I especially like the little ‘Inanimism’ twist - sounds like a scorn- or pity-filled word storytellers will use to thrill the children in centuries to come. It occurs to me that you could also use ‘death-worship’ (death as fixed end point rather than transition to another form of life) to describe the civilised religious experience. This contrasts nicely with the ‘life-worship’ of animism (’serve life’ as you say - indeed, that’s the only kind of service I’m comfortable with these days :)) and makes it especially clear where the civilised trip is headed.

What clicked this for me was realising just how dead everything is in our religious buildings. The only non-human life that played a part in any church I ever went to were the fully domesticated offerings of harvest day and maybe the flowers at weddings. And bread and wine? More like grain and grape … Quinn’s distinction of ‘Farmer’s religion’ seems particularly apt in this respect. Funny how few signs of life were observable in the people too (my involvement was mostly with the Best-of-British Anglican tradition). I’m reminded of Luke Rhinehart’s description (in ‘The Dice Man‘ which I’ve just finished reading for the third time) of post-adolescence as an extended period of early-onset rigor mortis - with which he begs to differ. So do I.

Anyhow thanks. My appreciation of this slant of analysis has been a long time coming, but it’s been worth the wait!

Leonard Schlain wrote The Alphabet Versus The Goddess to posit that Goddess religion was destroyed by the changes in the human brain that came about with the introduction of writing–all of a sudden we learned in a very different way. But the Goddess-religion theorists don’t go back far enough. It’s like animism isn’t even religion to them, which is really weird. I think the presence of writing destroyed animism as well as the later Goddess cults, because writing became part of the domestication process. Hell, it still is today. What’s the first thing a Christian missionary does to convert the unwashed heathen masses? Right. Teaches them to read and write. It abstracts their thinking, among other things. Civilization is based heavily on abstraction.

Anyway, that’s some of it, for what it’s worth.

Not that you don’t have a very good point about some supposedly science-minded people trying to make a religion out of science. I see it all the time and I’m not even a scientist. Man, don’t EVEN take aim at anybody’s sacred cows, no matter how much evidence you have to back yourself up. It’s scary.

Science isn’t a monolith, however, through objective observation of the endeavors - as promulgated and employed in the context of institutional science - you might think otherwise (even if you were to apply scientific method in your observations interestingly enough).

Hey Peter,
Can you say more about this “mistake” you think I have made?

I don’t have a problem with places to worship, such as sacred places or organized rituals. I just want to make it clear that their ideas destroy the planet.

keep the fath bro

“things do not have their own essences but define themselves through their environment and interactions.”

This here is almost straight from the Buddha’s mouth.. check it out! He was a Tracker of direct human experience..

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wheel008.html

I read a similar observation the other day in Plato’s Timaeus.. oh wait actually that was different he was talking about only being able to speak of “things” as “having” qualities not as “being” something solid and unchanging.

check it out!

mike

mike

This and a few other essays of yours will definitely make their way to the community.

Even in civilization, animist beliefs and tendencies held on for a long time, albeit primarily on the periphery. Take the Asatru religion for example, which is basically a continuation of various northern European pre-Christian beliefs: various nature spirits, or land wights, are recognized as existing and having personalities. Laws were even passed in Iceland about removing dragon-head images from ships before coming too close to shore, as to not offend the local spirits and scare them off. In Greece, there was a philosopher (forgot the name) who said “All things are full of gods”. What really fucked everything up, at least in the sense of religion, was when one group decided their patron god was better, and extended their dominating of others to their worship. Then he was suddenly the “only god”. Then an empire got involved, and we were all screwed. Now we have masses of people whose mental schemas are so based on singularity of truth that they can’t even imagine anything else but what they’ve been force-fed. Even the word we use to describe the wholeness of existence, ‘universe’, limits our understanding, which is why I prefer the term ‘multiverse’.

Oi.

Oh, and you might like this: http://www.neopagan.net/Scientism.html