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> That's different from ... talking about "sacred medicine" You seem to be doubling down on interpreting 'sacred' in that context as the scholar saying 'someth

by sago 11y ago

> That's different from ... talking about "sacred medicine" You seem to be doubling down on interpreting 'sacred' in that context as the scholar saying 'something I believe is supernatural'. Social scientists studying religion should use religious language, and scientists studying experience are fine to use mystical and visionary language, if they are describing something emically: i.e. the subject reports mystic or visionary experience. Terms like that even have an etic use, to refer to the pattern of experiences that are described that way, where they often become specific terms of art. You didn't seem to engage with my point that you are misunderstanding the term: it is triggering your 'woo' detector, which is giving a false positive in this case. "Sacred medicine" is not a problematic term, if you are studying medicine practiced in a sacred context. I have a book on "Shamanic medicine" - that doesn't indicate the author is a true believing shaman, just that they are the subject of his study. "Sacred knowledge" is a very good title for this book, because it is an attempt to look at what knowledge of psychoactive drugs is embedded into sacred frameworks cross-culturally, that can be reframed in a modern scientific context. I think the misunderstanding is very understandable, because religious vested interests do a good job of preventing religious studies being widely known. Partly their concern is to keep sensible folks like you saying this kind of thing: words like 'sacred', 'mystic' and 'visionary' should not be used unless you are a believer.

mbrock 11y ago
Firstly I apologize for making semi-snide remarks without having read the book. It does seem interesting and I appreciate your comments. But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I'm not really concerned with woo detectors. It's not that I think the word "sacred" implies some delusion or some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in theology and anthropology etc (I don't claim expertise in these subjects but I am somewhat familiar with what the word means). There's no way to sincerely apply the word "sacred" while remaining in the sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality. Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the framing I am missing here. I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think it cannot involve itself with normative/aesthetic/spiritual stuff like saying something is sacred. And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way? I don't have an answer. I've looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto Buddhism or Advaita monism. That's fine for them—and I'm personally very interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion (taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I'm not satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism. That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the function of secular science. I'm probably not expressing this very well.
- pantalaimon 11y ago
  > I'm probably not expressing this very well. Hm, could be. So you are acknowledging the feeling of sacredness, but you think there is no point in trying to evoke some sort of artificial 'sacredness' as that would defeat the very nature of it? That the moment you are trying to dissect it, it vanishes? Hm, maybe, but that's what we humans tend to do, sharing and categorizing experiences and when we do it systematically, it's science. I don't see why we shouldn't do this.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    To put it kind of humorously, I think science itself is sacred in its own way, and by introducing priest-like behavior among scientists, that's violating the sacredness of science as a distinct secular project.
- sago 11y ago
  > Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality. What's a claim of sacrality? A claim that a particular set of behavior is concerned with the sacred is, as your second paragraph implied, an unremarkable claim. No more impressive that claiming some behavior is religious, or ritualistic. This is where I'm struggling to understand you. Something is sacred, in the context of religious studies, if it is something set apart by a community and held deliberately in contrast with profane activities (following the Durkheim kind of definition - the older definition of folks like Otto is well out of favour now). To identify that certain activities, knowledge, experience, or behavior is commonly sacred, is just an observation about how communities organise their worldviews. In a certain sense, no discussion of religion can be secular, by definition (religious and secular are as slippery to define precisely as sacred and profane). But in the sense that you can do secular religious studies, I don't know why 'sacred' for you is a special kind of topic that can't be admitted to the rest of the field. On the 'people studying this go weird' tack. Yup! Very true. I think this is an issue with religious studies generally, and lots of related fields (biblical criticism, say). The people who are attracted to a field are probably more likely to have some affinity for what they are studying, and sometimes language can get a little to 'emic' for my taste. One does have to be careful to distinguish between the views someone will advocate and the positions they want to put forward as a scientist, or a secular scholar. Though sometimes people will blur those boundaries. Mind you, I get the same feeling from scientists and scholars with strong ideological opinions generally, not just religious folks. But all that said, the term 'sacred' is not unscientific that I can see, or at least, no more than any other term used to describe human religious activity.

by sago 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago

Firstly I apologize for making semi-snide remarks without having read the book. It does seem interesting and I appreciate your comments. But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I'm not really concerned with woo detectors. It's not that I think the word "sacred" implies some delusion or some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in theology and anthropology etc (I don't claim expertise in these subjects but I am somewhat familiar with what the word means). There's no way to sincerely apply the word "sacred" while remaining in the sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality. Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the framing I am missing here. I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think it cannot involve itself with normative/aesthetic/spiritual stuff like saying something is sacred. And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way? I don't have an answer. I've looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto Buddhism or Advaita monism. That's fine for them—and I'm personally very interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion (taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I'm not satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism. That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the function of secular science. I'm probably not expressing this very well.

pantalaimon 11y ago
> I'm probably not expressing this very well. Hm, could be. So you are acknowledging the feeling of sacredness, but you think there is no point in trying to evoke some sort of artificial 'sacredness' as that would defeat the very nature of it? That the moment you are trying to dissect it, it vanishes? Hm, maybe, but that's what we humans tend to do, sharing and categorizing experiences and when we do it systematically, it's science. I don't see why we shouldn't do this.
- mbrock 11y ago
  To put it kind of humorously, I think science itself is sacred in its own way, and by introducing priest-like behavior among scientists, that's violating the sacredness of science as a distinct secular project.
sago 11y ago
> Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality. What's a claim of sacrality? A claim that a particular set of behavior is concerned with the sacred is, as your second paragraph implied, an unremarkable claim. No more impressive that claiming some behavior is religious, or ritualistic. This is where I'm struggling to understand you. Something is sacred, in the context of religious studies, if it is something set apart by a community and held deliberately in contrast with profane activities (following the Durkheim kind of definition - the older definition of folks like Otto is well out of favour now). To identify that certain activities, knowledge, experience, or behavior is commonly sacred, is just an observation about how communities organise their worldviews. In a certain sense, no discussion of religion can be secular, by definition (religious and secular are as slippery to define precisely as sacred and profane). But in the sense that you can do secular religious studies, I don't know why 'sacred' for you is a special kind of topic that can't be admitted to the rest of the field. On the 'people studying this go weird' tack. Yup! Very true. I think this is an issue with religious studies generally, and lots of related fields (biblical criticism, say). The people who are attracted to a field are probably more likely to have some affinity for what they are studying, and sometimes language can get a little to 'emic' for my taste. One does have to be careful to distinguish between the views someone will advocate and the positions they want to put forward as a scientist, or a secular scholar. Though sometimes people will blur those boundaries. Mind you, I get the same feeling from scientists and scholars with strong ideological opinions generally, not just religious folks. But all that said, the term 'sacred' is not unscientific that I can see, or at least, no more than any other term used to describe human religious activity.