The Function Of Belief

Snoopy said:
Maybe we're just splitting hairs over "root" (Australian slang, grey!).

Did Beethoven spend a lifetime creating music just to impress the ladies?

s.
Click to expand...

Perhaps not consciously, but the root of that compulsion evolved as a part of our mating instincts.

Tao
 
So when Robin Williams' character in "Dead Poets Society" said the purpose of poetry was to "woo women" he wasn't kidding was he?
 
All surface aesthetics aside, the phenomenon of belief has mostly to do with recognizing beauty and dwelling upon it for whatever reason. Beauty is attractive to the eye, ears, nose, touch, etc. It is addictive and holds one's attentions for longer than normal periods of time and may initiate physical activities.

This is a unique process which requires equal contributions by one's heart and mind. The coordinated sense of the beauty perceived and recognized by an individual may be sexually based, since that is the most common and least complex of human reactions. Beauty triggers desire, and in turn, desire brings suffering. (This is what the Adam and Eve story is really about folks). Beauty admired and consumed sires belief. Poetry and prose are also forms of beauty if appropriately constructed.

If you love home baked apple pies, if you gaze longingly at them, if you smell their fresh-baked goodness, if you take a few bites of a slice with vanilla ice cream when it's warm, you do in a sense fall in love with its beauty through several sensing organs all over again. Your positive memories of past experiences with home-baked apple pie reinforces your desire to consume same, in mass quantities if you're a conehead. And if you do this often enough you WILL gain weight.

flow....:p
 
Flowy! It's about time you showed up!

I've gotta split hairs with you a little because I think that beauty just sucks us in. Beauty is the universe's way of getting us to stick our beaks into its blossoms. It's the process that we really dig. Baking a perfect pie is far more gratifying than admiring or consuming it. We love, love, love the beauty of natural processes. We seek endlessly to understand and approximate what nature does. All of our arts and letters ultimately stem from that. And it's super-dee-duperty (to quote a famous purple dinosaur) cool that the naturo-sphere seems to have a built in apprenticeship program with innumerable possible entrances. Think of all the different avenues of exploration we humans are engaged in. All the ways we're studying ourselves and everything else that goes to make up our world of plants, animals , rocks , and other stuff. Every pursuit a doorway to the Momma Nature's dressing room. And all the arts and sciences, all the trades and crafts, all the philosophy and religion is connected in ways usual and unusual. It doesn't matter where one decides to matriculate because we never run out of new possibilities to explore! You can't see it all in one or several lifetimes.

The only people I know who are truly miserable, excepting disease of course, are those who are bored out of their skulls because they have never found anything to get passionately creative over.

Chris
 
Hi Chris...You and I see this pretty much the same way. The beauties of nature draw you in through your senses, heart, and mind and you are aesthetically pulled into her realities depending upon your preferences.

For those who cannot bake a homemade apple pie, consuming one is just the other side of the same beautiful experience. I'll agree that too much ilconsidered consumption is, in the long term, not a very beautiful thing and leads to suffering. But we are a part of nature and as such we constantly are drawn to pleasurable experiences.

Maybe a slice of warm pie and a cup of coffee will lead someone to sit down and write a story or poem about the experience. A Dutch master might have painted a still life of a cooling pie and a steaming cup of coffee. They were so good at manipulating light on canvas with oil paints. See how such experiences are connected by our creative natures?

BTW, have we just defined what pagans are ?

Tao...Speaking of Pagans, I didn't click and register on your youtube link because another naughty boy label would have probably been connected with my name in cyberspace. And G-d knows I've got them plastered all over my bod already. Besides that Muslimwoman's back in the desert and would likely put me on her naughty spot should she find out about it. *shudder*

flow....:p
 
Paladin said:
So when Robin Williams' character in "Dead Poets Society" said the purpose of poetry was to "woo women" he wasn't kidding was he?
Click to expand...
No!! I am such a disliker of holywood, yet it cannot but by chance produce the occasional gem. Dead poets was one. It should b made compulsory viewing in every classroom. Not because it refutes my argument on roots but because it shows the endless beauty of desires expression.

Tao
 
flowperson said:
Tao...Speaking of Pagans, I didn't click and register on your youtube link because another naughty boy label would have probably been connected with my name in cyberspace. And G-d knows I've got them plastered all over my bod already. Besides that Muslimwoman's back in the desert and would likely put me on her naughty spot should she find out about it. *shudder*

flow....:p
Click to expand...

Lol....its all innocent, you do not get x-rated on youtube....didnt u know? You know fine well that I am incapable of corrupting the minds of anyone here, let alone you!! So no more excuses :p


Ta0
 
Hey guys!

