Karmic Adjustment & Weber

[Jeff Sunbury]

You wrote: "For my purposes below in Sociology of Religion, Weber assumes
the truth of his major thesis and finds that Calvinist pattern
in a lot of religions. See on God's inscrutable Will."

Was there a link "below" not included in your message?

Off topic: Is the proliferation of electric shopping carts in grocery
stores an outward sign of an inward moral decline?

On topic: Did Pig Bodine have charismatic authority? If so, what was his
source for that authority? Beer? Poontang? Both?


On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Yeahp.
>  For my purposes below in Sociology of Religion, Weber assumes the truth
> of his major thesis and finds that Calvinist pattern
> in a lot of religions. See on God's inscrutable Will.
>
> Then he finds a different pattern, more akin to Pynchon's allusions to
> karmic adjustment, maybe? with a 'complete closure of the moral system over
> time".
> What's that mean to us, esp in relation to Pynchon?
> Ye old Arc of Justice? Reaction/Counterreaction in History? In life?
> Jacobean--like Revenge as a ..closure??
>
>
>    *From:* Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com>
> *To:* Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, May 14, 2013 3:50 PM
>
> *Subject:* Re: Karmic Adjustment & Weber
>
> HA! (Is the elephant in the room LOL?)
> First, Schroeder's paper 'Weber, Pynchon and the American Prospect' tops
> Google search results. Are there any other online refs you'd suggest? Did
> Schroeder pay Google $ for that premium placement?
>
> So...
>
> Wading into Weber:
> Weber analyzed the historical shift from the conspicuous consumption of
> the Renaisance priveleged class including the Catholic Church to the
> economically calculating Protestant classes that sprouted around the
> sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The shift occured at three levels,
> economic, doctrinal, and moral. He identifies the "spirit of the age" to
> explain the shift in behavior from the traditional inheritance and
> religious calling to individualist capitalist determination; from working
> for salvation in the afterlife to accumulating wealth here on earth. That
> covers a lot of territory and time periods but Weber focuses on Europe
> after the Renaisance. To be continued...
>
>
> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This is the plist....'Don't follow leaders; feed the parking meters"...
>
>   *From:* Jeff Sunbury <jsunbury at gmail.com>
> *To:* Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, May 14, 2013 1:43 PM
> *Subject:* Re: Karmic Adjustment & Weber
>
>  Mark, the water's lukewarm but how deep do you want to go? I still have
> a paperback copy of Protestant Ethics from college.
>
>
> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>    Parsons, long-winded, sez in writing of another of Weber's key
> concepts 'rationalization'
> "which is the master conception through which cultures define their
> religious situation"....................
> which is resolved, basically, in one of two ways....."in the two fully
> consistent philosophies of moral meaning,
> or theodicies, which have appeared in religous history."
> 1) One is the Calvinistic conception that resolution depends on the
> relationship between an absolute, all-powerful, unknowable, God
> upon which his Creation--all of us--is dependent on his Will and
>
> 2) the doctrine of *karma, *which postulates a complete closure of the
> moral system over time spans altogether
> commensurable with the human life span, though not, strictly speaking,
> eternal.
>
> Justifying God's ways to man involves accepting unproveable postulates, of
> course, but similar considerations apply
> in the case of *karma, *Parsons says of Weber's notion.
>
> Kai, all, jump in, the water's lukewarm here.
>
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