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Originally Posted by guyy
I mean the complex of questions about the sacred that cannot be answered within our episteme. One deity or many or none? Theirs or ours? Jealous or forgiving? Bible or Koran? Old Testament or New? Luther or Aquinas... zzzzzzzzz....
If you are saying that we must pay attention to religious discourse because it teaches about humans, then it seems to me that you are more interested in social practice than the content of that discourse. Which is fine, but how is religion any different than anything else you might analyse?
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Now you're getting it! I'm fascinated by these questions not because I think the answers other people have derived are 'correct,' as such, but because I find it equally if not more fascinating to learn how and why they believe what they do. From an analytical standpoint there is no real difference between religion and, say, entomology. Both amaze and astound me and in much the same way. I'm not part of these other religions, I don't believe what they do (although I certainly don't take issue with them believing it) but I want to learn about it just the same. You could, I suppose, argue that my interest is sociological in nature, but regardless of the root of that interest I am very much interested in these complex questions and the plethora of answers derived. My own beliefs cause me to approach these answers all on equal footing, including the answers of atheism. What I've discovered in my travels so far is that atheism is a belief system like any other. Where most belief systems use ancient teachings in the form of texts and oral traditions (which may not actually be oral in the strictest sense, as I've recently learned) atheism uses logic, a comparatively new teaching.
I don't understand how others can not be fascinated by these things. Then again, I also don't get how others can not be fascinated by stars or bugs or physics. I'm all about the pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake.
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Originally Posted by guyy
There's always thesis 11 to keep in mind as well.
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Thesis 11?
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Originally Posted by Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 11
To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.
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Could you explain to me how that applies to the current discussion? I'm not sure I get the connection.