ERM Exam 1 Study Guide-2 PDF

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Professor Gruber...

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● The goal of the course ○ Utilize the insights from religious geniuses and religious studies theorists to better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. ○ Hope for far more from the study of religion than we are accustomed ○ Teach us how to have “off of grid experience” ○ Explore religious studies and religion to (1)examine our own beliefs (2) the beliefs we have inherited (3) become more tolerant and better able to make informed decisions that best suit us ● William James ○ Multiple disciplines to understand a single subject ○ One of the few who did not believe scientific knowledge would/should replace religious “truths” ○ “Father of Psychology” ○ Uses Kripal’s both/and saying to explain how religion should be studied: Science can explain stuff on the grid, ESP (extra sensory perception) can explain undivided self and subliminal self → better understanding of ourselves and where we stand in religion ● Divided self ○ Ongoing internal battle with “subliminal self” (subconscious) ○ Lead geniuses to suicide because able to connect with hidden world and drove them to madness ● James’ approach to studying religion ○ Comparative: religion AND science ○ Analyze exceptional experiences of world’s great “religious geniuses” ■ Physical/social science, religious traditions ● Religious studies vs theology ○ Exploring meaning via religions ○ Theology is looking at specific religions in depth ■ Single focus discipline/Textbook ○ Religious Studies is neither pro or con religion but analyzes religion with a broader scope** ● Gruber’s definition of religion (his includes secularism) ○ An organized system of thought, practice, and community that explains, defines, and structures: ○  (1) life and the afterlife ○  (2) materiality and consciousness ○  (3) human, non-human, and supra-human existence ○  (4) human and supra-human-related experiences ● Kripal’s definition of religion

○ Religion as narratives, rituals, mind and body disciplines, and social institutions built around a power experienced as radically Other or More ○ Any set of established stories, rituals, mental and bodily practices, and institutions that have built up around extreme encounters with some anomalous presence, power, or hidden order ● Mystical anarchism ○ The general theme in this course could be a mystical approach to freedom from institutions, business, and states ○ Critchley is an atheist pulling from mystical traditions to create new secular ethics to imply that we are in real danger ○ Though religion is often tied to violence, corruption, scandal, along with financial and personal exploitation, the teachings of mystics, or spiritual geniuses such as Buddha and Jesus are clearly against each of these abuses ○ Anarchists look for communal governance ■ Instead of being ruled by church, want something everyone can relate to ■ Mystical: free human/be able to believe own beliefs ● Comparative mysticism ● Comparing other gods to each other Original sin and government ○ Assumption that we are inherently born “bad natured” so there is a need for laws/police to regulate laws ○ Religion was way of controlling the people ■ Mystical tradition has no way of forcing people to do what they believe ● Ethics of self-annihilation ○ Rid self of any bad nature; cleanse the soul/WIPE OUT EGO ○ Goal: submission of free will to reach divine love ■ Widen place in which love will want to be ● Critchley's main argument ○ Current politics, ethics, and social structure remain rooted in biblical notions of original sin ○ Secularism is a religion ● Marguerite Porrette's steps to annihilating the soul ○ God cleanses soul so look out on life without judgement ○ Stripping away our ego lets God’s LOVE come in ○ Losing of Soul, Soul touched by God, loss of Will, SIXTH: last state to reach when alive ■ Soul only knows divine goodness and activity of the will that is driven by God ■ 7th step: reach when dead/souls: infinite self reflection ● Heterodoxy (anything but the truth) vs. orthodoxy (truth) ○ Religion changing with time ○ Religion stuck in old rituals/beliefs ● Gnostics

