritual. Someone used to looking for these things can even see it in modern scientific culture. Having seen A Beautiful Mind recently I think of the ritual of laying down of pens. There is the lab coat / robe and the Ph.D. rite of initiation.
Everything suggests that ritual is deeply built into the fabric of how we think.
And this makes sense. What humans seem to do best, and what we do better than any other animal, is identify long-term relationships between things. This empowers us to use symbols to refer to things at high layers of abstraction. The use of totems and rituals would be a natural first outgrowth of this; before we realized that some relationships are more solid and useful than others, we would pursue them all.
I think a life entirely without ritual is similar to a life without sex. One can make an argument that one is "liberated" from those base feelings, but at the same time one is missing part of the human experience. One doesn't have to slavishly believe that rituals put you in contact with invisible sky-beings to derive benefit from them. They can simply be a way to keep order in your life and calm your thoughts.
I do think it is better to learn to live with what we are than to try and deny it. We are all bundles of potential feeling and emotion no matter how irrational it seems. Awe and anger are natural and we should allow ourselves to feel them -- we just should let ourselves get carried away and make major decisions on the basis of such feelings alone.
The last thing we need is rituals. It seems the standard that when a group abandons the ways of the old that they create new ways, which turn out to be the old ways regurgitated in an updated manner. This is precisely why we would deny marriage, yet create a pair bonding ritual. "Pair bonding" was founded in spiritualism (namely religion) and has become such a common part of life that even the non-spiritual participate in it.
Maybe the non-spiritual participate in pair bonding because it is in our genes and goes back millions of years, long before humans arrived on the scene.
Someone used to looking for these things can even see it in modern scientific culture. Having seen A Beautiful Mind recently I think of the ritual of laying down of pens. There is the lab coat / robe and the Ph.D. rite of initiation.
I agree with localroger here and disagree with the anti-symbolism fellow a few posts up.
Sticking with the Beautiful Mind example, the pens are an expression of respect and an honoring. That is all this 'ritual' exists to convey -- "we appreciate you and your accomplishments, and we respect you." Now, with this in mind, is there any real distinction to be made in how that message is passed along? Why is it preferable to use words than the 'ritual' of laying down pens?
Even should the honorarium ritual switch to words, it would remain vulnerable to the moniker 'ritual.'
It would seem 'ritual' is just a term for actions people take to pass along meaning.
I think the anti-symbolism/anti-ritual folk are improperly spreading their dislike of (e.g.) Christian ritual to general ritual, when the reason for disliking Christian ritual is more than mere "it's a ritual and rituals are always bad" dogma. We dislike Christian rituals because they are associated with a system of dogma and, in a way, help to perpetuate it. With this in mind, we must recognize that not all rituals do this (promote dogmatism and traditionalism), and judge accordingly on a case-by-case basis, not rule out all symbolic actions and rites in one sweeping absolutist pass.
I am afraid that I have to disagree that ritual is either necessary or good. Although ritual is very old, I believe that it was mostly formed out of a fear of the world that we live in. The majority of human beings are afraid of that which is alien to them. To cope with these feelings of insecurity, they invented explanations for those events that they did not understand. Slowly, through time, human beings have replaced ritual with science. I like the hammer analogy because it makes it easier to point out that the only reason that we still have conventional religions and rituals are that they have been ground into our society so deeply.
Re:Legal definition of religion
« Reply #12 on: 2003-09-11 19:33:34 »
I share with others the disquiet at the unthinking use of ritual. It is the essence of the irrational system of ideas.
The debate here, however, is fuelled by a dichotomy: between rituals proximate and ultimate existence, in the context of evolutionary theory.
Proximately, believing that the sky will fall down if you fail to light a fire for the tribe is an irrational belief. However, its ultimate cause- that the meme evolved so that a fire would be lit at night to deter predators, is supremely rational.
There is a disassociation of reason in much of what humans do. We should seek to end this. However, we cannot escape our own evolved nature- merely modify and control it to our own purposes.
Do I think we should have our own rituals? Yes. It is part of what we are.
In many ways we already do, as every time we post a message here, we are in effect committing an action that defines us as part of a group, the essence of a ritual.
So if we cannot escape ritual, then those rituals must be involved in the pursuit of reason, not dogma. Pluralism, not conformity. To ask, and not to blindly follow doctrine.
The rationale (pun) behind the ritual must be accessible to all, and not hidden in a veil of ignorance, guarded by self-styled 'defenders of the faith'.
Flinn, who several times has appeared as an expert trial witness to present a legal definition of religion, says he identifies three essential characteristics of a religion. It must possess a system of beliefs that explain the ultimate meaning of life, must teach religious practices and norms for behavior and conduct rites and ceremonies, and must unite a body of believers.
Would the CoV be considered a religion under these criteria?
Once again!
This forum has a bad habit of not clearly defining ALL predicate terms and using logically fallacious presentation of argumentation.
I willl put my objections to the above simply for all to follow.
