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St. Patrickâs Cathedral (Free verse) by Dovina Familiar themes in architecture and art
Bloodstained head, hands and feet
A stone beside a hillside tomb
The fact of death graven
In skull and grave
Quiet kneeling in massive hall
Alcove candles glowing dim
Saintsâ fixed eyes staring down
Artwork preaching from thick stone walls
Glass stained with Motherâs face
Arms stretched to humble sheep
Some may know what they seek in church
And why they seek it here
But in the struggle for revelation
To transcend reason
I must tread the lonely forests
Skid about in skies and minds
Looking for the strength to die
Without somewhere to go
Up the ladder:
Who'd suspect?
Down the ladder:
Bugs
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
Arithmetic Mean: 7.769231
Posted: August 26, 2004 6:24 PM PDT; Last modified: August 26, 2004 6:24 PM PDTWeighted score: 7.02447 Overall Rank: 57 Comments:
[10]
patty t @ 212.20.245.14
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27-Aug-04/12:03 AM
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Reply
sad and beautiful
[n/a]
Dovina @ 24.52.157.176
> patty t
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27-Aug-04/9:21 AM
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Reply
Thank you. It is a bit sad, unable to know the answers.
i love the poem ..it touchs inside my soul ..
Thank you. It touches my insides too, as if there's a place there that inspires the building of these magnificant churches even while I wonder at the meaning of it.
Ok, I'm reading his as someone questioning their faith. That may not be what you're trying to convey, but that's how I read it. It is funny how the Christian fith is so gloomy and dark in nature. I don't understand why it has to have all these depressing icons to build up a point about eternal happiness.
Anyway, I think this is a good construcion of te idea: "Searching for the strength to die, without somewhere to go." It's a scary thought that when you die it's all over. That's why religion is important: It gives us a reason to live AND a reason to die.
Important for what?
Besides the reasons wilco gives, religion is important for its magnificent churches where I can go on a hot summer day and sit for awhile contemplating its long history, the craftsmen who planned and carved, and the peasants who thought it important enough to give their money for its construction.
I am always questioning. Faith, logic, and death are subjects that donât rest well when put together in my head. Most people in the world settle on some religion to help them through the dilemmas and conflicts these three present, and they hold to the ideals of their upbringing or to others they have found along the way. They build elaborate doctrinal structures and elaborate cathedrals, which seem to anchor them to what they hope is true. Religion is important because it provides comfort in their times of need and grief. I often wish I could be so comforted.
During your times of need and grief, do you envy religious people more than lobotomised people?
Yes, lobotomized people feel neither grief nor comfort, I am told. So, why not have your frontal lobe severed when in grief? I don't think the procedure is done anymore. And if it were, that ends all emotion. This seems like way too simple a question, and too simple an answer. You must be asking something else. Or do you belong to the First Church of Lobotomy?
I thought lobotmised people just wobbled around the place feeling happy. Some people think comfort is just the lack of grief, so they would disagree with the idea that lobotomised people feel no comfort. Anyway, my point was that I don't envy religious people, even if I feel grief, because, like you, I don't share their faith, and it seems silly to envy someone who is comforted by a belief that you think is cobblers. If you were an antelope fleeing from a hungry lion, would you envy a passing ostrich who had stuck its head in the sand? Of course the ostrich may not be as terrified as you, and you're right to envy the state of not being terrified, but to envy the ostrich itself is folly indeed! Praying to Vishnu to heal your wife's buttock cancer may make you think she'll be alright, but it isn't going to do anything about the buttock. You might think religion has done good by giving such people hope, but it is that very aspect of it which can prevent people from trying to find actual solutions to their problems. Rather than relying on Vishnu to heal the buttock cancers of this world, why not spend millions of dollars on research into this terrible, and debilitating disease?
Envy is the wrong word for what feel when I see religious people comforted through their religion. Envy implies ill will because of anotherâs advantage. I wish to have their comfort, but know that because of my reservations I cannot. Among my misgivings is the fear of hope such as an ostrich has when its head is in the sand. (Actually, I donât think ostriches do that.)
People want to believe â to hold a position on something. It does not have to make sense. Discrepancies are expunged for them by faith. So religion provides substance for their faith, and in so doing, it gives its parishioners psychological advantage in the storms of life. Your argument for applying real solutions through research and philanthropic funding (instead of spending money on cathedrals and such) makes sense. But people have always looked to gods and probably always will. Thereâs advantage for them; we might as well acknowledge it.