○ Jewish and Christian communities of the first centuries CE who emphasized a direct mystical knowing over literalist belief ○ *Emphasis based on personal mystic knowing; relate religion through religious experiences ■ Think way of religion is through experiences ■ Hated by Church because don’t believe in structured religion ● Heretical argument for studying religion ○ If we take thoughts from world religion geniuses and deeply reflect on them, provide opportunity to enhance self examination ○ Live in complex, malleable, socially constructed world ■ Choose what we define is meaningful ○ We are thought for; not thinking for ourselves ● Religious genius ○ Someone like Buddha or Christ or who has philosophy on religion, but does not necessarily affiliate with it ○ Experiences seen as crazy when alive, but after, recognized as important ○ People twist religious geniuses beliefs and turn it into something we can write down/make a religion ■ “Don’t follow me”/don’t want to be famous ○ Euhemerism* ● Religious questions as those of ultimate concern (ask in class but pretty sure yesterday he said we dont need this) ○ Faith in god is the ultimate concern* ● Cause of Axial age ○ Rise of urbanization, social stratification, and the disillusionments of city life. ○ Specialization and leisure of new priestly and scribal elites, or from altered states of mind of individual forest sages and trance prophets ○ Second Axial Age: NOW b/c of internet ● Diffusion theory ○ Religious complex in one place came from another place ○ Religious ideas/practices tend to spread out through migration, trade, war, empire, and other traveling human activities ○ Buddhism traveled faster because spread by books/portable ● Principle of extremity ○ Best understand deepest dynamics of religious experiences by focusing on extreme and extraordinary instances ■ Look at crazy heretics, not just Bible ■ Look at good and bad ● Euhemerism ○ Gods as exaggerated human beings ○ Humans worshipped in own lives for accomplishments

■ Divinized as local gods ○ Ex. Buddha “don’t follow me” ● Sacred canopy ○ Religion provides safety umbrella that makes believer feel protected from reality ○ Berger: religion is the seemingly safe and reassuring canopy that we create in the very dark and foreboding forest of the real ○ Religions die when they don’t work, then are replaced ○ Gods exist when people worship them ● Platonic orientalism ○ Popularized by Said ○ West’s engagement with the East consistently rendered the East as inferior to the West, regardless of the intentions of the author ● Anthropomorphism ○ Tendency of humans to imagine their deities in human form, esp in forms of own identity ○ EX) white jesus vs black jesus ● Evolutionary monotheism ○ How monotheism started ■ Transition from polytheism to monotheism ○ EX) all variations of god come from central ones ● Pantheism ○ Everything is god ○ “Nothing left over” ● Panentheism ○ God is above/ in everything ○ God overflows into universe ● Thomas tweed ○ Theory is travel ○ Don’t question beliefs until leave that culture to encounter different one ○ Read whatever you want, but don’t know anything until experience ● Theory as travel ○ Leave to develop different perspective of culture ○ You can read all you want, but you won’t know anything until you experience it. ● Features of polytheism ○ Name of local deity ○ Shape of deity/how it looked ○ Function of deity/what it controlled or looked over ● Oppression by polytheism/monotheism ○ Poly: no practice/belief imposed on others (keep practicing what they are practicing, just change the form/ view of your God to mine) ○ Mono: oppressed a lot; only one God is the right God (convert or die)

● Tolerance vs.intolerance ○ 1. Institutional religion tied with politics ○ 2. Mystical religion tied with contemplation and experience ○ Either or; not both (Open minded or not) ○ Sheldrake’s magic of comparison ● Nonlocal self ○ Quest for truth of deepest self elsewhere ○ When Gruber went to India and shared beliefs with people there but not in US ○ Deepest experiences can find few/no resources in culture in which one is born ● The grid ○ To make sense of that reality ○ Inherit and create a grid that is understandable through the process of externalization, objectification, and internalization ○ Simplified version of reality ■ Confuse it with reality ○ Makes us feel stable ● Lack of chair ○ Chair isn’t there until consciousness makes it there ○ Many parts make up the chair ○ At what point does it become a chair? ○ Objectification - we are told a chair is a chair → schemas ● God as a floating signifier ○ Makes us feel stable/have “answers” ○ Signifies what is off the grid ● Objectification, externalization, internalization (BERGER) ○ Externalization is the human activity of building a cultural world through sign, symbol, myth, ritual, and institution: the human species “externalizes” itself in culture; it builds a world. E.g., Durkheim and “born into a fiction.”-- all objects created before us ■ Durkheim: collective effervescence ● Worship own social structure ■ Born into fiction ● Everything we were born into was created before us ● Nothing experienced for the first time; not unique to other people ○ Objectification is a further extension of this process: an independent world of “objects” comes to confront the human being— the subject— as facts outside that subject. The world externalized by humans now takes on material, physical form. It becomes a literal set of objects “out there.” E.g., mistaking the grid we created to understand reality as reality. ○ Internalization is the reabsorption back into consciousness of this objectified world, in such a way that the structure of the world “out there” comes to determine the subjective

