Just about an hour ago the Easter king died and was resurrected. Robert Graves and James George Frazier can explain. Adonis was killed in the Nahr Ibrahim, Osiris dismembered in the Nile, and Jesus died crucified on a hill near Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, scientism seeps into the culture and makes rationalist fools out of the bible thumping Christians, whose religiosity is sabotaged by their pride in their western heritage. They defend the scientific reality of miracles, making straw men of themselves.
The spiritual key to human experience, and the human experience of spirituality, is lost; either washed away in the literalism of Mel Gibson's blood festival, or diluted by Rowan William's all inclusive notionalism. Williams can defend Philip Pullman because he shares Pullman's beliefs. The poetry of sermonry only makes his philosophy seem different to Pullman's. As my father used to say.
'I'm an atheist, but that shouldn't stop me from joining the Church of England.'
Yes, Google Bloggers, pulp has consumed our society. The literalism of the atheist turns easily into the contrariness of the Satanist; the religionist has given up his faith. Too often he is an intellectual. To the lovers of pulp there is meaning in denying meaning, meaning nihilism. Meaning to be derived from the recognition of all the half hidden realities of porn and violence, monstrosity and morbidity that film directors use to help paint their films yellow.
The film, No Country for Old Men, by the Cohen brothers has a veneer of truth because it argues for the arbitrary coin toss leading to destruction. But it is not profound. Just as the appeals for rationalism from a scientist with no understanding of history, no membership of a movement fighting for social justice, are not profound.
Hollywood has ransacked the perversions, because it believes that perversity is the underlying reality. For Hollywood Babylon, when reality is deconstructed it is perversely non-teleological, like the heat death of the universe. The underlying message they deliver now is that truth is a snicker on a phone line away, followed by the sound of buzz saws.
Sadly, focusing on the perverse is not a way to escape the clutches of Sam Harris's materialism. Although it is, perhaps, a way to escape the religion Sam Harris criticizes. He points at US, knock off, Jerry-built religion. At the flimsy denials of upright people like the US pastors, who, while saving their flock, screw them.
The perverse, pulp, is honesty in this context. It is why J G Ballard wrote about the posited sexual acts of the wounded in crashed cars. Why Leonard Cohen spiraled down into that ultimate nihilism: Zen Buddhism. They thought they were being honest in their nihilism. They were mistaken.
The rebuttal of the so called artist, that creepy co-opted western aesthete, to the ravages of the unwound Ouroubouros of materialism, is to try and rip its flesh- ultimately to self-harm.To zombify humanity for the sake of clarity and exposure. To examine the human machine and observe its decay, to play with ideas of cruelty and violence, to grow self important and fat on the recognition received from betrayal of the 'good'. To bejewel skulls.
Artists explore the nooks and crannies of sexuality and physicality in the old fashioned spirit of surrealism. Someone like Grayson Perry was a cynical little step up. His invocation of perversion and zombification is prettyfied and approachable.
And, again, this approach is not 'catacritical' it is almost medieval; satanic, a Boschean negative in the way it defines itself in opposition to the scientific and the religious, occupying a market niche. Of course the battle has already been won: the Christian religion in the west has long ago been recast into a scientistic mould.
The spiritual pride of the new scientific priesthood supersedes religion. Yes. Spiritual pride, because it demands obescience. Brian Cox is an upsetting exemplar of the mediocre scientist who vaunts his trade to the rest of us and demands modern forms of tele-evangelical worship. Yes, worship.
Look at the amazing universe. We brought you that. Look at infinity space. We brought you that. Look at the incredible diversity of life. We brought you that. Amaaazing!
The new priesthood is over-reaching, unpleasant in its ambition. It was described by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength. The world is theirs to do with as they please and now, emboldened, they demand your spiritual energy to worship Charles Darwin, not just your nod of recognition.
The followers of scientism have tried to convince UNESCO to make Down House into a shrine for the last 12 years. The new scientific priesthood wants the right to mediate what is right and wrong on the basis of science. Not just to act as informed experts. Professor Weston is Richard Dawkins.
