Archive for the ‘Religion as emotional tech’ Category
Mood-making
Religion is not solely about the economic, political and social-climbing technologies. There is also emotional technology, what Idries Shah has termed ‘mood-making’. Different kinds of mood, however, are made. Moreover, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is quite wrong. Even when adequately fed, clothed, sheltered and laid, few people seek this thing he called ‘self-realisation’. [...]
Are you being served?
Small children are sometimes heard to wonder why the tedious events to which their churchgoing parents drag them are called ‘services’. They probably find it a most unconvincing explanation that they are there to serve God, as the innocent childish mind does not see any such serving going on. Unless, perhaps, the church is like [...]
The varieties of religious entertainment
Time was when church attendance was compulsory; in some parts of the world it still is. In other parts of the world it is not formally required, but non-attendees can forget all about doing business in the community. Networking is important everywhere, particularly for immigrants, the poor and the corrupt. Perhaps some people go in [...]
The Goodman deal
The New England Puritans used ‘Goodman’ and ‘Goodwife’ – often abbreviated to ‘Goody’, which we moderns have trouble hearing without fits of the giggles – as perfectly serious titles of address. We meet them, for example, in ‘The Crucible’. There are two ways of looking at this. We might think it respectful, as suggesting a [...]
It shouldn’t happen to Me!
The Psalmist kvetches about the things he does when someone else for once is doing it back to him. He suffers because the natural order has been disrupted; woe, woe, woe, he is receiving it rather than handing it out! In the Psalms there is no sense of karma, of ‘what goes around comes around’. [...]
Clean hands and dirty deeds
Just as our aural imaginations supply the ‘right’ notes (that we have not actually heard) so as to resolve musical dissonances (that don’t actually resolve), so too can what we may call our social imaginations supply the ‘right’ facts and perspectives to enable us feel good about ourselves. Now, not everyone has a sufficiently powerful [...]
The thirst for the Absolute
If fundamentalists had truly arrived at their perspective through a close reading of the Bible or the Qur’an, then they would have a decent scriptural knowledge. It can easily be demonstrated that the great majority have very little. Only half of American fundamentalist Christians can tell you who preached the Sermon on the Mount. [...]
The True Church is me and the wife
It is a common perception that Judaism is clannish, inward-looking and suspicious whereas Christianity is universal, expansive and embracing. And yet the Greek word synagoge actually means ‘coming together’, while the first Greek word used for the Christian fellowship was ekklesia (the origin of our ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘église’ and so forth), which means ‘called out’. These [...]
Telling it like it is
A survivor of the massacre of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 wrote, somewhat oxymoronically: ‘May the Merciful One avenge the spilled blood of your servants – and the blood yet to be spilled – during the lifetime of those who survive us, before their very eyes.’ This seems just a little bit more honest than [...]
Misery loves company
If a person has done something which he is not sure is right, or is beneficial to himself, he will generally seek to persuade others to do likewise. Since we are social animals, seeing other people do this thing will reassure him that it was right or beneficial after all. So, too, will seeing others [...]
