[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.

[Mister Agenda]

It's not rewritten history, it's current events.

[brewer]

[edit]

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. 

[edit]

It's not always against the creativity or happiness. There are many christian acts/activities that I consider good for society. It's the "claimed" christian motivation that I have an issue with.

Just the other day a christian claimed that "god spoke to her" and that's why she performed a charitable act. I prefer to believe that she performed the act from her own motivation.

A supernatural concept should not be a necessary factor in creativity, happiness, generosity, doing the next right thing, ....................... Claiming "god" as the motivation is the result of manipulation from another human by instilling the concept.

[The Grand Nudger]

It isn't necessary, at all. Human beings are compelled to create art. We've been creating art for longer than we've been creating gods.

[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.

[Belacqua]

How can we possibly determine what whether religion’s influence and contributions to the human experience are a net positive one?

We can't, of course. We have no alternative history to compare it to. It's the only history we have. 

That's why we have to look at it as objectively as possible, and using our very limited judgment, which has been formed by our own unprovable value commitments, try to be fair. 

I understand that I come across on this forum as a defender of religion, but that's only because I refuse to accept the default view here that religion is always and only oppression. (With the occasional damned-by-small-praise admission that it provides comfort to those who need a crutch.) There is a story, structured like a myth, which prevails on forums like this one, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly: "All was in darkness and tyranny as religion was over the land! And lo! There was Galileo! And there was Darwin! And science brought light and freedom! And more science means more light and freedom! And religion is always and only allied to Darkness!" Extreme ideology like this damages our historical understanding. 

 
As Gae mentioned, people have been making secular art since before religion, and will continue after. 

I hadn't seen that. It's a typical Gae sort of argument, misusing the words and opposing something I've never said. 

There is no secularity in the absence of religion.* What he probably means is that there was art which was not explicitly illustrative of that society's dominant religious view. Of course that's true. 

Yet all art in a society reflects to some degree the dominant framework which that society has for understanding the human world. There was plenty of secular literature in the Middle Ages, written in the Romance languages, about warfare and romance. Every bit of it is framed in the values of the Middle Ages, even (or especially) when it works to oppose those values. There is plenty of Byzantine art which depicts hunting scenes or attractive ladies -- not pictures of saints -- but that doesn't mean that any Byzantine person could conceive of the world outside of the era's conceptual framework, which was dominantly Christian. 

It usually pays to look for the subtext or underlying assumptions in these non-religious works. Romance literature, while not explicitly Christian, would have been impossible in a non-Christian context. Just as modern fantasy movies pretend to be timeless, but turn out on examination to illustrate and justify modern American assumptions about how the world works. Pre-Christian works like the Odyssey are entirely embedded in the values of their times. 

I don’t think a secular framework rooted in empathy and caring for the well-being of others is a terrible place to start. 

I hope that such a framework is possible someday. Though individuals today may or may not value those things, the messages we get through the media are often very different. I also suspect that things like "empathy" are too abstract to stick with people. Such things need embodiment in a story or larger framework to have force. 

*about "secularity":

The word [saeculum] had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of
a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of
years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly,
though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection. Throughout
Rome’s history, from its earliest days to the time of Constantine, games to mark
the passing of a saeculum had repeatedly been held: ‘a spectacle such as no one
had ever witnessed, nor ever would again’.32 This was why Augustine, looking
for a word to counterpoint the unchanging eternity of the City of God, had seized
upon it. Things caught up in the flux of mortals’ existence, bounded by their
memories, forever changing upon the passage of the generations: all these, so
Augustine declared, were saecularia – ‘secular things’.

[possibletarian]

Me neither,

Just because the majority are religious does not mean values which give people morals, valued emotions and lifestyles does not mean they are a product of religion, in fact i would say it's the other way around, religion was used as a means to give them authority.

If someone were to argue, on another thread, that religion is necessary for those good things, I hope you would argue against him.

On this thread the topic is different. The topic here is that since religion is NOT necessary for those good things, but has been involved with them for a long time, what are the best non-religious tools for us to talk about values and the good life? I think that the answer may be: the humanities.

It's always been humanities, religion just being one aspect of it.

[possibletarian]

It usually pays to look for the subtext or underlying assumptions in these non-religious works. Romance literature, while not explicitly Christian, would have been impossible in a non-Christian context. 

How so ?

I hope that such a framework is possible someday. Though individuals today may or may not value those things, the messages we get through the media are often very different. I also suspect that things like "empathy" are too abstract to stick with people. Such things need embodiment in a story or larger framework to have force.

Again, how so ?

[Belacqua]

It's always been humanities, religion just being one aspect of it.

Well, for a long time "the humanities" was a term used in contrast to religious studies. It included pagan philosophers and others as a way of countering or finding alternatives to theological views.

But I'm sure you're right that in more recent times it's come to be a term in contrast with the "hard sciences." So maybe the term has changed sufficiently that it has come to include its old rival.

Anyway, it's my unprovable opinion that we'd be better off if the humanities had always been the field in which we debate and advocate aspects of the human world. What we often have instead -- especially in corporate-produced entertainment -- is propaganda reproducing the values of the status quo military/industrial complex. 

Marvel Movies advocate a narrow range of things and push down the idea of alternatives. A good novel (Proust, Stendhal, Dostoevsky) enriches our experience of ourselves and others, increasing sympathy, making it more difficult for us to keep our favorite cliches, and challenging our prejudices.

[The Grand Nudger]

You prefer one set of fantasies to another. So do we all.