Re: Imagination

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Katha Pollitt wrote:

>  The question in both cases is whether religion speaks to
> something deeper in the psyche than socio-economic-political misery. I
> think i would say ORGANIZED religion no, mystical speculation yes.

Everyone in this debate tends to take religion after the "Religions of the
Book," in which it is closely tied up (in however perverse a sense) with
hope, the future, Worship, morality, etc. But over huge stretches of time
and geography religion has been connected with none of these things --
it has simply been a rather mechanical recognition of powers that the
thought of the time could not explain. The only difference between gods
and humans in Homeric religion (and in many others like it) is that the
latter don't die. No morality accompanies the observance of the demands
of those deities.

In other words, the kind of religion Doug and Katha speak of is the product
not of any particular deeply human need but of particular historical
conditions.
The response of one of Homer's auditors to a Christian or Muslim rap would
be neither "I agree" nor "I disagree" nor even "I don't understand," but
"Huh?" --

    "Come friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
    EVen Patrocolus died, a far, far better man than you.
    And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
    The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life
    a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
    death and the strong voice of fate are waiting.
    There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
    when a man will take my life in battle too --
    flinging a spear perhaps
    or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow."
                    *Iliad* (Fagles tr.), xxi, 119-128

If mortals can live with *that* at the heart of their religion, why do
they need either religion or any imaginative substitute at all? And
the "mystical speculation" of which Katha speaks is irrelevant to the
present thread, since that like the philosophy of Wittgenstein is the
possession of an elite few. Some *intellectuals* seem to need it, but
personally I have never met a mystic.

Certainly none of the hard core religionists I work with all the time in
the Depressive Manic Depressive Support Group seem to be much
interested in mysticism. As Kenneth Burke has remarked, the important
question is not "Are you a Christian?" but "Who are you a Christian
*against*?"

I think the discussion of religion and socialism would be better carried on
by marxists who deal every day with "ordinary Christians" than those whose
own surroundings are pretty secular.

Carrol