The "criteria" suffer from the fallacies of 'Begging the question' of: "what are beliefs", "is there in fact an ultimate meaning of life"; the 'Fallacy of false association' by asserting a direct connectivity between 'religious' practices and norms of behavior, rites and ceremonies.
Either Mr Flinn is inept at argumentation. Probable. Or Mr Flinn has been taken out of context and/or erroniously summarized. Possible.
Define.
Belief. A system of cognitive and emotive associations not predicated upon knowledge.
Knowledge. A system of cognition predicated upon repeatable, refiable and predictable inquiries using scientific protocol. etc ad. red. absurd. but this is enough for now.
Summarize.
Simply put, belief exists outside of those things which are "knowable." It is a system of cognitive and emotive associations based on pushing the great big "I BELIEVE" button in the sky and accepting for granted as true these associations.
Expound.
Critical discourse demands SIMPLE rules. Critical Discourse demands consistancy. If you find yourself in a disagreement withsome, it is likely do to INCONSISTANCY.
Critical discourse demands PRECISION.
I CANNOT SHOUT THIS LOUDLY ENOUGH!!!!!!!
SAY WHAT YOU MEAN!!!
DO NOT MEAN WHAT YOU SAY!!!
If you have some rolly polly of a thought that cant make it past the dust laden speech centers of you mind, chiefly the Wernicke, THEN FOR SHIT"S SAKE STOP. Go to the dictionary or thesaraus and FIGURE IT OUT. FIRST. Then commit the sound of your text to the annals of history, not idiocy.
For the first time and last time I will delineate the use of the name of this psyber-tution (virtual-institution). It has been expostulated ad nauseum a priori. But it must be delineated in context.
The nom de guerre, "Church of the Virus" is a play on words. It is a literary device designed to catch the attention of the reader/surfer. In memetic terms:
IT IS A HOOK!
In literary terms: it is a figurative device known, play on words, a pun.
So, where does that leave us?
Revisitation of Virian "Beliefs" (bullshiite but we'll use it). Hypocracy. This psyber-tution decries deitic theisms (shut your cake hole and look them up) yet this institution routinely entertains the use of the the vernacular and predicates of deitic theisms, beliefs.
In short, insanely and stupidly hypocritical.
Examine any argument that you "feel" the need to invest your thought processes in. Your cognition and emotion are psychic (of the mind) resources which you invest in by "buying into" different ideas.
Invest in Knowledge. Divest of Belief. Shitcan with extreme thermonuclear prejudice Hypocracy.
If you are going to assert an idea, have the courage of your convictions. If you have convictions, it means that you have cognitive and emotive investments inthe idea at hand. If an idea is crap, you WILL be called on it (ref. Gator Bait, Joe Dees). If your convictions ar ill placed, you WILL suffer counter emotional responses and these will be unpleasant. That is why you must choose wisely which idea to invest in.
Secular Religion is not one of them. The term is an oxymoron and hypocritical.
FLUSH IT FROM YOUR BRAINS. If your brains are clogged, ask one of the ArchVectors for some mental floss or Brain-O. BUT STOP, DO PLEASE STOP, the endless torrent of hypocracy and indecent attempts at argumentation.
Argumentative rules "evolved" out of necessity and civility. If you propose a civil debate, then USE THE RULES IN EXISTENCE. Do not go creating new ones because you need to feel good about something by being the one who created the "new and improved" rules. Feel good about abiding by the old rules, SUCCESSFULLY and proving your point that way. If you need new rules to win an argument, then you have already lost the argument. (i wont go into the mathematics of that here, but it would put a sort of fatalistic end to the argument of 'creating new rules' that might actually need to be presented, but I'll use textual semiotics (LOOK IT UP) for now.)
If you NEED to feel good about some cognitive hurdle that you have overcome, try LEARNING an old trick BEFORE you FAIL and FLAIL miserably at attempting to re-invent said old trick (ref. 're-inventing the wheel'). Actually learn what critical discourse IS. Learn what "Logical Fallacies" are. LEARN. (And the First ArchVector or ANYONE who puts a web link on where to look these things up as a reply to this flamage, gets an automatic ZERO, GOOSE-EGG, NULL on Meridon from me! ) Part of learning, THE BIGGEST PART, is figuring out how to figure out, things, for YOURSLEF. This is a slef-referential part of the learnign protocol. This does not apply to all thing Virian. In this case it most certainly does.
Think about what you think about. Examine your thoughts. Examine your cognitions. Examine your emotions. Examine your investments of said cognitions and emotions. Have the courage of your convictions.
Stand, the freak, by to defend any silly-assed assertions are indecent attemtps at argumentation.
Prepare for heavy winds and high seas all who continue to bombast critical discourse with secular religiousity.
Kirk
(you know he's peeved when he drops the 'afreakinggawddamnedsoreassed Wrecks' from his signature.)
Re:Legal definition of religion
« Reply #14 on: 2003-10-04 14:48:45 »
Kirk, what is the advantage of defining the terms such that the question doesn't make sense? Instead of forcing your definitions on others, why not adjust your own definitions so that the communication is possible?
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