A question on Armageddon

No, I am not anti-civilization or anti-western civilization. But I do see mankind as rapidly approaching a turning point, where we either move to a higher level of existence, or we fail and our primary tool that defines our existence becomes a sharpened stick. So in that regard I am trying to save civilization, but in order to achieve this, I believe we need to shake some of the foundations of civilization, namely---dualism, objectivism, and the group ethic. And before you go down that path, let me remind you that I already told you I am not a romanticist.

You keep trying to make it harder than it is, I have told you that the problem I have with the word religion is functional. I have also told you that it is existential.

The word religion, most likely comes from the Latin word, religare, which means to bind. Then we get the Latin and Old French word, religio which referred to obligation, bond, and reverence. In Middle English the word religion meant life under monastic vows. Religion is a social dynamic, which we could say, binds believers together, just as it bounded monks together under monastic vows. I told you that I coined the term Logosummonism, which refers to the process, dynamic, or an understanding, which attempts to bring the presence of the transcendent signified--or God--into the mundane physical as part of his process to control, manipulate, or structure his own existential reality, and that religions are more logosummonist than spirituality. So a religion is really a social structure that operates in the mundane physical world in the name of god, or spirits or whatever, for purposes of control, organization, social cohesion, or other similar purposes.

The word spiritual, comes from the Latin word, spiritus, which literally means, spirit---a nonphysical being, or the nonphysical side to a human, etc. As I have said, spirituality is a door to the nonphysical. There is an authentic mystical experience to spirituality. An existential example would be to compare a communion ceremony at a church with a sweat lodge of a yuwipi man I know. The communion ceremony has everyone there, and they say prayers and recite a liturgy, and everyone eats some bread and drinks either some wine, or grape juice, depending on the church. That is all there is to it. If you were to go to a yuwipi, there is a set of rattles that the medicine man sets down, each on opposite sides of the altar which he lies in the center of, through out the yuwipi, the rattles fly through the air and when they touch each other or other things they give off blue sparks (that's just a part of the ceremony). In the sweat lodge performed by a yuwipi man I know, he brings his rattles into the sweat lodge, and during the sweat lodge, they too move around, rattle, and give off blue sparks. It would be extremely difficult--impossible really--for someone to physically move the rattles around the yuwipi, as there are people sitting all around the altar. In the sweat lodge it would also be impossible for anyone to move the rattles in the tight space, with the red hot stones (the grandfathers) in the center of the lodge, and everyone seated around them. There is literally no place to move in a typical sweat lodge.

To experience this type of thing, over an over, and even sweat lodges that do not have moving rattles, is to realize that, what people understand as religion is not the same as a spiritual event. There are a number of white people that participate in some of the sweat lodges I go to. Many of them are there because it healed them of alcohol or other addictions. They tried Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a very Christian based thing, and it did nothing for them. I have had this conversation about spirituality and religion with them, and they agree that there is a different experience to something that is spiritual and something that is religious. There is a popular saying, that I can't remember exactly right now, but I believe it goes, "Religion is for those who are afraid of going to Hell, Spirituality is for those who have been to hell."

In the paleolithic, people didn't need a social organization that bound them with other people who believed the same way. They didn't need to validate a leader by god. They didn't need ceremonies that meant no more than some symbolic meaning. They needed some way to communicate with spirit such that they would be helped, or that they would gain answers to their problems, or that they could survive. They literally needed magic. I have seen a lot of magic.

My sister thinks its terrible that I am not a Christian. I've never seen magic in a church. The meaning of that is, that is not my path. My sister says there is. If she sees it that's great, but when she tries to tell me of the miracles or magic she sees (actually magic is of the devil, so she doesn't say it that way), her examples are very mundane. I was raised in the church, and at some point I started realizing that the success rate of prayer is 50-50----it is either yes or no. In my experience it was more no. So there was a point when I said, why bother? Praying with the chanunpa is a completely different story.

