Interpretations?! As an echo from last lecture, I am 'meditating' on this notion of interpretations as a stepstone towards understanding. It is important to make sense out of symbolic meaning of religious texts. When there are many communities that share the text, then how do they harmonize their philosophies? I do not want to sound redundant, but again the question of justification of any means or ends comes to the surface...If there is a text that may be understood from a number of different perspectives, then there is a possibility of multiple "right" answers. Now, 'right' and 'wrong' are merely adjectives...But the question of compromise remains opened. How do they achieve consensus among themselves with these 'free-floating' interpretational thing?
Now, the guest prof. mentioned that there is no individualism, but communal relations between individuals. She also emphasized this diversity that is again based on "interpretations". When speaking about consensus, she said that there is no need for "one umbrella" unity...COnfusing? Yes...And no...
Religion is historical. It is a process. When it becomes solidified in its historicity, it loses actuality, and stops serving its purpose. Religion needs to be a process. It goes along with politics, with the nation, with citizens, with individuals, communities....The past is memory. When we go back and check scriptures about what is right in the present or in the future, we go back 5 000 years in time...Symbolic meaning is coded. One can have as many interpretations as one wishes to have...NOw...what? what am talking about here?
Anthropological machine needs diversity of opinions, needs these miriadic process of making sense of the past...We need also remember that religion as an institutional system coincides with domestication and warfare. I think the problems we are facing right now are partly rooted in this religious determinism, where free floating messages of truth are taken out of the dynamic context, and become tools in the hands of further domestication...become wheels of the anthropological machine.
Before religion, there was magic...animate earth. Prof.McNab put it in a very nice manner: It is spirituality that lies at the center...Spirits communicate...And there is an ongoing dialogue, participatory and reciprocal. It is the spirit that gets information, then it becomes available to the body, so to speak. Is there an internal conflict here? No, there is a flow of meaning...not solidified truths.
I guess the problem I see with religions in general, is a problem of interpretations, with the Absolute....Monotheistic approach goes hand in hand with biopolitics.
Now, the guest prof. mentioned that there is no individualism, but communal relations between individuals. She also emphasized this diversity that is again based on "interpretations". When speaking about consensus, she said that there is no need for "one umbrella" unity...COnfusing? Yes...And no...
Religion is historical. It is a process. When it becomes solidified in its historicity, it loses actuality, and stops serving its purpose. Religion needs to be a process. It goes along with politics, with the nation, with citizens, with individuals, communities....The past is memory. When we go back and check scriptures about what is right in the present or in the future, we go back 5 000 years in time...Symbolic meaning is coded. One can have as many interpretations as one wishes to have...NOw...what? what am talking about here?
Anthropological machine needs diversity of opinions, needs these miriadic process of making sense of the past...We need also remember that religion as an institutional system coincides with domestication and warfare. I think the problems we are facing right now are partly rooted in this religious determinism, where free floating messages of truth are taken out of the dynamic context, and become tools in the hands of further domestication...become wheels of the anthropological machine.
Before religion, there was magic...animate earth. Prof.McNab put it in a very nice manner: It is spirituality that lies at the center...Spirits communicate...And there is an ongoing dialogue, participatory and reciprocal. It is the spirit that gets information, then it becomes available to the body, so to speak. Is there an internal conflict here? No, there is a flow of meaning...not solidified truths.
I guess the problem I see with religions in general, is a problem of interpretations, with the Absolute....Monotheistic approach goes hand in hand with biopolitics.
posted by Olga at 7:07 AM
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