I can't believe I never had to read Zizek in all of my religion courses. Just started The Puppet and The Dwarf. it gets right at some central issues of modernity.

Intro: The Puppet Called Theology
"religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive as the same religion in different cultures." This allows a religion to globalize itself. Of course, there are still individual cultures that do integrate and identify with their religion, but he is speaking of the generalized secular worldview, at least since the Enlightenment (age of Reason). Here, the price for this globalizing ability is that religion comes to be viewed as epiphenomenal, a kind of modular organ than can be grafted onto or conceptually removed from a social organism without really altering its fundamental constitution. Religion has two roles in this system: "therapeutic or critical." It can be a tool for subjective individuals to cope with their lives ("I may not believe in God, but I know religion can help some people tremendously"), or it can be a kind of tool for social forces to critique the existing socio-political order (a theater for discourse). This seems to be a pretty accurate dichotomy - it catches the ways most intellectual people think of religion.

The effect of the triumph of Reason is to: de-emphasize rituals, traditions, dogmas, etc as irrational, non-essential cultural ballast. The integrated, organic mode of religion falls apart as these historical artifacts come to be "alienated" from the individual who no longer takes them for granted, but subjects them to the criteria of Reason. the authority of these rules (representing a universalized morality) is then logically questioned, and what remains is a kind of essentialist, emotional, feelings-based "sense" of morality or the divine or what-have-you, divorced from culture and tradition. But this emotional sense is also subject to Reason's criticism, and seems irrational too. So, why then does religion persist if it fails the test of rationality on both fronts? "The standard answer is: rational philosophy or science is esoteric, confined to a small circle; it cannot replace religion in its function" of maintaining socio-political order. So we are left with a functionalist explanation of religion emphasizing control of the masses. But this doesn't seem sufficient, for religion is too heterogenous in the modern world, and many people don't know what they believe.

Zizek wants to begin by exploring the "unwritten prohibitions that define the position one is allowed to adopt." He says one is supposed to harbor a kind of amorphous, ineffable "deep spirituality" or at least open-mindedness. "Consequently, when, today, one directly asks an intellectual: 'OK, let's cut the crap and get down to basics: do you believe in some form of the divine or not?," the first answer is an embarrassed withdrawal... then usually explained in more 'theoretical' terms: "That is the wrong question to ask! It is not simply a matter of believing or not, but, rather, a matter of certain radical experience, or the ability to open oneself to a certain unheard-of dimension, of the way our openness to radical Otherness allows us to adopt a specific ethical stance...' What we are getting today is a kind of 'suspended' belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) admitted, as a private obscene secret." In this case, it seems even more of the "right question to ask" is: do you believe in something or not? What is desired is not equivocation, but a declaration of the taking of a position.

Zizek wonders if there was ever a time when most people "really believed." He discusses the archetypal "primitive" tribe who is criticized and called naive by anthropologists for believing they had descended from a magical bird or other totem animal. But did the individuals really "directly" believe this, or did they just indirectly accept it as part of culture, as we implicitly accept the existence of Santa Claus by putting up a Christmas tree every year? The anthropologists in question here seem to be imposing their understanding of "belief" on the tribesmen - their "modern" understanding of belief, as being something "Other" people do because they lack a rational, critical perspective. Perhaps then, belief is not necessarily a direct affirmation of an ultimate truth, but rather a kind of polite acceptance of a cultural norm that takes the form of acting "as if" one really believes. This puts the very act of "deconstruction" into question as a hallmark of skepticism, for it relies on the perhaps mythical figure of an "Other" who "really believes" (constructed as a kind of straw-man by the one doing the deconstructing).

"The postmodern need for the permanent use of the devices of ironic distantiation (quotation marks, etc) betrays the underlying fear that, without them, belief would be direct and immediate..."