My wife, as I mentioned, is a healer in the old Philippine traditions. But the Spanish pretty much destroyed those traditions completely. She was raised in the catholic church, and years ago she would go regularly--in Japan, the Philippines and here in America when we first came. I would go with her to support her. I even drank the communion and am a godfather to someone in the Philippines, etc. (and she says, don't tell anyone you are not catholic) so I don't. It doesn't make any difference to me. As she began getting closer to her own spiritual path as a healer, she stopped going to church. It didn't really fill a need for her. In fact, there is a Buddhist temple and monastery that is being built in the mountains by some monks, it is very quiet and no one is around. She prefers to go there. She was given an old family Bible that was published in the 1860's by a friend. No family that we know, and the family history was mostly removed when she got it. That night she couldn't sleep. Her ancestors kept talking to her all night through the Bible. I had already helped her connect to her ancestors, and she had already been to a yuwipi ceremony. Long story short, her healing comes from her ancestors, and she has even connected to the sundance tree, not literally, but spiritually she has a connection to it, and even saw what she thought was Mother Mary, or Mother Guadalupe, but, which my Native friends and I believe by her descriptiom is White Buffalo Calf Woman, as we supported at the Sundance. As she says, she simply does what she is told to do, and I interpret it from my own knowledge of Shamanism, South Pacific and Philippine mythology, and ceremonies I have seen and other knowledge of spirituality. But her healing has a very Christian context to it, and she considers herself a Christian. (Though my sister, I believe, thinks she is evil, despite the fact that my wife knew exactly when my dad would die, which everyone else kept getting wrong as he lied on his death bed, and my sister wanted nothing to do with my wife's experiences with my dad near his death and after, which is too bad because she told me things that my dad wanted to relate to me after his death that she had no way of knowing, and that made the whole event easy for me to go through. I did not grieve at all as my sister did. In my wife's case, we could speak of a pre-spanish spirituality that she tapped into, Native American spirituality, but also a Christian spirituality that guides her as she heals. And we have found that it works the best when I pray with the Chanunpa as she heals. She prays everyday, and the Bible is key to that, and in her eyes, she is very Christian.

So I am not saying that the old ways are better and that this is what spirituality is. For me, I found my spiritual path in indigenous spirituality. And looking back, I see my whole life taking me in that direction, with the turning point in the Philippines when an indigenous healer, before healing my stepdaughter, said that I was 'supposed to' participate, while I was hiding in the taxi, because we didn't have much money and were afraid that if he saw a foreigner, the price would go up. My wife also has an indigenous aspect to her spirituality because of her own indigenous ancestors, and she has gone on this path with me, but Christianity is important to it.

Spirituality is at the core of every religion. I am sure that there are Christian mystics, or even just Christians, who find that door to the nonphysical in their beliefs. I know there are Christian healers. But I also know there are plenty of fakes, like televangelists, and that music can be used to 'create a moment' and so forth, so I would not label any inauthentic use of the sacred as spiritual, nor anything that was humanly structured to create a spiritual-like feeling as spirituality. There are many stories of why people have converted to a religion, and as long as those are authentic, I would label those as spiritual.

But, in your arguments you seem to display a struggle with the nonphysical, including the idea of life after death. As I have already stated, using the 4 C's to label all such things that use it as religion is popular among academics because they do not acknowledge that there is a nonphysical reality. To them, there is no difference between a communion ceremony and a sweat lodge where rattles move around, because they cannot even fathom that rattles would move around under their own volition. It is impossible. So to them, both ceremonies are one and the same. And if you talk about the Chickasaw or the Pueblo Indians or whatever, you see that the older spirituality, begans to grow a structure around it. In the Pueblo and Hopi Kivas you start to have dancers that represent spirit, and so forth. A dancer is very different than the spirits that enter a yuwipi. Eventually city-states develop and the institution becomes more formalized. At the core is still a spirituality---a connection to spirit---at least I hope so for the people involved. But as for the outer layers, where you have the written word and a political structure and all the trappings and formalities of the institution----at that level, you have religion. At that level you deal with a human-defined concept of God, and try to place him or the idea of him, into the mundane in order to manipulate and control.

To go back to the beginning of this post, when I spoke of shaking up the foundations of civilization for its survival, I am not suggesting the removal of religion. We most definitely need to keep religion and politics separate, but it is very important and it is key to maintaining a culture that we hold onto religion. If we don't have a culture, then civilization becomes meaningless.

In fact, I am writing another book that I work on on the side. It is filled with my numerous criticisms of religion, but the whole focus of the book is how and why religion should survive the nihilism of the present day. For example, what would it mean to be a Christian if the traditional arguments for being a Christian were deconstructed. This book is not really for me, obviously. But for religious people to maintain their faith.

 

And let me remind you, as I mentioned in a past post, a spirituality does not have members and nonmembers or a strong concept of an in-group out-group. This is a reason that I have heard some of my Lakota friends give for why their beliefs are not a religion. As one Medicine Man said to the people that came for the first time, as he led a sweat lodge, "You are now in the circle. This isn't a religion. We don't care if you come or not, you are always a part of the circle."

