I guess I could kill a perfectly good day bing-watching five years worth of My Name is Earl, but I get more satisfaction from exploring real-world topics that interest me. The interwebs offer an endless skein of such threads, if you can sort them out of the flotsam.
And so I have a number of “dig deeper here” markers among my saved sources and links, and during these house-bound covid-oppressed days of solitude, I occasionally dig into those saved-for-a-rainy-day treasure hunts. For that task, I’m using a tool called Roam Research and a method called “Progressive Summarization”.
This starts by collecting NOTES which are all the highlighted passages from the web article (and occasionally with my own comments interspersed.)
From Notes comes a SUMMARY, which extracts all the highlighted or bolded bits that come from gleaning back through the notes to distill the most important saved bits of text.
And finally a SYNTHESIS, where I put the summarized pithy parts into my own words to gather them into the context of my own voice, experience, interest and realm of understanding. These will be available later, when related threads surface and relate.
Below, the numbered extractions distilled from the long article called In Praise of the Gods by Simon Sarris. I found it a very interesting read, and it provided for me a validation of my long-held sense that the Age of Science has not been without its costs.
For the morbidly curious, I appended a screen shot of what my Roam Research graph or work board for this article looks like. Yeah, I know. I should get a life. Gotta luv me. — Fred
With the Enlightenment's "escape from irrationality" we have lost the value of myth, of wonder, of enlivenment by the ineffable mystery of the *Kosmos--more than the physical Cosmos
"Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" *Ken Wilber KOSMOS as reality beyond the physical COSMOS.
The author calls for a return to an "embodied reasoning" other than the abstract world of the lab scientist who relies solely on reason (or the cloistered city dweller who never hugs a tree.) Life in the body vs life in the mind.
Irrational has become a pejorative term; as such, any matter not amenable to measurement is suspect
Lord Kelvin: Measurement is the basis of all knowledge. #ff
QUOTE: Rational insight is a powerful tool, and one of our worst excesses.
QUOTE: Virtue lies in giving things their proper place. To lack reason is to be inhuman. To rely on it solely is to be disembodied. This disembodied nature is the vice of the modern intellectual.
QUOTE: Without an education of stories, it is not only difficult to build your intuition, it is difficult to learn how to learn, and difficult to reason about virtue.
Modern "story telling" of TV fails to reach us because all it asks is our [[Attention]] but typically does not ask us to THINK. see [[Attention Economy]]
Traditions: "answers to" or I'd say responses to enduring questions, the author says. They are an "embodied" celebration or honoring or enactment of a part of who we are, see ourselves to be, sometime a part that we have inadequate words for. The candles we light, seasonal songs and stories, tales we tell--instill meta-rational values in our families and societies.
The quality of thought and richness of our vocabulary in an age or a society is reduced as we eliminate MYTH from our understanding of reality, of who we are, or our relationships to each other and to nature and the Other.
A belief in science can become less a creed of belief resting upon objective reality than on ORDAINED AUTHORITY and CONSENSUS. Science as a priesthood, it's creeds held with a white-knuckled grip.
There is FAITH in science just as there is FACT in religion. Both have their creeds and dogmas.
The "certainty" of science would hold that the earth (the KOSMOS) holds no secrets not ultimately to be cracked by mathematics, physics and reason.
A society does not become happier (the pursuit of happiness) by becoming more Spockian, by eliminating anything not PROVEN. We become impoverished in language and purpose. We can't grasp our place in the KOSMOS with nothing but equations. Rejecting ritual and liturgy is not to reject the supernatural, but to allow our existence to become UNNATURAL. [[Chesterton]]
Children live in the body, not the mind. As adults our understandings of the world become DIS-embodied and abstract, often completely free of any ties to the Earth under our feet.
The product of a life enriched by religion is gratitude and wonder and a world view that embraces the ineffable vastness and unknowability of the matrix of time and space we experience as a human life.
“The gods linger to remind us that the genius of the world does not originate within ourselves, but is hidden in every part of the world, if we are willing to let it dawn on us.”