structure of consciousness “in here.” E.g., “we are written” or we only experience what the grid allows. ■ Sheldrake, Seth Neil, Hoffman internalize materials without lineage that is trapped in in an objectified world ● Marx: opiate of the masses vs sigh of the oppressed (both coping mechanisms) ○ Keeps people dumb (masses) ■ Enforce beliefs ■ Realize how bad is, but need to suffer through pain to get to heaven ■ Life of suffering ■ Alcohol (push away) ○ Religion of the common people (oppressed) ■ Expression to deal with pain ■ Provides hope ■ Blues ● Religion vs secular ○ Basically the same; based on faith ○ Science and religion ○ Religion and secularism are end points on the same linguistic spectrum ○ Modernity is in many ways defined by secularism and a belief that there are no longer mysterious and incalculable powers. It is about reason, measurement, and math ● Hegel’s idealism ○ Privilege consciousness over realism ○ History of world is history of God trying to find his/herself ○ Explain how mind becomes matter ■ Try to understand self by creating matter ○ One of the greatest philosophers in western history ○ Idealism is a philosophical position that privileges mind as the ultimate nature of reality ○ Drew from ancient mysticism and Romantics, wrote about the natural tendency of the cosmos to “unfold” its own implicit consciousness or divine mind. ○ Created the equation: Thesis (our thoughts) + Antithesis (what we write down) = Synthesis (conclusion; what we think after everything happens), which leads to another thesis + antithesis and so on. ○ History is an epic composed in the mind of God ● Consciousness as co-creator of reality ○ Brain as producer ○ We are the creator of reality, co creation is NOT passive ○ Projects reality ○ What we are used to; see both ways ● Consciousness as hallucinating reality, projecting reality

○ Brain as a producer ○ Constantly hallucinate grid that we see as reality ○ Instead of seeing stuff and processing, our brain is processing and then we are seeing ● Reflexivity ○ Ability to step outside one’s self and one’s society to see how one is thinking/not thinking but being thought for ○ compassion/empathy ○ Human ability to think about thinking ○ Freeing consciousness from society and ego ● Insider/outsider ○ Insider is somebody who has been raised in a particular religious tradition and accepts its basic belief system and values ○ Outsider is someone who has not been raised in a particular religious tradition and does not share the insider’s beliefs ● Magic of comparison (Kripal) ○ Magic is new learned knowledge if you are open minded/tolerant of learning new things ■ Take teachings from multiple perspectives, internalize, tolerate, and use that magic of knowledge to further findings ○ New insight comes from comparing two views ■ Synthesis of 2 views produces new knowledge ○ Whether consciously or unconsciously, when we assert our own beliefs/worldviews, we are typically denying the validity of other views. ○ Outsider Magic: superstition and outdated dogma ○ Insider Magic: ritual performance of beliefs leading to miraculous events; religious experience, divine intervention, etc. Can also mean forces of darkness ● Humanities as consciousness coded in culture ○ Study consciousness as it is refracted in cultural artifacts ■ Text, art, language, ideals, rituals, social institutions ○ Assume all humans share same nature and need ○ Practiced in consciousness so caught in a loop ● Scholars believing in belief ○ Most faithful scholars have experience that is unexplainable; same scholars cannot explain/perceive things outside of the grid ○ Typically familiar with the pervasive nature of the paranormal, the supernatural, and the miraculous throughout each culture, in every historical epoch ○ An experienced, sane scholar typically faces a dilemma ○ Things that s/he can neither explain or accept as true consistently occur and often have real-life effects on the persons believing them to be true ○ Placebo effect → scientific proof of power of belief has REAL consequences ● Collective effervesce