To me, a religion that says, the only way to God or to heaven is through this religion, is painting a picture of a god that is jealous, revengeful, and with hate, not a god that is of unconditional love. When the missionaries came to indigenous people the world over, the indigenous did not see something that would oppose them or try to control their beliefs. The thought that its another way to pray and interact with God, so we have a good way, why not see what other good ways are. Once the missionaries got them to go regularly, then they convinced them that their old ways were wrong and evil.

Japanese people are both Shinto and Buddhist, If you are Japanese and the slightest bit religious, or even very religious, you are both Shinto and Buddhist. And in very Buddhist temple is a Shinto shrine. Because shinto was the native spirituality. When the Chinese brought Buddhism over, it had no problem with the native spirituality, and as a spirituality it had no problem with the religion of Buddhism, except that it saw the structure as an improvement and adopted the religious structure as well.

 

In other words, you think of a deity as purely transcendent, and religion must (for unexplained reasons) be about that. As a panendeist, I think of God as both imminent and transcendent, which is consistent with traditional Christian doctrine, albeit the transcendence gets the emphasis. There is nothing self-contradictory about this--God's presence including nature but extending beyond it into the realm of the ineffable. It is true that when we move from spirits to deities, we've made an important transition. The question is how important it should be in defining religion. When people take ritual action to placate the spirits in rocks and trees, is that fundamentally different from placating the gods who control those things? Should we ignore the similarities? If not, what word do we us to encompass both? Most scholars who have tackled the subject use "religion". The concept of "spirit" in the sense of soul seems to have arisen early on in human history, as people while dreaming had strange adventures and encounters with deceased ancestors. Many hunter-gatherer societies have the concept of spirits which are detatched from natural objects: ghosts and spirits of ancestors. Many primal people also had the concept of impersonal spiritual power--life forces that infused natural objects, animals or people with sacred power: orenda (Iroquois), manitou (Algonquian), wakan, or mana.

Not sure what point you're making here. Both animism and theism are rooted in awe of the majestic and powerful: lightning, thunder, waterfalls, etc. Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy) famously identified the core of religious sentiment as the numinous: . a profound emotional "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self." He further described it as a feeling of mysterium tremendum et fascinans --something wholly different from our everyday experience, frightening in its overwhelming power but also fascinating.

 

Of course. Primal societies don't have the variety of differentiated structures that modern societies have. In primal societies, there is no concept of "religion" as something detached from the rest of communal life. It's just a special part of their everyday experience--set apart by sacred sacred rituals. And they aren't noted for making analytical distinctions in comparing their ways with those of other cultures. Most ordinary Americans aren't either. What you seem to be saying is that the go-to person "in the know" about the proper definition of religions is the shaman, not scholars who have made extensive comparative study of the subject.

The exclusivistic "religion" you're talking about is not the generic religion but an Abrahamic one. I hope you recognize that the ancient Greeks and Romans had religion, even though their gods weren't jealous and people could worship as many of them as they wanted. Belief and worship of the pagan gods was religion by most definitions, but not exclusivist. Hinduism, I hope you recognize, is a religion, but one which can accommodate other religions, including Christianity. It's Christianity that refuses to reciprocate. The exclusivity of Christianity caused problems for it in the first few centuries of its existence, but Bart Ehrman thinks it was one of the most important reasons for its growth. It wouldn't allow folks to dilute their loyalties by worshiping other deities.

Here I think you're getting at the crux of the problem. When you think "religion", Christianity, the Abrahamic religions, or something like them is what you seem to have in mind. But historically, these were quite exceptional. Another problem is a tendency to use the term "religion" to refer to the institutionalized, bureaucratized kind found in modern societies, in which structures are highly differentiated. This is not true of the typical hunter-gatherer society, where religious structures aren't differentiated and religious practitioners are not self-conscious about it.

BTW, Shinto is commonly considered to be a religion, even in Meagain's sense of the word. World History Encyclopedia
Shinto | Beliefs, Gods, Origins, Symbols, Rituals, & Facts
Shinto - Wikipedia
Shinto means "way of the gods", and "certain natural phenomena and geographical features were given an attribution of divinity. Most obvious amongst these are the sun goddess Amaterasu and the wind god Susanoo....In Shinto gods, spirits, supernatural forces and essences are known as kami, and governing nature in all its forms, they are thought to inhabit places of particular natural beauty. In contrast, evil spirits or demons (oni) are mostly invisible with some envisioned as giants with horns and three eyes." Shinto
The Kojiki ('Record of Ancient Things') ,the Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan), the Manyoshu (a collection of 10,000 leaves) the Fudoki (a collection of mythology, rituals, and folklore), and the Engishiki (laws, rituals, and prayers) set forth basic tenets of the religion.

