. . Some of this is also found in my address "The Trappings of Religion"
. . Skip down to "Soul".
. . Skip down to "Magic".
SIN!
. . (also see the file: The Seven Deadly Virtues.)
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UP-date: Dec 14th, 00
. . Some of this is also found in my address "The Trappings of Religion"
. . Skip down to "Soul".
. . Skip down to "Magic".
SIN!
. . (also see the file: The Seven Deadly Virtues.)
I think we all can use a reexamination of the hoary old word, & see if it has a good use for modern thinking people. I'd say it does, but certainly not in the old sense.
IMHO... In my humble opinion:
There is such a thing as a feeling of sin. It's guilt, shame; a sorry, sad, sick, heavy feeling. It could be thought that the feeling is just a reaction to outside influences--parents, society, church. Obviously, to a degree, that is true. A lot of what people take as their self-image is really just what others tell them it is. They've never examined it. But let's look just at the behavior-guidelines that we have personally accepted or developed as our own.
. .
. . Shame is more a public humiliation; guilt more a private, internal one.
. . When we break one of our own rules, we have what's really an identity crisis. Why did we do that bad thing? Do we now have to re-examine our rules? If we keep the rule, could we ever do that thing again? Are we really the "good guy"? Did that bad act come from our real self?
. . Yet the psychopath feels good as he acts out what we others would call evil. The "congruity" hypothesis fits. To him/her, he is acting in perfect congruence! It is reinforcing to him too, unfortunately. Be careful of what self-image you may give a young person.
. . Fear of an authority --even a god-- is not a grownup, rational, growthful reason to act properly! Note that my "Incongruence Hypothesis" puts the burden of proof properly on the individual. ("Properly", in a Gaian view) Even positing a god, I believe that that god would appreciate our use of the brains he gave us.
. . If a person is not *truly sorry--i.e. wouldn't even *think of doing it again--he's not out of the "sin". S/he has not distinguished and separated the act from the "self".
. . Asking for forgiveness, for a time, assuages our incongruence. We will, from now on, act as one with our ideal self. Right. One part of us is set up to combat the other "evil" part of us. Nonsense! Instead, do the work. Examine the incongruity. Resolve it without creating some imaginary internal evil. See it as it is: a miscalculation, due to inattention. Note to self: pay more attention. (Being me requires attention!)
SOUL...
Now, about "soul". It's terribly difficult to talk about because it is taken to mean so many very different things --from "passion", to "American black-ness", to something like ghosts.
. . I prefer spitituality based on reality, tho that's not meant to lose whatever value may reside in the metaphor. BUT --let's not lose reality in favor of the metaphor!
. . So I'll start from a guess at far history. People observed other people die. The sick one had something --some "animating force", then they didn't. They were a person, then they were meat. What was it that left?
. . Unfortunately, the human brain demands explanations long before science can supply the real answer --sometimes after thousands of years. In between, people just made the best explanation they could. Probably, the "essence" they thought left... the "animating force"... was the original concept of a "soul" --pretty close to the "ghost" concept. Now we know what "leaves" the body at death, and it isn't mysterious any more. There is no ghost. So the definition of "soul" is free to change, and it has --in many directions at once. My preference is that it mean: deep(er) knowledge of who you really are. Death to the "ghost"!
THE ORIGIN OF MAGIC.
SLEEP. That other world, of wishes and fears, both too easily granted.
. . The origin of "magic" is from the area between sleep and waking, when we are unsure of our domain. The uncertain interface. When the possibilities of the omnipotent world intersect with the practical life.
. . Other writers:
Dissonance.
. . What the mind will do in the case of *some* people is to rationalize it away, to 'untwist' it. The greater the dissonance, the greater the rationalization in an effort to untwist things.
. . And this process is what is at work when we feel guilt. We have cognitions of what we believe, and of what we have just done, and things are either in consonance, or dissonance.
. . Some people can live with dissonance, some can't.
. . by "mjhts"
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. . cathe22 (Seattle, WA)
. . There is a concept in both Hinduism and Buddhism of himsa which is the sense of separateness of self which is seen as the foundation of sin. At the moment that a person considers the self individual and whatever is other as other, the basis for sin is laid. I came across this notion this year after using the term "ahimsa" which I took to mean harmlessness for years to keep myself lodged in right behavior.
. . ...alternatively, if there is a little part of the biological me [genetic] that controls my morality, couldn't that be loosely interpreted as a soul?
. . David Nye (nyeda@uwec.edu). Midelfort Clinic, Eau Claire, Wisconsin