That “Issues around notions of “belief”
page.
OK, some people are going
to think I’m pretty silly investigating this stuff.
But
what I’ve noticed over the years is a real overlap between what commonly gets
regarded as “religious” behaviour and the behaviour I see among people involved
in political action. This includes:
·
Conversion
experiences
·
Self-righteousness
and bigotry
·
A
tendency to attack those nearest them (not dissimilar to the treatment of
schismatic sects)
·
A
tendency to refer to sections of particular books, or to those books that tell
them not to refer to books (eg Bakunin’s “God and the State”).
This is hardly a new observation, I know.
Anyway, what goes with this, for me, is an interest
in how mystical experience is grounded in brain structure. So look out for postings there.
In addition, as I advertised on the Index page,
further pages and links will appear on:
·
Neo-paganism:
is it possible to have a non-mystical religious belief, a way of experiencing
that apparently wonderful sense of unity etc that does not rely on a belief in
a deity or mysterious powers? Can we
have our cake of rationality and eat it too, as it were? And also, what are political dimensions of
such? Neo-pagan groups run the
political gamut from very left-liberatory (eg Radical Faeries) to very
right-repressive (eg the Ásatrú movement in the USA). Hmmm, sounds not unlike a lot of radical politics to me.
·
Conspiracy
theories: to me this is sheer
fascination: it’s fun to read, it’s illuminating in some ways (as opposed to
Illuminating, for me at least), and it seems to involve a real desire to
believe in unity and coherence in human activity; and as well as this it
touches and affects conventional politics in so many ways, from old
Freemasonry, to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to Hansonism.
·
Morris
dancing, yes, morris dancing. A
working-class form of dance that has been heavily implicated over the years in
cross-dressing, lewd sexuality, Luddism.
Banned in Queensland in the 1860s.
·
Modern
uses of runes, particularly neo-Nazi uses of them. I’ve been fascinated for years in modern re-inventions. I’ve delivered workshops on the logical
contradictions involved in the modern claims.
This section will largely take the form of an essay on that; but I’ll
also have links to a few sites of interest, especially stones in the US.