 

Actually, transubstantiation is the Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox version. Some Christian denominations believe in consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine retain their substances along with that of Jesus. Most Protestant churches, like my Methodists, regard it as symbolic. Episcopalians, typically, leave it up to the individual to decide.

But you're right that for Catholics, the idea that this just taking some bread and wine and "that's all there is to it" is a serious misconception. The basic difference between a Catholic service and most Protestant ones is that Catholics actually believe, or are supposed to believe, that the bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Jesus. The whole service is oriented toward this event. As a kid taking Catholic communion, I remember being puzzled, as I tried to scrape Jesus off the roof of my mouth with my tongue, why He still looked and tasted like a wafer of bread. And of course, the consecrated host, Christ's real presence, is always present on the altar of every Catholic church, and devout Catholics are expected to show proper reverence. I personally think that if people can believe this, they can believe anything. But I have the impression that they actually do believe it!

 

You are gathered together with other people at a ritual presided over by a shaman and witnessing rattles fly thru the air giving off blue sparks. And you say this is not religion because...? Because it's real while "religions" are fake or insincere? Have you ever been to a Catholic or Orthodox service? Or a Pentecostal one? People take those very seriously, can get quite emotional over them, and think they've either consumed the literal body and blood of Jesus (Catholic) or think they're possessed by the Holy Spirit (Pentecostal).

As for the flying rattles, that would indeed be quite extraordinary. As one of those "objectivist" types you complain about, I go along with Hume and Carl Sagan that "extraordinary claims" require extraordinary evidence. Since you claim to have seen this with your own eyes, it may be veridical for you. I won't believe it unless I or a credible source see it. I'm not accusing you of being a liar or hallucinating, although I can't rule out those possibilities. Another possibility is that the medicine man worked out some kind of illusion, such as the ones commonly used by priests in ancient times to fool the faithful. Ancient Magic: The Illusions Created in Temples by Amazing Inventions Professional mediums in our own society make livings out of similar devices for duping their clients. Of course, I could be wrong and missing out on the true meaning of life. I've heard that a lot before. I do think, intuitively, that there is probably a lot more out there about reality that we don't know and is beyond the reach of science at the present time. But I'm afraid I think doubting Thomas was right in insisting on empirical evidence.

I do accept your contention that the 4Cs need to put more emphasis on the numinous, which is the sine qua non of religion. But the fact that primal societies don't separate groups of worshipers from the rest of the community seems likely to be the result that they're much smaller and less structurally differentiated. I think that's a dubious basis for distinguishing religion from non-religion. I've heard the Twelve Steppers' slogan about religion being for those trying to avoid hell and spirituality being for those who have been there. I've seen the program work. But Bill Wilson was influenced by Christianity. Biblical Roots of Early A.A.’s Twelve Steps - Christians in Recovery That some recovering alcoholics and addicts have decided to try Native American ceremonies as an alternative doesn't make them non-religious, even if they work. As I've mentioned, I've had mystical experiences of my own, and have changed my life accordingly. But I'm willing to entertain the alternative explanation that they're hallucinations.

 

No, no, no. I am not thinking of Abrahamic religions. That low hanging fruit is not the point. It was an after thought that I added after my previous post. I know that such is not definitve of religion. Some religions are that way, and others are not, though I would argue that a religion is more likely to have an in-group out-group dynamic whereas this is not important or necessary to a spirituality. I have often pointed out, and possibly did so already in this debate, that Hinduism is an example of a very powerful religion because it does not oppose other religions but simply assimilates them. I know I have already discussed Shinto in this debate, prior to the last post.

I will argue that religions have members, regardless of whether they are exclusive or not. That is part of their power as an institution---that is their in-group/outgroup.

Yes, and you will notice that I stated that Buddhism did not have a problem with Shinto, while clearly stating that Buddhism is a religion---to what I said above.

