Part 25 (1/2)
For ion is itself a miracle For many more, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficiently accounted for in science, art, or social and political life Its role in a new prage, mediated activity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, is obviously different froious constitution and in a reduced scale of huion did not start out to deceive, but to explain Its practices, while see, or even ridiculous at ti, if only by resort to endurance The proain in attraction the inal purpose of religion was modified over tiress, especially in their radical form, are difficult to cope with
Once old values are questioned in the light of succeeding pragmatic circumstances, under new patterns of self-constitution, the result is coion and literacy ultiious diversification reflects each new scale at which humatic fraious result in tension between the variability of the elements involved in work or new aspects of social life and the clais and consequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation of numerous new books of new forms of faith Christianity and Islam are revisions; within them other revisions (schisms) took place, such as the Roman and Orthodox churches, the Sunni and shi+te
Other sects and religions, schis to reconstitute the original status, whatever that ing new contexts-that is, new pragmatic requirements Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to address everyone in the small community in which it came to expression
Over time, many books addressed their own constituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particular saints, or to soer corew in proportion to the diversification of human praxis and to the function of education exercised on a broader and broader scale
Froion of small-scale human activity to the churches of universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and the spirit of the respective books occurred They ultiious institutions had to adapt to and justify The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifying framework- embodiment of tradition which became laell as the followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures of Veda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One (Buddha), the practitioners of Taoised a sense of community It is the same sense of cooals, by the nation-state
The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resulted in the spread of the respective religious books, and of the letters that the books ritten in This is not necessarily the saion established its own state, the Holy Roman Empire (which is non to the size of Vatican City) that transcended national boundaries and languages, and was considered universal In the language of Islam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan is the Motherland The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by the Catholic Charles Martel, were also dissee, and culture of the world community they envisioned
The Crusades, in turn, and the religious wars that plagued Europe did not spread literacy as much as they atte meant to ensure an order that promised eternal life
In the scale of today's hueneral is almost independent of individual perforree of faith, ethical behavior, faion calls good, and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of social expectations Within a sether: the practical and the spiritual, politics and ion is their syncretic expression The need for specialization and matic relations Various realms of human practical experience are severed frorounded systeration-after all, this is what monotheism, in its various embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of new circu the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, at least the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the various churches of urus is reflective of the crisis of rew around it An increasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, or pseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the saer isolated, that alious dimension of people is connected to some sect, be it even one that used to be a doion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the new segmented practical experiences of work, family, and society, and thus into the real from sexual drive, love is one of the experiences from which family, friendshi+p, art, and philosophy derived over time Once written in the Book as a different form of love, once ascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between its natural biological basis and its cultural reality as a characteristic of a framework of huical and cultural identity
Written about in religious books, love starts a journey froence, temperament, appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love is subjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing the Book, to a set of expectations expressed as though they originated from outside the experience
In this process, there is no passive participant The written word is permeated by the structural characteristics of the act of preferring soelse, according to religious values The implicit expectation of permanency (of faith, love, or ownershi+p) results froed by the Book(s) A consensus essential for the survival and well being of the co forces fro their permanent and quasi-universal nature In a universe of ie other than that experienced in natural cycles is not anticipated
Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiences from which a notion of eternity and universality result The written words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and the promise of a better future are the result of the practical experience, since in the realm of nature only the ied Forever marked by this experience of tie of religion, together with the written language of observations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (the ues), remains a repository of the notion of permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrument for hierarchical differentiation
Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent of religion, language, as a product of and medium for human identification, projects these structural characteristics upon whatever the object of practical experience is Once written, the word seems to carry into eternity its own condition With the advent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by a different scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear as endoith the quality of eternity and universality, triggering its own sense of exaltation andwell into our day For millions of citizens froave up their roots to show allegiance to the Soviet E forced to adopt the Cyrillicto their eternity That soeo- political confrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roe the expectation
Religion and efficiency
In the literate forion, but also science and the humanities, literature, and politics are established and subjected to the practical test of efficiency Each projects a notion of permanency and universality, which is influenced by the practical experience of religion, someti in the notion (or notions) of God (or Gods)
Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale of human practice makes permanency and universality untenable, the tendency to escape fro sense of relativism in science, an appropriate self- doubt in hu of the multiplicity and open-endedness in almost every aspect of our social and political life
This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregard of it, through theour practical self-constitution The reality of the global nature of human experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributed nature, and of the rative forces at work, renders the centralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people At the same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes the Book even more necessary than ever for many, and at different levels of their practical life Thepermanent modes of life, exotic and less exotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes for a happy future or soood and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular in a world of extreue distinctions
The question whether love and reason can undergird community awareness, social action, political activism, and education if, as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues to decline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective This perspective is coion
It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religious suppression-either under coion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion
And it is becouions of atheision The subject is ulti very intimate aspects of individual self-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed
Still captive to dualisht about and nourished by experiences constitutive of literacy, we have probleion is different from what it was at the time of its inception, or the time ere first were exposed to it
In view of these developments, onder how the rules and values established in the original religious frah which these rules co values and criteria for evaluation, then any other means could perform the same function
The Crystal Cathedral of television fame, no less than the Web sites of uage, and we constitute ourselves as spiritual and physical entities in the experience of language, writing cannot be seen as a passive ly, the ion, changes its condition Applied to conteain and again Froion, what survives is the liturgy, transformed into a perfor completes this new condition of faith For millennia, a community considered its priests vital to its survival In the civilization of illiteracy, the situation is reversed Ministers, and to some extent priests, depend on a community for their survival Ministers are in the business of selling the their church or even God Soelists rerae crowds in tents, in auditoriuious enterprises create a vast business e as the enterprise can deliver what the preacher proh his performance act and the ants-no less fascinated by celebrity than the rest of society-will buy him
A newer phenoe- oriented, but the goal is the sa on inforoers, soboring or aggressive; cost- efficiency; co to a study by the Harvard Business School, the resulting church was the e their needs” Church attendance grew by relying on customer recommendation Soon, the etmarket”), with middle to upper middle class salaries
Other seekers look in different directions Alion, and sometimes entire sects are based on just a feords from the Bible (the Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, or the snake handlers of the Appalachians, or the Pentecostals) Participatory forms of worshi+p are another trend They may derive inspiration from the book, but they ai, dance,ions hark back to nature, anianision