The only thing I acknowlege is my own excellence.
Although my thinking seems excellent sometimes, it will likely change, possibly turning todayâs excellence into tomorrowâs foolishness.
In all seriousness, does worrying about death and some vague and sort of unpleasant-sounding Hereafter keep you from being comfortable? And is it really fair or very well-informed to propose that people with religion feel, on average, more comfort than nonbelievers?
As far as "Discrepancies are expunged for them by faith" goes, well that's a load of wash, isn't it? There wouldn't even be a sense of there being "Discrepancies" if there weren't a religion saying things are or should be some way and anything else is a deviation. In short, I think you're going about it kind of backwards. Even here, within sight of Palestine and a 5-hour bus ride from Iraq, I'd say religion mostly keeps most of the people in the world from killing me whenever they feel like it - or, say, taking my stuff or my wife. It does this by making them feel bad about nearly anything harmful they might consider doing to me. Since I do (or keep from doing) all of these things for perfectly sensible reasons of my own which don't have anything to do with guilt or conscience or whatever, it's likely that I'm slightly more comfortable than most believers, isn't it? Why shouldn't it be for all non-believers, including yourself? Please, please take this comment seriously. I'm sorry for making fun of you so much before. Thanks, zodiac
I'm afraid I disagree awfully. I don't think religious people, on the whole, refrain from slaughtering people they dislike just because their religion says it's wrong. And I don't think non-religious people refrain from slaughtering people they dislike for purely practical reasons. In both cases, the majority of people feel guilt, partly through upbringing, but also because we have an innate sense of guilt at doing such things. If you did an experiment in which a human colony was left to develop on a desert island, totally isolated from the rest of humanity, and in particular from religion and people who told them killing was wrong, would they end up slaughtering each other? It is to the species's advantage that we feel guilt when performing certain lewds, since shame at lewding upon others promotes cooperation. Before we all evolved, humans who felt no shame at performing lewds upon others would have been shunned by the rest of the group, and left to wither and starve on their own. The main difference between religious people and normals is that religious people can end up believing in wallyish morals just because their religion says so. These are the morals for which the only justification is "God says so".
Sure, but I would avoid any of the following typical assumptions:
1) People with religion are as a whole more content than people without. Sure it sounds nice and believable, but how can you tell? I would guess they aren't, for the reason above and because I think believers are more likely than nonbelievers to be stupid and hurt themselves. Besides, believers can't, like, bang any chick they want whenever they want or do a fatty bag of smack, while nonbelievers can; and believers seem more likely than nonbelievers to be somewhat desperate and unhappy people to begin with. 2) If people were somehow utterly isolated, they would still, kind of instinctively, have a moral code, conscience, and sense of guilt. If you were to somehow strand an extremely young child on an island, he would probably smear himself in his own feces, pleasure himself whenever, and basically kill whatever thing he felt like for a pretty long time without any sense of shame. I imagine he'd eventually break out in a nasty rash or otherwise logically come to the conclusion that feces-smearing, self-gratification, and wanton killing aren't healthy, at which point he'd grow some kind of morality and shame. But there's nothing that's convinced me he'd just have it instinctively, like an animal or Aboriginal would. If there were a bunch of people stranded on the island, they'd probably get it faster, since, say, killing or stealing would be more likely to lead to a quick consequence. This is, I think, the only original basis for morality. But there's no way to tell, is there, since you couldn't strand a 4-year-old Irish on an island without him bringing some kind of moral training with him? 3) Religion has caused more slaughter or murder or et cetera than any other thing. Bunk. And how do you know? And it's probably also prevented more by making the majority of people not murder-prone. As far as "wallyish morals" go, I can't think of any. I think the wallyish part is just that most believers (like nonbelievers) have forgotten whatever practical purposes they had in the beginning and have likely added all kinds of garbage onto them, like genuflecting or, for Islams, entering a lavatory right-foot-first. Can you think of any which are purely wallyish?
1) There is little evidence that I am aware of to suggest that believers are happier than normals. So I agree with you.