Actually, I reread what I wrote, I can tell I was getting very tired and I was trying to post that before I went to bed. So I guess I wasn't as clear about Buddhism being a religion as in the previous post I did a while back in this debate. I did say that Buddhism did not have a problem with Shinto, and Shinto adopted religious aspects from Buddhism. In my earlier post, I referred to Shinto as a pseudo-religion which I usually use to denote as something in between a spirituality and a religion. My argument is that before the Chinese came, it was a spirituality, and that after the influence of Chinese Buddhism (a religion) it became a pseudo-religion. Though, if you wanted to argue that as it was elevated to a State Religion, it in fact became a religion, I would not disagree too much. Originally Shinto ceremony was conducted by women who would perform ceremonies such as Kami Oroshi wherein they served as a shamaness. There is clearly a connection between Shinto, the Korean shamanic traditions and the traditions in Siberia and China including those that gave rise to Taoism.

True, but I'm not talking about just indigenous traditions or the ancestral ways of the ancients. What about modern people that believe themselves to be 'spiritual.' I have had this conversation with many kinds of such people. This is a definition I have used and written about for a good 15 to maybe close to 20 years. For many of those years I would host a fire pit in my backyard where I would cook steaks and we would talk philosophy, spirituality, and religion long into the night. Some people always came, but there were many people that came once, or only occasionally, or were invited by friends and did not know they could come again by themselves, etc. And there were other places where I explored this concept. In my experience, many of the people who believe themselves to be spiritual do not agree with the structure of 'organized religion,' or the religious structure of an in-group/out-group. They certainly do not see their beliefs as something that is detached from the rest of the world. They see their spiritual traditions as all-encompassing and largely unstructured. Wicca is another example, and even while they have covens and what not---they do not see it as structured as religion and consider their spirits to be all around us, not split between a secular and nonsecular, for example. Wicca is not an old ancient spirituality---it was created by an author in the 1800's if my memory serves me right. Many of them like the idea of secrecy and an exclusivity so the comparison with Wicca might not be as good, but many I have talked to experience it as an unstructured non-political belief system.

But religious Americans certainly experience their religion as an in-group with nonbelievers in an outgroup. In fact, I would have to disagree about Americans not making analytical distinctions with their ways and other cultures. They are prone to making ignorant and uninformed distinctions, and some are prone to making racist distinctions, They certainly rationalize these distinctions. And there is certainly an in-group out-group dynamic at play that is different than what I referred to.

But in terms of spirituality, and talking with those who consider themselves spiritual as opposed to religious, there is certainly an acceptance of other people. We can argue that many of these people do not even have a spirituality as I define it, but nonetheless, they do recognize a difference from themselves and a belief that can be exlcusive, as you said, or at the very least, represents a distinct in-group.

LMAO! So, lets go back to why functionalism even became a thing. Do you recall what that was?

Just in case, let me remind you, Malinowski and other Anthropologists were finding that the 'curious and exotic ways' of the people they were studying, was actually important and had an important social function and therefore rebelled against the broad generalizations made by people back at home.

A medicine man (and all the ones I know dislike being referred to by the Tungusic word, Shaman), an actual shaman, a supporter, someone who believes in the ways, etc. someone who believes they are spiritual, a healer, a Christian Mystic-------yes, true to the foundations of Functionalism----they would be a better go-to person than someone in an academic setting, who denies the nonphysical nature of their work, to ask about their spirituality and why they disagree with it being a religion. Or---at least someone like myself, who like Malinowski, experienced it first hand, and made an extensive comparative study of the subject based on that experience. Granted, I have not submitted a research paper to peer review. But, it will face public opinion (if and) when I get my books published. (If my wife doesn't succeed in keeping me from finishing them with her many pet projects...)

My whole point is------the experience, the magic, the lack of structure and institutional framework, the dynamic that seeks the nonphysical directly rather than to place the nonphysical into the mundane physical. This is spirituality. This is the experience that the definition of religion ignores. Religion is an institution. Spirituality is a spiritual thing. Religions have spirituality at their core, or at least, they should. This is the existential experience that creates my Functionalist definition.[/QUOTE]

 

Did you read my whole post or posts, before responding? Yes I have been to many catholic services. My wife is catholic. I didn't mention it but I have been to a Russian Orthodox service, and I have been to Pentecostal ones and other similar services, sometimes I would have preferred not to. I have been to many Buddhist services.

