(December 23, 2019 at 1:58 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: what values has religion bestowed upon society with its overarching command? I notice obedience, fear of the unknown, discouragement of intellectual curiosity and questioning of authority, self hatred, and sexual shame to name a few.
This is interesting to me. I suppose it's taken for granted on a forum like this that these are the essential characteristics of any religion, and that this is what religious people get from their beliefs.
This contrasts, I think, with what you write after:
Quote:Or, is truly good art the expression of an intimate and nuanced understanding of values we innately possess? Perhaps, simply the shared human experience, for better or worse, drives those things?
I don't think we just know what a shared human experience is like. So I agree with you that at least one of art's functions is to allow us to feel this. In fact I think we are fairly unaware of a lot of things that are going on in ourselves, much less in other people, and that art brings these things to light, or gives them "a local habitation and a name," so that we can think more clearly about them.
And one of the things that has been part of human experience is the positive value of religious experience. Though you and I may lack this, it has clearly been important for vast numbers of people. (I suspect that there will be people on this forum willing to pipe up and say that it has always been fake, or the result of fear, but I think we can take people's accounts as accurate, and not dismiss them based on mind reading.)
I was raised without religion, but I have been fortunate to get some sense of a shared religious experience through the arts. Have you read I Promessi Sposi by Manzoni? Truly a great novel about the varieties of religious experience -- good and bad -- in the 17th century. Every Italian person knows it, so I don't know why it's not famous here. I know of no other book about what it is like to live in a society completely soaked in the Catholic religion. The results of religion in this book are not entirely like the list you describe.
Dante describes the achievement of merging with bliss, and the enormous sense of peace that derives from his religion. He is famous for saying, "all my thoughts turn toward love," which, given the Platonic and otherworldly origins of love that he believes in, is entirely a religious feeling. Blake lived every day in a religious ecstasy which he used to develop a beautiful Christian worldview, anticipating Kant and Jung, among others.
Whether "good art imitates life" or not is an ongoing debate. I guess it depends on what we mean by "imitate." Zeuxis couldn't find a living model beautiful enough to pose for his Aphrodite, so he looked at a few dozen and chose the best features from each. Is this imitation? Surely it's not ONLY imitation.
I wonder about your experiences with art... Have you been in the presence of something extremely beautiful and thought, "Oh, this is what religious people are talking about." There's a temple in Kyoto that I go to every time I'm in the neighborhood, with a gigantic gilded statue of Amida Nyorai, and the most wonderful otherworldly atmosphere. If it's quiet and there aren't any squalling school groups, this gives a sense of what real believers must experience, I think. For them, it is more than an aesthetic surge. I don't believe in Amida Nyorai, but this experience allows me to share something with people who do.
