This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
You say, "My sympathy for organized religion... grows lesser and lesser." You did not say "religion," you said "organized religion."
ReplyDeleteMaybe you can elaborate on the reasons why it is "organized religion" that you are disillusioned about, not all religion?
Is there even a difference between religion and organized religion? Isn't religion by definition organized? If one has merely personal beliefs in a supernatural being or beings that do not coincide with those espoused by an organized religion, we wouldn't call those beliefs a religion. We might supplement Wittgenstein's private language argument with a private religion argument. Religion, like language, is a social institution. It is a language game.
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ReplyDeleteHenry, are you saying there is no private experience? And/or do you take Wittgenstein as implying that there is no private experience? My experience of the color "blue," understood not as a wavelength but phenomenally, seems essentially private. Hence the well-known puzzle about Mary and her colorless room. Of course if you want to share blue with me you can point to a bluebird and say THAT color. And I can nod, yes, THAT color is also what I call blue. But there is surely a subjective SEEING of that color that is not directly comparable between you and I. Further, I believe (very much following James here -- note the name of the blog) that this subjective seeing of what blue is gets us to the heart of what religion is, and that social institutions seek to freeze and dissect it in various ways. They are secondary phenomena. Isaiah [40:3] puts this wordless thought in words. .
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ReplyDeleteChristopher, of course we have private experiences, and I don't know how my comment could be read to suggest otherwise. But I don't think that the private experience of a god or of the supernatural or transcendental or whatever you want to call it constitutes religion or is the basis of religion. How could a social institution freeze one person's private experience into a religion? And what social institution are you referring to that pre-exists religion and that does this freezing?
ReplyDeleteGeorge Fox, just for example was born into a world where religion was very much a social and hierarchical fact. King James was on the throne, the Bible associated with that name was widely promulgated by an official Church of England with a hierarchy dated from Henry VIII"s day -- the Archbishop of Canterbury heading the Church and answering to the King. Fox's dissent from this Church and his determination to create a non-hierarchical Society of Friends, must be understood I submit as the promptings of a very private experience of his own. This is why most of the time one spends in a Quaker meeting is time one spends listening to the silence. The Church of England was a frozen body of rituals, rules, approved texts, etc. which was about to be shaken by a civil war. Every frozen church has some inner experience in its history, perhaps many generations before , but it is often quite hostile to the new stuff.
DeleteI would say that Fox's "very private experience of his own" may have grown into the Quaker religion, but at the time that it was his private experience, it was not, in my view, a religion. About 25 years ago, I attended a Quaker service; it was at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, which my daughter was attending at the time. The service had little silence. After the pastor made opening remarks, individual members of the congregation, one at a time, spontaneously stood up and said whatever was on their minds.
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