To assume my point is that indigenous spirituality is real, while religion is fake or insincere, is to miss my whole point that spirituality is at the core of religion. You still don't have a grasp of my use of the word, logosummonism. There are religious services that can be very spiritual, including pentecostal services. Praying with the rosary can be very spiritual. Hindu and Buddhist meditation is certainly spiritual, and Sufi ceremony can be very spiritual. These touch on the core of religion that is a spirituality.

It seems that one problem you have with my definition is that you think it is dualistic--that I am saying that there is spirituality that is exclusively spiritual and religion that is exclusively religious. That is not the case. I am saying that there is spirituality which can exist on its own, and then there is religion which is the structure that emerged around spirituality.

The fact that you haven't experienced it, while I have, leaves us with the problem that whatever I say is anecdotal. One thing you commonly hear among Westerners who have experienced such things is, the phrase, "You have to experience it yourself."

I can rule out that I was not hallucinating and one very big reason is that there were changes outside of the ceremony, and there were amazing things happening around the ceremony--before and after, when I had my wife and I requested a ceremony, for example. Then there are the people that my wife, has healed in her path, for example. I have a good 20 years of experiences, in fact more if you include a few things in the Philippines, that are so numerous I could write long stories for several days. But, again, unless you experience it, it is all anecdotal.

For this reason, in my books on philosophy, I do not get into this side of my life. There may be a few hints. But I don't explain any of it, or tell the stories. I have one book that I have been writing on the side, which gets into my search for proof and truth when I was younger, and relates it to my career as a Securities Analyst in Japan, and then meeting my wife and her 'quaint, seemingly superstitious, ways' leading up to the healing of my stepdaughter by a Philippine indigenous healer, and how all of that tied into my wife's healer ancestry. I don't make any conclusions on it, I leave the reader to make their own conclusions.

But-----you mention fake mediums----let me remind you what I said lastnight that I do exclude such things in religion that is insincere. I think there is a lot of this in the pentecostal faith. There is true spirituality in the pentecostal and similar traditions. In fact, one researcher did a study on this which led them into other traditions which became a very interesting book----they originally wanted to try to understand why pentecostals would achieve a certain expression as they were having these deep spiritual experiences. Eventually they studied the posture expressed in ancient statues, totems, etc, and the power that it had.

But I do think there are plenty of fakes from pentecostals who fake speaking in tongues, and evangelical altar calls, all the way to televangelists. I mentioned music last night---and music is used to create a fabricated spiritual feeling by using several techniques such as repetition, then a build up, and a pause, followed by a response such as a crescendo. I would not include this in my definition of spirituality----it is logosummonistic.

And thus you fail to see the difference, like the academics who arrogantly think that their definition is sufficient. From a Functionalist standpoint, they make the same mistake as the speculative anthropologists who categorize and define without first hand experience. The silly assumptions they make on how plant medicines were discovered for example. And like you say, the medicine man could have used some kind of trick to make the rattles move in the sweat lodge or even in a yuwipi. It is easy to argue such a thing without actually having seen it. Simply participating in any Lakota sweat lodge and wondering how such a thing could happen, should answer that problem right away. But, of course, a Western mind will naturally ask this. In my first yuwipi, I tried to figure out what kind of trick this was. Was there a person with infra red spyglasses moving around we couldn't see? That still would have been impossible the way the rattles moved around the crowd of people. Even today, a part of my mind still says----how can they do this? And the rattle is only one thing. I have been touched by animals and all kinds of things.

There is a case of a fake yuwipi man who tried to trick people in yuwipis with lights and stuff. There were several news stories in a newspaper that comes from the Rez about 10 years ago. It was considered a pretty serious thing, and I believe he was killed for it.

Simply stating that primal societies are smaller and less structurally differentiated still ignores the whole problem of the experience, and of the numinous, and the other points I have made. If these former alcoholics, for example, who have found recovery through Native ceremony consider themselves as nonreligious and agree with the distinction that these ways are spiritual and not religious, then you are minimizing their experience. You are objectively disagreeing with Medicine People and others who do not like to label their ways as a religion---and by this I don't mean that your are using fact and data and rational analysis to disagree---I mean that you are objectifying them, their opinion, and their experience.

Let me remind you that it is not a dualistic argument with spirituality on one side and religion on the other.

 

I have two responses to this that go to the point I was making.

1.) The first problem is the difference between a ritual of belief as in the communion where this is believed to happen, and the case of the sweat lodge and yuwipi where you are literally 'experiencing the nonphysical or a nonphysical event.'

