Me2 wrote:
Religion, science and reality are all gendered, classed, racial, cultural constructions. Everybody decides how they want them to function, or more importantly, not function in their own lives.
I realized my points may have drifted a bit in my last rant....
I agree. We take all kinds of beliefs, ideas, attitudes, religious concepts into our consciousness and make them all part of who we are. Then we give them weight and make them real. (Reality) This even includes the relative weight we give to science and logic. Altered states, dreams, intuition, visions, etc. are considered less real because they don't
seem connected to physical reality.
However along comes a bunch of crazies who are interested in ideas like Utopia or non-physical spiritual realms that can't be measured by science or any other major "paradigm shift" tangent to which they might be attracted. Fine.... you set off in search of your own shangrila. You start deconstructing the various beliefs, concepts, constrictions, mind traps, games with which you've functioned reasonably well until that point. But then you start to get the sense of how much those various boundaries really give you. We need boundaries of some sort. They allow us to function. When you start reaching for larger boundaries, I think you have to really be able to free yourself from the smaller boundaries. Like for instance the thread is drifting into the idea of new age stuff being merely "infantile psuedo science" etc. I would say that is a question of perspective. If science determines for someone the limits of valid reality, how is that any better than the christian who says the bible absolutely defines the limits of non-physical reality and the limits of god. (Yes of course of course physical reality is measurable, testable, etc. and certainly seems the most solid and dependable, but..... simply, science can't explain the ineffable. Science becomes a harsh and jealous mistress.)
I get the impression that most people that would like to bash new agey goofy ideas have never spent enough time to dig in long enough over the course of enough years to find whether there may be anything valid there. That's not a criticism per se. The only reason to go there is that you are
drawn there. Once there, you will have to learn to function under a different set of "rules" and you will have to get used to a new set of measuring sticks to determine whether you're merely delusional. (or you merely dabble with the ideas because they sound kind of groovy. You might see a bit of that here in Boulder.) But even that fills a need (the empty void). Since we were talking about Christians, I have to admit that even though it seems way too constricting, christianity will function as a very fine boundary for some to explore their spirituality as far as it goes. It would never work for me.