All extreme forms of materialist rationalism treat people as objects and animals. Peter Singer is an example of this logic. And the consequences of these philosophies are familiar. Scientism turns humans into animals that breed - value is assigned to these animals by scientists. Materialist rationalism strongly advocates eugenics.
But, like the old priesthoods in the Egyptian times and all other times, the power of the priests to control the people relies on their ability to awe them into subservience with their correct interpretations of nature. And morality is an add on. The scientist priests helped the farmers plan their harvesting and sewing and the farmers and peasants gawped and marveled and offered up tribute.
Fleming and Pasteur are demi-Gods. Tesla, Faraday and Edison, demi-Gods, Singer and Dawkins are middle class semi-Gods. Without them, where would we be? Without the Mayan priests controlling the calendar, where would the Mayans have been? These people, say the telegenic front men, the Coxes of this world, are owed your allegiance. Were it not for them and their cohorts, would you even exist? Worship the scientist, not the false Gods of religion. In a synchronic coincidence tonight Cox speaks of Carl Sagan in science and at the core of the programme is this quote:
'Science is finding the answers to some of the deepest questions we have asked...this should be shouted from the rooftops and declaimed from the pulpits.'
How can two such embedded, such conventional scientists, right wing supporters of virulant capitalism by ignorance and default, have the chutzpah to pronounce on 'the future of humanity'? For them conflict was and is the 'senseless' behaviour that endangered and endangers our planet. Everything that is not scientific is superstition and pseudo science.
'We squander our 15 billion inheritance in meaningless destruction.' said Carl Sagan.
Sagan needed history lessons from the Vietnamese his country was killing in the millions. That was meaningless destruction, from his country's B52 bombers. Struggle for freedom and social justice is not, and was not, meaningless. The failure of understanding was Sagan's. Don't forget, Brian Cox helped write the bland theme tune for neo-con New Labour. For the third way. These are the people who claim to survey our civilisation.
And yet, theologians, philosophers, philosophers of science and the scientists themselves are less impressed. They see the strings. They know how thin the cardboard scenery is. Inflated spiritual pride in a scientist, demanding the awe and facing down the Pope is unwarranted. We know what we know. That's it. We use certain fixed methods to acquire this knowledge.
The Ouroubouros of science turns its back on its tail in order to try and understand consciousness, but cannibalisticaly, with a sharp knife and fork - with its X-rays, scalpels, radioactive traces and ultrasound. The category error is theirs not ours. Consciousness is indeed of a different order, Mr Gilbert Ryle, it belongs to a different domain. Vivisection didn't help you understand what people experienced Mr Mengele, but empathy would have.
If Crick needed LSD to visualize the double helix, then it was only through a drugged stupor of experience that he was able to make sense of the experimental data. He experienced DNA holistically. LSD allowed him to throw aside his analytical crutches and take a walk through his imagination.
William James and American pragmatism trounce British empiricism and it's derivatives every time. Understanding humanity and the world is about understanding the experience of being human and our experience of being alive in the world. Abstracting or objectifying consciousness and turning it into categories doesn't help us come to grips with experience. Experience is not classical and categorical, ask George and Robin Lakoff.
It is only the upstarts, the wannabe priesthood and moral arbiters, the badly educated Sam Harris, Adam Rutherford and Brian Cox, who claim that science itself is a higher order of consciousness, in a category above consciousness. Nonsense! It is not. Listen to the echo of elitist mystical religious inductions. Scientist proselytizers ignore criticism and rely on the ignorance of the people who listen to them: the gullible peasants and grateful cargo cultists.
Human consciousness is not the scientific method, it uses the scientific method. The human should use the tool. The tool shouldn't command the human. Rivers have to flow this Easter, metaphorically with Adonis's blood. The king must die and we are moved to our bowels by the love of Christ, not by scientifically formulated laxatives.
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