I turn my head for a minute and look what I missed out on!

The conversation took a fabulous turn!
China Cat Sunflower said:
Beauty is the universe's way of getting us to stick our beaks into its blossoms. It's the process that we really dig. Baking a perfect pie is far more gratifying than admiring or consuming it. We love, love, love the beauty of natural processes. We seek endlessly to understand and approximate what nature does. All of our arts and letters ultimately stem from that. And it's super-dee-duperty (to quote a famous purple dinosaur) cool that the naturo-sphere seems to have a built in apprenticeship program with innumerable possible entrances. Think of all the different avenues of exploration we humans are engaged in. All the ways we're studying ourselves and everything else that goes to make up our world of plants, animals , rocks , and other stuff. Every pursuit a doorway to the Momma Nature's dressing room. And all the arts and sciences, all the trades and crafts, all the philosophy and religion is connected in ways usual and unusual. It doesn't matter where one decides to matriculate because we never run out of new possibilities to explore! You can't see it all in one or several lifetimes.
Click to expand...
Chris, you've hit on some truly interesting points, and that's not to take anything away from Flow or Tao or anybody else. I'm really glad I got involved in this discussion. :D
 
juantoo3 said:
Hey guys!

I turn my head for a minute and look what I missed out on!

The conversation took a fabulous turn!

Chris, you've hit on some truly interesting points, and that's not to take anything away from Flow or Tao or anybody else. I'm really glad I got involved in this discussion. :D
Click to expand...
2 tru juantoo!! Chris is getting rather consistent at making wayyyy too much sense!! If he aint careful I might start calling him my Guru !!

Tao
 
Chris...I too humbly bow to your verbose and loquacious expertise. But the old guy behind the curtain, W. Huston Smith, to my knowledge was the first in modern times to think and write about a "nature as origins of religion" perspective in his seminal book, The Religions Of Man, which was later retitled, The World's Religions.

But then he also may have sold snake oil on the side as did the character in OZ who ended up behind the curtain pulling levers.

flow....:p
 
OK, new wrinkle, now that I have had some time to mull it over in my mind.

So, we tend to believe because "we seek endlessly to understand and approximate what nature does" and call it "beauty?" If so, then does that mean that our pre-historic ancestors...and by extension through collective unconscious, ourselves...believe killing and death beautiful? The thrust of the spear, the slice of the throat, the watching in anticipation as the blood puddles, the draining of the life from the eyes...beautiful? Red of tooth and claw, beautiful? Those skulls of real cave bears that surround and sit atop those cave altars create quite a humbling sense of decorum.

chauvet-altar.jpg


The paintings on the cave walls are predominantly of prey animals and hunts, not butterflies and waterfalls.

9bph19.jpg


There may be some element of truth to my sarcasm...if we look to our collective fascination with war, blood sport and competition. Anybody with even an idle interest knows that ice hockey, American football and World Cup football are anything but sedate, even for the fans. Or what of our idolization of "gangsters" and others who use violence and murder to achieve what we feel we desire in this life?

Seems we have again returned to another one of those untouchable subjects...sacrifice and death. Which may actually be the point, at least according to Campbell.

So how do we account for these real evidences?
 
Last edited:
I posted this in the Applied Anthropology thread, but I think it may help shed a little light in this conversation too, so at the risk of being redundant:

Upper Paleolithic people were Homo sapiens sapiens like us and therefore had a nervous system identical to ours. Consequently, some of them must have known altered states of consciousness in their various forms including hallucinations. This was part of a reality which they had to manage in their own way and according to their own concepts.

This being said, we know as a fact that they kept going into the deep caves for twenty thousand years at the very least in order to draw on the walls, not to live or take shelter there. Everywhere and at all times, the underground has been perceived as being a supernatural world, the realm of the spirits or of the dead, a forbidding gate to the Beyond which people are frightened of and never cross. Going into the subterranean world was thus defying ancestral fears, deliberately venturing into the kingdom of the supernatural powers in order to meet them. The analogy with shamanic mind travels is obvious, but their underground adventure went much beyond a metaphoric equivalent of the shaman’s voyage : it made it real in a milieu where one could physically move and inwhich spirits were literally at hand. When Upper Paleolithic people went into the deeper galleries, they must have been acutely aware that they were in the world of the supernatural powers and they expected to see and find them. Such a state of mind, no doubt reinforced by the teaching they had received, was certain to facilitate the coming of visions that deep caves in any case tend to stir up (as many spelunkers have testified). Deep caves could thus have a double role the aspects of which were indissolubly linked : to make hallucinations easier; to get in touch with the spirits through the walls.
Click to expand...

