M&D Deep Duck Soulless?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

> Mark Kohut: There was a time in the West when no
(religious) person would even have such doubts. Dante's time did not,
right Monte? and TRP fave Henry Adams said about the same of the time
of building Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes.<

> KAREN ARMSTRONG: First of all, there is the whole business about
religion before the modern period never having been considered a
separate activity but infusing and cohering with all other activities,
including state-building, politics and warfare.<


Although this view is popular in the social sciences it's perhaps an 
exaggeration. Sure, in theory it all adds up: Pre-modern societies show 
a significantly lower degree of social differentiation, they are 
'mono-contextural' (while modernity is 'poly-contextural'), and religion 
often plays a huge role. But does this mean that people had no doubts 
about religious issues or that there always was, as Armstrong seems to 
suggest, a tight coupling of non-religious and religious activities? I 
think that these  are empirical questions that cannot be answered once 
and for all regardless the concrete place and time. The danger here is 
to imagine pre-modern man like we remember ourselves in childhood. 
Caught in a magical dream. Not even for actually tribal societies this 
is an adequate imagination since there are some practicing no religion 
or magic at all. And for the Christian middle ages? Is Henry Adams right 
to conceptualize the Virgin as a societal mega force like later the 
Dynamo? Perhaps. But I still remember my astonishment when I was 
studying a historical source of the Hanseatic kontors from the 14th 
century and it all of sudden said: Do not store goods on the altar! If 
there's a rule against it the practice itself must have been common. Not 
exactly a hint that people were meditating the Holy Trinity 24/7. So 
history is not as simple as social theory does suggest. And even the 
religious sources themselves sometimes offer a different view:

^21 They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render 
therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the 
things that are God's.

Matthew 22:21 King James Version (KJV)



On 15.01.2015 13:24, Mark Kohut wrote:
> SALON: You point out, though, that the concept of "religion" didn't
> even exist before the early modern period. What exactly are we talking
> about, then, when we talk about religion and violence before modern
> times?
>
> KAREN ARMSTRONG: First of all, there is the whole business about
> religion before the modern period never having been considered a
> separate activity but infusing and cohering with all other activities,
> including state-building, politics and warfare.
>
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Mark Kohut<mark.kohut at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> p. 22....Mason, from the ongoing grief of the loss of his wife, after
>> suggesting to Dixon that they
>> should investigate the Learned Dog for Metempsychosis reasons, at
>> least p.19....after asking why are there still not
>> Oracles...Gate--Ways to Futurity.....
>>
>> must ask tLD if he has a soul...
>>
>> I would say, off the top, Mason is sorta-obsessed with whether Death
>> is The End or there is an After, wouldn't you? [tangential: we might
>> remember the von Braun quote in GR. More heretically tangential: we
>> might remember TRP's lifelong remembering of his great pal, Richard
>> F.?]
>>
>> The doubts of a religious man. There was a time in the West when no
>> (religious) person would even have such doubts. Dante's time did not,
>> right Monte? and TRP fave Henry Adams said about the same of the time
>> of building Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes.
>>   Becker suggests that Acquinas's massive Summa came about as his and
>> his time's edifice against doubt...
>>
>> But, doubtlessly, religious doubt at least was ushered in with the
>> Enlightenment.
> -
> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>

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