[Serious] The Humanities

[LadyForCamus]

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.

You could be right about that. I won’t pretend I don’t have a bias in this discussion. But, I’d say maybe you’re overlooking a lot harm that religious values, and passion over religion has caused. That’s the thing. Religion is a mixed bag. I see the value in certain aspects of it on the micro-level; i.e., a mother coping with the death of a child knowing that the child is in heaven and they’ll be reunited some day, or as you rightfully point out, the art that was born of religious expression. I’ve seen the Cathedral of Notre Dame in person. I didn’t need to be a believer to have the breath taken out of me. But, on the macro level, religion also inspires violence, holy wars, and oppression. How can we possibly determine what whether religion’s influence and contributions to the human experience are a net positive one?

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.

It’s a good question, Bel. As Gae mentioned, people have been making secular art since before religion, and will continue after. I don’t think a secular framework rooted in empathy and caring for the well-being of others is a terrible place to start. Emphasis on higher education that includes the arts should be a priority so that we can give the artistically inclined every opportunity to flourish and produce the types of important works that are revered and cherished across generations.

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.

That was a lovely expression of your experience, thank you.