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○ Religion, raves, sports (brings everyone together to feel transformed) ○ Feeling a community experiences, when together, as religious or divine ○ For Durkheim, this experience is really the experience that comes with being part of something larger, namely a community Totems ○ Worshipping and honoring is their own social structure ○ An object worshipped by a group= Torero Reductionism ○ Reduces the religious experience to a more basic mechanism, something non religious ○ For Marx, it is economics, for Freud it is a child-like need for protection/sexual, and for Durkheim it is social ○ Either/or not and/both Religion not working Lots of our generation doesn't really believe or understand religion, we feel guilty when we don't pray enough or feel these things etc. Rational re-reading** - Theories to help us understand that anything divine does not exist ○ No doubt between reason/revelation ○ Revelation is false; rejected as an illusion by reason “Both-and” ○ Approach to comparing religions ○ Balance human sameness and human difference ○ 1. Collection and description ○ 2. Classification and naming of patterns ○ 3. Wider comparison of classification and patterns ○ 4. Creation of general theory of religion ○ The selection of data is never neutral. Theories emerge from vast amounts of data, but preceding theories largely determine the data and organization Defense Mechanism ○ Resistance to new ideas is the psyche’s attempt to protect itself from difficult material that would expose its own illusions ○ Freud

● Foucault’s belief that knowledge is power ○ All forms of knowledge are forms of power ○ Every form of knowing serves particular political agendas and interests, which is to say particular people ● Sacred vs profane ○ Sacred: something holy; in awe; religion ○ Profane: regular events in everyday life ● No gap between reason and revelation ○ Rational re-reading

○ Reason: logic; revelation: extreme religious event or experience ○ Revelation is reason; just because we cannot understand something doesn’t mean it is not real ● Hoffman’s claims about subjectivity, experience, the hard problem ○ The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? ○ Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science. ○ As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality. ○ HARD PROBLEM: how did 3lb grey matter become human consciousness ○ There’s not objective truth because everything is produced by subjective mind** (my headache could be different than yours but we will never know) ● The central lesson of quantum physics ○ Neuroscientists aren’t ever going to advance because not accounting for thought ● According to John Wheeler** ○ No public objects sitting in pre-existing space ○ Nothing until we make it something ● Plato’s cave ○ Mistake our perceptions for nature of reality ○ Prisoners only see shadows, but one sees world and rest don’t believe him ○ Off grid ● Kripal’s argument that we are written ○ Culture is the network of institutions, laws, customs, symbols, technologies, and arts that cultivate, control and contain consciousness in very precise and specific ways. ○ Kripal argues much of our personal identity, as well as our most intimate thoughts and desires are not ours alone. They belong to culture. ○ We are born into a story (culture) and are a character being written by culture, only most of us do not realize it ○ Consciousness coded in culture

○ Infinite feedback loop ○ LSD/hippies: find out what we are doing is wrong/new perspective ■ gov worried because could be overthrown if didn’t put a stop ● Sheldrake ○ Challenge science ○ Science became religion ○ Pattern of averages ○ 4 minute mile: once one breaks it, keep breaking it ○ Build on work something else has being worked on - Main point according to Gruber= scientist have been fucking up on data, idiotic when we don't make room for consciousness in evolution, he was banned because he was too accurate* ● Scientism view of educated elite ○ Science is the ultimate thing that we should be studying/way problems will be solved ○ New version of religion ● Rough idea of morphic resonance ○ Self organizing systems inherit memory from previous similar systems ○ Everything forms on habit of fixed laws ○ Everything in universe has a collective memory

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Wastebasket Problem - Broad set of things confused and mixed up and seen as single thing Instrumental Reason Itself - T hinking that privileges truths turned into an object to be replicated, measured Brain as Reducer - M  arx’s explanation of religious-inspired forms of thought Ideological Debunker Comparison - P rotects materialist worldview by keeping unexplainable off the table ○ (1) conflates science with materialism (2) anecdotal (3) Naive understanding of mind (4) public shaming (5) historical amnesia Marx’s materialism - Marx’s belief that economics, mode of production, determines state of mind ○ Religion is a false consciousness ○ Socio-economics determine human consciousness ○ Materialism: the philosophical position that matter is the primary or most basic cause of consciousness and reality. False Consciousness - Consciousness is transmitted through body, but not produced solely by...