Even in the case of catholic transubstantiation, where it is supposed to be more than a symbol, there is a problem with how much do the people believe. You would think the belief would be much stronger in the Philippines where there is a common belief in such supernatural things as Diwata, which are like fairies or elves, or where, for example, the Catholic church still performs exorcisms, far more than in any Western communities. But the whole experience of communion in a Philippine catholic church is more of a symbolic ritual that is a social part of mass. In many other cases, as Tishomingo pointed out, it is more symbolic. It was symbolic in the church I grew up in. It was still a serious ritual, but it was not comparable to rattles flying around a sweat lodge of their own volition.

2.) It is the perfect example of what I refer to as logosummonism. Even if you believe that Jesus is converted into the bread and wine through transubstantiation, it is a ceremony that places a nonphysical being, Jesus, as he is in heaven, into the physical world as flesh and blood, made even more physical as the present moment of bread and wine. Communion replaced the blood sacrifice, which in its earliest paleolithic form was not logosummonistic, as it was a gift back to nature--the nonphysical animating force. Later it became a ceremony to pass to the nonphysical side, one could not come before God but through the blood sacrifice. But as it is performed through communion even back into, I forget where it was originally used---the cult of Mithra or was it a Greek or Egyptian God? I forget----but in this context, it is very logosummonistic. These ordinary people, living in their ordinary mundane physical world, are now like Jesus---here in the flesh.

When you enter a sweat lodge or a yuwipi, you are entering into the sacred---the nonphysical, or at least somewhere in between. When those rattles move, it is not symbolic, or mundane---they are moving of themselves. There is no one in a mask, there is no one representing spirit, there is nothing that is moving the rattles---it is nonphysical.

 

But MANY Protestant denominations, like Methodists, Presbyterians, Evangelicals, etc. don't believe in any divine presence in the bread and wine at all. For them, it's just a commemorative ritual.

 

But more than that, Christians believe that God is present in all of creation, while remaining distinct from it. In other words, there is no place where God is not.
God Is Transcendent and Immanent? How Is That Possible?
Immanence - Wikipedia
As the Qur'an puts it, Allah is "closer to man than his jugular vein."(50:15)

Yes! Religion goes beyond mere personal feelings, and ordinarily involves ritual. I don't think you need to "placate" the falls, but you'd have to be trying to relate them because you think they might do something for you, are powerful or have the status of what Eliade calls a hierophany, a manifestation of the uncanny or the sacred--holy, exalted, or worthy of devotion. Probably there would have to be some sense that the falls have agency, i.e., the ability to take independent action. Cultural anthropologist Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) thinks the religious impulse is a result of our cognitive programming to perceive agency in unfamiliar or ambiguous objects. Upon encountering something that could be either a log or a crocodile, the tendency is to perceive and act as though it were a crocodile. Better safe than sorry!

But in order to get it into the comparative religion textbooks you'd probably have to go public, and get others involved. Individuals can have private experiences, but religion as we know it is a group-shared, communal phenomenon. Like Lone Mountain Wolf's sweat lodge.

 

Here we may have reached an impasse. You think the participants in yuwipi are literally experiencing the nonphysical. And Catholics think they are, too, in the eucharist. In fact, there are thousands of people who have reported encounters with extraterrestrials, ghosts, leprechauns, Big Foot, the Virgin Mary, etc. Carl Sagan convered these in A Demon Haunted World, and naturally dismissed them as hogwash, but he could have been wrong. These always seem to be in situations that are inaccessible to scientific verification. It may be that these experiences are real, and that the entities concerned have an aversion to scientists ans won't show themselves in their presence. There was a reputable anthropologist (I can't remember her name) who went to Haiti to observe voodoo rituals and ended up being possessed by a loa, the goddess Erzulie. Too bad there weren't other scientists around to figure out whether or not she was hallucinating.

Here is where existential choice is concerned. Do I believe you and the shaman? Or do I hold out for the scientists? I'm waitin' for the scientists. I'm a little less demanding than Meagain in this regard. He once told me that he needed "mountains of evidence" to convince him that the historical Jesus existed. I'm willing to settle for substantial evidence--enough to convince a reasonable person, even though other reasonable persons aren't convinced. I don't know you well enough to know how reasonable you are, and what you've claiming is so extraordinary (unlike the existence of an apocalyptic Jewish rabbi when such folks were relatively common) that I'd need some pretty solid proof. (I'd need the same to believe Jesus walked on water or rose from the dead). I've chosen to accept the findings of psychology about the power of hypnotic suggestion, wishful thinking, group pressure and other influences on even reasonable people.