2) Of course you would have to find some way of stranding a morally untrained colony on the island; perhaps by stranding newborn babies there and using morally neutral robots to feed them. It would be pretty difficult to invent a robot that was totally morally neutral, though. Perhaps it should, at random intervals, do something naughty for no reason, like punching one of the other robots in the motherfucking face. Even if the experiment could be performed and the colony didn't slaughter or do anything too untoward, it wouldn't be conclusive. My instincts say people have an innate sense of guilt at doing certain lewds; this also seems to be the case in the animal kingdom, and perhaps it would be best to do the experiment on monkey colonies or something. Anyway my view could be utterly distorted by the fact that my upbringing as a Scholar and a Gentleman has been so austere, so fundamental to my being, that to me it seems like second nature. 3) There seems to be very little correlation between high church-going levels and low murder rate. Britain, Canada, the rest of Europe all have much lower murder rates than the USA, but the USA has a much higher rate of church going. I think religion has very little to do with making people not murder-prone. I don't think most religions say murder is wrong because God told someone it was wrong and they wrote it down, or some madman heard a voice that said it was wrong so he wrote it down; it says murder is wrong because that's what most people instinctively feel is wrong. By and large, most religions share similar basic morals, and they aren't very different from those followed by normals. Is this just coincidence? Or are such religions more likely to survive because people feel more comfortable following morals that they already believe in anyway? Of course some wallyish morals slip through... A friend of mine is a lapsed Jewish, but he has relatives who are ultra-non-lapsed-jewishes. On a particular day of the week (Holy Saturday?) they aren't allowed to work, cook, drive a car, etc. One of the most wallyish aspects of this is that they can't turn on a light. They actually have a special device on their fridge which prevents the light from turning on when they open the door. There is clearly no practical basis for this moral, other than God told them to do it. Other, more serious wallyishnesses exist, like condemning homo lords. Now I actually think there is an inbuilt disgust towards gayness among many people, but normals can overcome this quite easily. Religious people can't because the prejudice, which was present in the elderlies who wrote their holy books, is now ingrained in their religion. So they can't tolerate gayness, lest they be deemed gay.
1) I was pretty sure you were making fun of Dovina for suggesting so in the first place.
2) Nurturing, even by a robot, is not morally neutral. There is a rather interesting and amusing note in the memoirs of Master Wellington-Beeves concering an Irish infant abandoned in a forgotten back courtyard at Cambridge and somehow allowed to grow to maturity more-or-less undisturbed, but that's hardly applicable to this discussion. 3) It's hard to say there's "very little correlation between high church-going levels and low murder rate", because the moral influence of religion extends to most nonbelievers, as Dovina has demonstrated. You can't say a moral is innate simply because the practical reason for it has been forgotten or become irrelevant. I can't imagine what reason might have been for the refrigerator thing, but the condemnation of gayishness, especially gayish monogamy, was probably at some point pretty practicaly, involving political and species-minded motivations. At any rate, gayfear still has to be learned (and unlearned).
zodiac,
In answer to your first paragraph, comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers. If they truly believe, they have more comfort in times of bereavement and sickness than I do while contending with my unanswered questions. In your second paragraph, I think you miss the meaning of âDiscrepancies are expunged for them by faith.â When I mention to a religious person some discrepancy about heaven or about Godâs personal caring for their condition, the usual response is that God is greater than our feeble understanding of these things, and they will trust Him even while not understanding. Your third paragraph introduces the restraint people have on killing each other, a topic not much related to the above. DAâs âinnate sense of guiltâ argument makes sense here. Religion can go either way on this. It might, as you say, restrain those who would otherwise kill you or take your wife. But it could in other times and conditions encourage killing, such as in the Crusades or recently in the Iraqi resistance, or within Al Kaida. You and I abstain from âlewdsâ as DA calls them, âfor perfectly sensible reasonsâ most of the time. I wonder how well those reasons would have held up in some of the historical settings where religion has held groups of believers together in winning good causes against enemies who claimed to be reasonable.
