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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 misund

• 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.
  • mbrock 11y ago
    For some reason I read Durkheim's book on the origins of religion. Back then I was also reading stuff like William James on the variety of religious experience. Very interesting stuff, and they're both great scholars. Durkheim of course discusses the sacred at great length, tracing it in the case of Polynesian tribes to the social concept of mana. (Just showing that I've read the book!) The reason he was able to present this theory in a convincing way that advanced the state of the art in anthropology and sociology and religious studies, it seems to me, is that he was well-trained in the scientific method and scientific writing, so he was able to discuss it all on a scientific basis—that is, I suppose, separating the etic from the emic. Again I'm simply curious about how the scientist in the article manages that... and I've seen a lot of people get into psychedelics and then kind of lose their ability to talk clearly from a scientific, secular, non-mystic perspective. Maybe you'll see my point of view more clearly if I say that I have absolutely nothing against the mystic perspective—I just think the value of science lies in its refusal to really "go native." And I think religious studies and religious psychology etc is more fascinating the more it sticks to the scientific/philosophical project of secular explanation. My initial knee-jerk reaction was about a psychologist publishing a book with the title "Sacred Knowledge." I am probably mistaken about this reaction... it was bolstered by the article's quotes about "sacred molecules" and empirical proof of Jung and excitement about some guy who saw dancing gods on a drug trip, fractal patterns, and so on. I'm super interested in how we could, with philosophical and scientific rigor, discuss whatever is the actual content of "mystical consciousness." James's work was an empirical and mostly anecdotal study of life-changing mystical experiences, and I thought it was very interesting. I think there are some interesting aspects in Heideggerian phenomenology that would be relevant. Mildly interesting: the reason why those deep learning pictures look like LSD visuals. If I were to start studying this stuff myself in any serious way, I would also probably be likely to "go native" or "go weird" or blur the emic/etic, etc. Still, the whole project is very interesting, and kind of seems to represent the whole "Enlightenment project" in a way. Using secular science to treat and collaborate on things that previously was the realm of shamans and priests. Just, how does the scientist not become the priest, even after 100 doses of entheogens?
• sago 11y ago
  (Also, no need to apologise, at all - I'm interested in the conversation, and you're not coming across negative in any way. I hope I'm not either: I certainly am not intending to be.)
  • mbrock 11y ago
    No worries.