 

And I can't blame you in that way, because for a good part of my life, it was important for me to find whether God or the nonphysical was real or not. I could never accept blind faith. And I too needed a lot of proof. And until I had found that proof, I was skeptical of all such things. In fact I even gave up for almost a decade. If it had gone any other way, I would be an agnostic, if not an atheist, rather than to believe in something that I cannot experience in such a powerful way, and more importantly, that I cannot have evidence of. If you are satisfied with your faith, then, like you said, it is an existential choice. And anything I say is anecdotal.

And the way science currently is, it is very unlikely any man of science will come forward soon. For one thing, they wouldn't dare to. Albert Einstein, for example--I helped Jennifer Black Elk get her dad's stuff out of storage. Her dad was Wallace Black Elk, the son of Black Elk. He healed one of the Rockefeller sons of an incurable disease and became well known in some circles. He was friends with the Dalai Lama, and other people. Jennifer let me go through these boxes with her, and there was her father in pictures with all these people. Including several pictures of him with Albert Einstein, and even a letter (or more--I forget, this was a good 10 years ago) from him. Einstein participated in several sweat lodges with Wallace and said that Wallace was the only real teacher he ever had. I doubt that you will find any official record of this. Or even a mention of Wallace Black Elk. But Jennifer has the proof of that. Wallace did publish one book about his life, and he doesn't tell about Einstein, but he does tell about scientists coming to study ceremony with him, and how every time they would start to record, their equipment would seem to act up.

And the iidea that there is a nonphysical side of reality is what I hope my philosophy will provide. I show how science, and even the common man, is working with nonphysicality. And people do not like that idea. But my argument for a nonphysical wave is sound science and not quantum quackery. When you watch TV or listen to the radio, talk on a cell phone, or use a wifi, you are tapping into the nonphysical side of the universe. Im hoping this cracks the door open just enough that science can make a headway in this direction. It may sound crazy, but go back 200 years, and you will find that the idea that tiny little animals that we cannot see, can make us sick, and even kill us was ridiculous. How can such a small animal even exist? Are they invisisble? That's crazy. Back then everyone knew that it was the vapors that made you sick---bad smells and night airs.

But to that point I was making on communion. Since we can say that both sides are doing something they believe in (even if I think there are at least some catholics that when you pin them down, they would say that it is more ritual than factual) the experience of the communion is very different from the experience of a sweat lodge where rattles fly around, or any sweat lodge for that matter. There is, for example, just the preparation to enter into such ceremony. To enter into a shrine or temple in Japan, there is a stand where you rinse your hands and mouth with spring water an act of purification which adds to the numinous experience of being in the temple grounds or in the shrine. The torii gate itself is an entry into the sacred. The sweat lodge begins with a pipe ceremony, and then there is a ritualistic way of entering the sweat lodge, which you then have to stoop down to enter into because of the size and shape of the sweat lodge. So whether one is a valid belief and the other is not, or neither belief is valid, or beliefs are valid, the whole experience is different.

 

The only one I know of is Roman Mithraism. Justin Martyr thought the worshipers of Mithra practiced a ritual like communion, but Tertullian disagreed. Fact is, Roman Mithraists were a secret society, withe members sworn to secrecy about their rites. Any writings about the religion have been lost, so we just don't know much about their rituals and their significance. A common ritual meal was basic to binding people together, so it wouldn't be surprising to find it used by other religions. (The original Christian communion rite involved a sit down dinner). The most important Roman Mithric ritual was the sacrifice of a bull, embodying the god Soma. There is no record of the Persian Mithra doing such a thing, and Zarathustra is on record opposing bull sacrifice. Another problem is that we don't know which came first--Christian communion or whatever the Roman Mithraists did. Of course, Persian Mithraism is much older than Chrisitianity, but the Roman cult of Mithras apparently reached Rome somewhat later than Christianity, the second century, and seems to have been a very different religion in many respects--something like today's masonic lodges. Most of the monuments to Mithras began to appear in 136 c.e. and after, and none of the Roman religions were shy about copying from one another.

As for blood sacrifice, blood was widely regarded as the life force, so shedding it gave up something precious and valuable. Until the destruction of the Second Temple, it was the central focus of Jewish relgion. Saint Paul made the connection between the Paschal Lamb and Jesus--a powerful metaphor that helped to put Christianity on the map--at the expense of shifting attention from the life and teachings of Jesus to His death and resurrection.