Everyone, including myself my first weeks here, kind of expects Islams to be some kind of monomaniacal robots. The first times we all saw Islams drinking liquors or associating with women or some other vaguely or specifically haram thing, we all screamed bloody murder at them. Then we realized Islam in most of the Middle East is pretty much just like Christianity in America with two important exceptions:
1) they occassionally blow themselves up, and 2) they pray about 5 times a day. Anyway, the short of it is that these two things - which incidentally, nearly every Islam doesn't do - are so anathema to Western thinking that we have to assume anyone who would consider doing them is an android or some freakishly orthodox fundamentalist. They're not. Really. If you must know, it's insanely easy to contemplate blowing yourself up, for political as well as financial reasons, and then give it some thin coating of religion. Especially here, where pretty much everyone just sits around contemplating all kinds of illogical actions and theories in ridiculously angry-sounding voices (hint: it's the language!) anyway. And the majority of people who blow themselves up don't know the Qu'ran from my ass, seriously. So anyway, talking about the Iraqi resistance or Al Quaeda as anything really connected to Islam is kind of bunk. It's probably, in fact, as much bunk as talking about the Crusades in terms of Christianity. And just look at the number of mostly-Christian Westerners who've self-righteously marched to their deaths in Iraq this year. Or nonbelievers, for that matter. Oh God, I'm afraid I've gotten you frightfully confused now.....
PS-If you envy (or whatever) the comfort of believers because you struggle with all these problems surrounding religion while they don't - well, that's kind of backwards isn't it? If you're going to be a nonbeliever, why don't you try just not worrying about God (or whomever) and whatever he or it is or isn't doing, since right now you just seem like a regular believer with commitment problems? You might as well be one of those Existentialist Frenches or Stephen Daedalus.
PPS-If the "unanswered questions" you struggle with are Why is there so much suffering in the world or something such, you're still a believer! QED.
Iâm a believer sometimes and in some ways, nonbeliever in others, existentialist in feeling responsible for my acts with the dread and anguish that responsibility sometimes brings, moral sometimes and in some ways, amoral in others. Another way of saying Iâm wishy-washy, changeable, and justified therein by virtue of womanhood? Every issue is like a new day for me, even if itâs been hashed over for centuries. My day is ending while yours begins, a result of our positions on the globe, and its position relative to the sun. My yours reveal some new slant or freedom from a new slant, maybe the knitting of an ancient culture into your own.
bow'ls
That's a religious-sounding moralist answer, like a pulpit-pounding preacher might rant. Try again. On second thought, let's leave it here lest it become a name-calling exercize with no good end.
Whatever.
Anyway, I'm embarrassed by my part in this entire conversation. The only topic worth discussing here was -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.'s asking if you envy the comfort of believers; and the answer is yes, you should, since you're in the worse position of believing only in a ridiculous, halfassed, and frankly unsustainable way, and not even knowing that -=Dark_Angel=-, P.I. was making fun of you by asking. You're clearly the moralist here, as far as the negative, not-really-knowing-what-you're-talking-a PS-you misspelled "excercise"
I see it has already headed for that no-good end. And I had such a good answer for your ecumenical American Christianity comment, too.
PS-You misspelled occasionally, ecumenical, and Islam.
You also misspelled "exercise" :(
You mean that was not on purpose? He's so deceptive, isn't he?
Maybe. But it's a very common mastake.
Mastake?
"comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers"
I think that much of the 'comfort' believers feel stems from a reduced fear that they might end up in hell - a fear that religion put there in the first place!
While this is true for those religions that send unbelievers to hell, I was referring to the comfort of knowing your loved ones are safe and alive and that you will be reunited with them. I would like that comfort, but know I cannot have it.
I believe all practical religions have some conception of hell, and that it's probably not possible to believe in a good afterlife without believing in a bad one.
Note that the few religions which have tried to do away with their ideas of hell (e.g., modern, ecumencial, American Christianity, for the most part) are all colossal wallowing failures.
The answer to the question your poem asks is not in churches it is true. It's not in the sky nor in the forests either. Maybe it's in RLS's Requiem "Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill." Or Donne's(?)" Glad did I live/And gladly die/And I lay myself down with a will." Good thought-provoking poem. One point better than your personal average. -10-
And for those of us who have not the strength for those declarations, there is always TS Eliotâs âI should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.â But there is time, up to a point, for change, âAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions.â
Well written, this deserves a place somewhere above all the others, at least for a time. I believe you find peace in a chapel because your soul, which makes you who you are, feels more at home there than in this chaotic world. Just a thought.
Thanks for the insight. Perhaps itâs true that we each have a soul, and it makes us who we are in spite of our efforts. Perhaps Iâm enslaved by that soul and its controlling deity, kicking against the goads. Iâd rather say Iâm open-minded and ready to consider opposing forces even while looking a fool in the conflict.
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