Paleolithic Cave Paintings and Rock Art in France

Animals are often drawn without any care for scale, in profile. They can be whole or just represented by their heads or forequarters, which is enough to identify them. Their images are often precise, personalised and identifiable in all their details (sexes, ages, attitudes), whether they be Magdalenian bison in the Ariege or Aurignacian lions and rhinos in the Chauvet Cave, 18,000 years earlier. Scenes are rare and certain themes are absent, like herds and mating scenes. Paintings and engravings are thus neither faithful copies of the surrounding environment nor stereotypes.

As to humans, whatever the culture and diverse as they may be, they always seem to be uncouth and unsophisticated, mere caricatures. This is also a constant feature that stresses the unity of Paleolithic art.
The artistic abilities of the painters and engravers cannot be questioned. They deliberately chose to represent vague humans, with few details or deformed features.

A particular theme is that of composite creatures, at times called sorcerers. Those beings evidence both human and animal characteristics. This theme is all the more interesting as it departs from normality. It is present as early as the Aurignacian in Chauvet. It can be found in Gabillou (fig. 7) and Lascaux 10,000 years later or more and it is still present in the Middle Magdalenian of Les Trois-Freres, nearly 20,000 years after its beginnings.
Click to expand...

Paleolithic Cave Paintings and Rock Art in France

Wall images are perfectly compatible with the perceptions people could have during their visions, whether one considers their themes, their techniques and their details. The animals, individualised by means of precise details, seem to float on the walls ; they are disconnected from reality, without any ground line, often without respect of the laws of gravity, in the absence of any framework or surroundings. Elementary geometric signs are always present and recall those seen in the various stages of trance. As to composite creatures and monsters (i.e. animals with corporal attributes pertaining to various species), we know that they belong to the world of shamanic visions. This does not mean that they would have made their paintings and engravings under a state of trance. The visions could be drawn (much) later.

Trying to get into touch with the spirits believed to live inside the caves, on the other side of theveil that the walls constituted between their reality and ours, is a Paleolithic attitude of mind which has left numerous testimonies, particularly the very frequent use of natural reliefs. When one’s mind is full of animal images, a hollow in the rock underlined by a shadow cast by one’s torch or grease lamp will evoke a horse’s back line or the hump of a bison. How then couldn’t one believe that the spirit-animals found in the visions of trance - and that one had expected to find in the other-world which the underground undoubtedly is - are not there on the wall, half emerging through the rock thanks to the magic of the moving light and ready to vanish into it again. In a few lines, they would be made wholly real and their power would then become accessible.

Cracks and hollows, as well as the ends oropenings of galleries, must have played a slightly different yet comparable part. They were not the animals themselves but the places whence they came. Those natural features provided a sort of opening into the depths of the rock where the spirits were believed to dwell. This would explain why we find so many examples of animals drawn in function of those natural features (Le Roseau Clastres, Le Travers de Janoye, Chauvet (fig. 14), Le Grand Plafond at Rouffignac).
Click to expand...

Paleolithic Cave Paintings and Rock Art in France
 
Hi Juantoo,

You do bring to the thread a dynamic of aesthetics my assertions failed to touch upon. I still stand by the idea that this function originally developed because of sex and say that what you point at is as a result of the emergence of abstract thought developing in early humans. You make a good point that there are no butterflies, waterfalls nor flattering portraits in early cave art and your pastes from the other thread show that through the longevity of this type of art it showed amazing consistency. A reflection of largely stable cultures back then perhaps?

The emergence of abstraction very likely did give rise to the emergence of supernatural beliefs. But surely this was a side effect. Abstraction is a tool of the brain that allows foresight, logic, planning and all the other faculties mankind developed as a requirement of moving very rapidly out of Africa into a wide variety of habitats. Adaptability created abstraction for survival not to ponder God. Theism tends to turn it round the other way yet we can see looking to the very beginnings of primitive beliefs that we drew all we knew from what we knew. Not what we did not know. As beliefs developed over time they grew more complex and drifted ever further from the natural environment from which they stemmed. With the emergence of permanent settlements and the gradual divorce from wider nature, and new tools such as record keeping, they developed quickly into wholly anthropocentric edifices of thought. The human history of art shows very clearly the evolution of the supernatural to be just that, an evolution. Very strong evidence for saying religion is not gifted on man by a divine entity, but is solely the product of our imaginations? I think so.

Tao
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top