(December 26, 2019 at 9:47 am)possibletarian Wrote: Are you saying essentially that romances with good endings would not be possible without Christianity ?
It would be more accurate to say that what determines "good" for a particular writer in a particular era is determined by the framework through which he interprets the world. A good ending for a Christian writer may well be different from a good ending for writers from different frameworks.
Quote:Also If they contained what are considered Christian values,and only a person with these (religiously motivated ) values could have written them then how do you reconcile the claim they are also nonreligious in nature ?
It looks to me as if some people here think of religion as some detachable accessory in a culture. At best a decorative veneer, at worst an oppressive overlay.
This may be how modern atheists see religion. Our own framework for interpreting the world isn't religious, so we may make the mistake of thinking that earlier eras were the same. We may think that there is some natural and universal way of interpreting the world, and that religion in any time and place is added on to that.
I think this view is false. Religion in past times was frequently the major structure through which people interpreted the world and their place in it. The absolutely crucial judgments about value, meaning, use, objectives, etc. -- all the things that are not detectable to science, but are still indispensable in the human world -- these were derived from the dominant religions of the day. The religion was not an add-on but the main framework through which the world was read.
If we want to understand people in different places and times it's important not to project our modern frameworks onto them. Things were different.
Of course their understanding of the world was not monolithic. Of course everyone is influenced by multiple aspects of life. The people of Heian Japan were influenced in their views by climate and the local vegetation and the facts of human anatomy, among many other things. But this doesn't change the fact that the conceptual framework through which they experienced their lives was Buddhist. And that this is revealed in their literature. Of course their culture includes Shintoism -- no one who's read the book forgets the emotional struggles around Rokujo-no-miyasudokoro leaving the capital when her daughter is chosen to be priestess of the Shrine at Ise. And the government is based on inconsistently-applied Confucianism. But people's sense of time, their judgments about how to spend that time, their ideas of what constitutes a good life and a happy end, while enduring a constant sense of melancholy and mono no aware, are Buddhist, and constitute the main themes of the book.
Foucault used the word "episteme" to refer to the set of ideas that are possible for people to accept in a given time and place.
Quote:"Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true."
I suspect that many atheists today reject this. They may well say that there is only one truth, that it is revealed through science, and that variations are simply mistakes. Maybe so. But I would say that such opinions show us our own episteme, and we should keep in mind that every episteme so far in history has been contingent and subject to change.
Even if we hold that the findings of science are true and unchanging, science doesn't address the human world. Values, meanings, uses, etc. -- these are projected into the world by human minds. And none of us makes them up entirely for ourselves. We are all products of our society. And when religion dominates a given society, the values of that episteme are invariably a part of its literature.
Ultimately I think this comes down to a matter of empathy. Empathy, for me, isn't merely the idea that we shouldn't poke someone else in the eye because I don't like being poked in the eye. Such empathy in fact doesn't require me to know anything about the other person, only about myself. Deeper empathy would demand that I come to understand the necessity that other people have in seeing the world as they do. In admitting that enormously intelligent and good people can disagree with my own episteme entirely, not because they need a crutch or are momentarily stupid, but because that is how their conceptual framework presents the world to them. This is why the humanities are good.