Does this skeptical criticism, deconstruction, and automatic distancing of intellectuals actually then indicate a secret belief or at least uncertainty about disbelief? Does the scholar's choice of subject matter betray a subterranean belief system, or is merely an artifact of socialization within a specific culture?

So this is what religion in a secular society may be all about. "Culture" is the "central life-world category" of how we think about the world we live in, and "when it comes to religion, we no longer 'really believe' today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the 'lifestyle' of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules 'out of respect for tradition' etc)."

So, perhaps "culture" is just a name for all those things we practice without really believing in them or "taking them seriously." Is science separate from culture then? Is this why fundamentalists who profess to "really believe" in religion are sometimes viewed as "barbarians" who threaten culture by daring to take their beliefs seriously?

Then Zizek begins to apply all this thinking to the case of Christianity, calling attention to its early days, its split from Judaism, the meaning of Paul's work, Gnosticism, the Holy Spirit as symbolic, ideal-plane envoy, and more...

this guy is totally awesome!



also THIS.

Anyone who lives in Tosa and got the Journal-Sentinel on Thursday, check out the WauwatosaNOW section.
I was chosen, despite a torrent of trollish comments (or perhaps because of them), as the Best Of The Blogs for the current week, for my post on religion here.  They reprinted it in the paper edition so that the non-net-savvy set could also bask in my wisdom and wit  :D
My post even spilled out of the rather insular CommunityNOW crowd, to be reviewed by an independent blog here.
*does a little dance*

So sometimes I go to St. Sebastian's down the block on Sunday mornings. The priest is a wise and savvy grandfatherly dude who I first met last year when I was interviewing congregational leaders for some sociological research I was involved in. Now I go back just to hear his sermons because they're fantastic. The problem is, to get to 10 minutes of awesomeness, I have to sit through an hour of dreary soul-numbing Catholic "music" and repetitious traditional prayers that are so rote as to be meaningless to the sheep who populate the pews, standing and sitting, standing and sitting with a trademarked Catholic mindless empty stare, dressed in their Sunday finery just to set an example for their kids; it's soooo obvious they would rather be doing anything else with their time.

And then there's me, the casually dressed punk who comes in 5 minutes late, and sits in the back with a suspicious pad of paper out taking notes, who puts his headphones on and grooves to techno when the parish starts singing or mindlessly reciting their ingrained creed. What a bad example for the kiddies! Except they've all got it backwards. THEY'RE the bad examples, all concerned with how they look and terrified of commiting a social faux pas. I'M seemingly the only one who's actually interested in the words of the priest - who is supposed to represent Jesus himself! I pay attention to the lovingly crafted words. I consider his thoughts and jot down the gems of wisdom he drops, which seem to go flying right over the rest of the congregation's heads. And then I ignore the boring parts mull over the implications of the sermon.

So today he was talking about certain passages of the Bible that explain the symbolism of the sacrament of the Eucharist. For example, one of Paul's letters explains that the parish is considered one with each other in the shared consumption of a single loaf of bread, which is Jesus. Therefore, parishoners are meant to literally see Jesus in each other, and treat each other accordingly. Combined with the Catholic belief that all of humanity is technically part of the universal, symbolic Church, the priest described how we should conclude that Jesus is in everyone and therefore that certain behaviors are just categorically wrong, such as waging war on our neighbors in Iraq (or anywhere) for example.



This brought to mind a recent conversation I had, where someone pointed out to me that the slogan on many a bumper sticker that says "What Would Jesus Do?" is wrong and misleading, in that it presumes Jesus is dead and gone. The question should be, "What WILL Jesus Do, Now That He Is STILL HERE?" or perhaps, more in line with the priest's sermon today, "What Will YOU Do, Now That You Literally Are Jesus?" I think that puts more immediacy into the question, and reminds the reader of moral responsibility to other people.

OK wow, I have been having a real crappy day, but finding this on Unfogged just totally redeemed it by making me laugh when i needed it.  Best "most (something) list" evar:  The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses.

Moses = Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell.
'nuff said.