[Serious] The Humanities

[Belacqua]

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.

As far as I can tell, those are the values Christianity attempts to instill into its followers, and I think there is ample evidential support for that assertion.

Yeah, that's strange to me. It looks as though you've filtered out all the good things that people wrote about for centuries. It comes across to me as rewritten history. 

This may be an example of what the article quoted in the OP is talking about. The really great stuff from history is pushed aside, and we are largely left with popular things which is popular precisely because it mirrors back to us our current opinions. I honestly don't know how somebody can experience Christian art, music, and literature, and all the writings of the various saints who were inspired to joy, and conclude that Christianity is always and only against creativity and against happiness. 

It was the structure through which people made sense of the human world for a very long time. There were good results and bad results -- just as there are from our own framework. 

How we work out what's good and bad, and how we make sense of the lived world is what I thought we should talk about. People used to do it through religion, and now they don't as much. 

If the statue wasn’t based on a religious figure, would you be as powerfully moved by it? Would the art alone be enough, or does imagining what it must feel like for a believer to experience that statue add something unique to your own experience of it?

I have to take the great art of the past as it comes to me. The people who made the statue were inspired by Amida Nyorai, and for me to experience it as purely visual art, deracinated from its origin, would be a misreading -- like admiring the sound of poetry read in a language we don't speak -- it might sound good, but you're missing too much. The history and the aura and the meaning it has had to people are not detachable from the object. 

Japanese art and literature is soaked in the views of Buddhism and Shinto. Just as Proust, though he never discusses religion, could only have written his book in a Catholic country. Sometimes it makes people melancholy, and sometimes it makes them happy, but it was the way they saw things, and it would be neurotic of me to wish that the past were different. If part of the role of art is to connect us with the human experience of people different from ourselves, then it's important for me to take what they gave us with the positive intentions it had for them.