A Bit On Comparative Religion

After spending the weekend with my grandfather repairing a roof, I've begun wondering whether humor doesn't transfer biologically. Both he and I agree on the importance of stating the obvious. That is, on stating the obvious obviously, as if it weren't obvious. For example, "be careful you don't slip, else you'll end up falling" or "I wonder if i take my time nailing these, whether it'll take longer." The first was mine, the second his.
The majority of the time, the subtlety of the joke goes unnoticed, or worse, gets taken seriously. But Popop and I were having a grand ol' time blathering off meaningless and tautologous sentences."
Later, the whole subtlety of the thing got me thinking. As a word, subtlety reminds me of two things. The first is that it is absolutely impossible to spell correctly on the first try. I can never get the 'L's and 'T's straight. The second, and only slightly less important, is that the majority of religious activity seems to occur as if shrouded by some unobservable force.
It is becoming more and more apparent to me that our former categories are presently in a sort of metamorphic state. We are now conflating, if I may borrow and misuse O'Conner's terms, Mystery and Manners. "My Cosmos" and "the cosmos" are turning into the same thing--a phenomenological possibility unattainable till this century.
The globalized American Christian, or at lest this globalized American Christian, is beginning to feel the intense struggle between the Mystery of homo religiosus and the Manners of, say, my shoddy excuse for being an Anglican. I am beginning to feel, in other words, the psychological strains created by the incessant juxtaposition of my particular world and the whole world. There are too many congruities between the impulses that drive Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists etc...(even secularists) to be ignored. Why, for example, do we all desire a "better," and hope to find it by transcending our present condition? Why does religious man distinguish between Sacred and Profane things? What is all this rigmarole concerning the imitation of the gods? The re-creation of the Creation through art or ritual? Why are so many different people, in so many different places, sacrificing so many different things to attain salvation? I'm not suggesting some kind of blind universalism, I'm declaring obvious trends among the vast majority of humans.
There are deep-seeded phenomenological phenomenon which subtly dictate the course of a religious enterprise. The difficulty is that the enterprises are remarkably similar, suggesting a remarkably similar phenomenology. And when the Mystery that is India is not so mysterious when you have three Indian friends, what becomes of your Manners? If my Manners reflect my phenomenology, and the Manners of the Indian reflect his phenomenology, aren't they, aren't you, both part Western and part Indian? Doesn't our identity get screwed up? Isn't a Southern hospitality which collides with Jamaican or German Manners no longer hospitality at its Southern best?
What on earth happens when you smash one worldview into a world? What happens, in short, when my religion meets comparative religion? Psychological dissonance? Recalcitrance? Integration?
It is almost as if the world has come full circle, and the war of the gods has started anew. Yahweh must now fight Allah instead of Baal; He must show us his wonders as standing in contraposition to the platitudes of Taoism. In a way, our generation (and especially our children's) will resonate with the O.T. Jews, a people who struggled to have faith in one God among many. The future, I'm afraid, will not consists in fighting against the mere onslaught of atheism. Christianity must learn to persist while fighting, in a sense never possible till now, the entire world.

Affectivity in Christianity

Here is the first paragraph of my paper for my myth-theory class. No one may ever again accuse me of cowardice. You name a synonym for courage, and i've got it: gumption, balls, and even the Hebraic chutzpah. I've never written anything quite like this in my life, nor, if it goes poorly on the grading scale, will i ever attempt to again. But heck, this is why im in grad school, paying more money for classes than one should pay for the salvation of his soul. I've earned the right to be overtly creative. I've been pushing busy work assignments for 24 years. It's time i get my own, even if it gets me a failing grade.

Affectivity in Christianity:

According to Micrea Eliade, all humans feel that in illo tempore (at the beginning) we existed in a perfect state, a Paradise or--more broadly--the illud tempus. He calls this impulse Nostalgia for Paradise, tracing instantiations of the phenomenon throughout religious and secular history. My concern with this Nostalgia lie with a how a religion, particularly Christianity, might explain the same phenomenon. That is, given that Eliade's formulation of Nostalgia for Paradise is accurate, how might Christianity explain its existence? To do this, i will draw an analogy between, on the one hand, the universality of Nostalgia for Paradise and, on the other, John Calvin's articulation of a universal belief in the existence of God--produced by the sensus divinitatis. Clearly, the primary relationship between Nostalgia and belief is their ostensible univerality. But the two likewise intersect at the general level of persuasiveness, insofar far as both cultivate religious thoughts and attitudes. The import of this comparison cannot but be apparent to those familiar with the natural theology debate surrounding the beginning of Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion. This paper acts as a thought experiment to see how Christianity might begin to integrate 20th century psychological theory--specifically affective experience--into its traditional theologies, in this case Reformed theology.