Driving to pick up a stained glass job today with my brother, we ran across a ton of these new Pepsi One billboards. In case you haven’t been following, it’s made with Splenda which means they stripped out all the sugar, and chlorinated the molecules so now you can drink all you want and only consume one dangerous chemical-packed calorie.
Which brings me to a really wild news item which Fantastic Planet posted on yesterday. Seems that some UK schools have decided to take out all the calories from their religion education curriculums. It sounds like their equivalent of what we call “Social Studies” across the pond, where they do a unit on religions from around the world. Except with all the excitement and mystery stripped out. Good examples:
The education authority thinks that the traditional phrase ‘Holy Ghost’ implies “a trivial and spooky concept of the third person in the Trinity”. Instead it urges teachers to refer to the ‘Holy Spirit’. The guidelines also say that the first 39 books of the Bible should not be called ‘the Old Testament’ because it makes them sound old-fashioned or out of date.
Dismissing centuries of Catholic belief, the guidelines go on to state that Communion bread and wine should not be referred to as ‘the body of Jesus’ or ‘the blood of Jesus’ because it suggests “a cannibalistic consumption of human flesh”.
I’m certainly all for updating religion so it’s actually relevant to people, but it strikes me that these people are treading on dangerous ground. The point of religion - in my estimation - is not that it’s this neat little comfortable thing you can swallow. It’s supposed to be kind of irrational and ultimately pretty weird. It’s not a logical system. In fact, it’s a non- or trans-rational system of symbols whereby you can interact with and encode your subconscious mind along certain directions. If you start stripping out all the “cool freaky shit” you basically cripple your subconscious mind’s ability to understand it - because that part of you fucking LOVES “cool freaky shit.” The more you feed it, the more that part of you grows and develops in cool ways. If you trim away all the “calories” then you begin to sort of starve out your subconscious mind - and your rational ego conscious starts to run rampant.
This is pretty much precisely what’s happening with the decision of these schools. The worst part is that it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. You strip out the mystery for one generation, then they grow up without it, then they strip it out even worse, and so on. It’s, in large part, how we got into this whole pickle of the modern world in the first place - because people have been systematically stripped of their ability to functionally relate to symbols and to the weird arcane wonderful mysteries of the subconscious mind.
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5 Comments
The worst part is that it’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Would that that was really the worst part! What is more likely to happen is a true cycle of rejection of the mystery by one generation and the wholehearted but unquestioning swallowing of the mystery by the next, and so on and on. You go from an arid cultural landscape to a chaotic jungle and back again. It’s all a bit dizzying or, in the case of the pagan renaissance in Nazi Germany, a bit scary. Nothing like the return of the repressed to instill terror in one’s heart.
Nice analogy between Pepsi and religious studies. I guess the dietary cycles are chiefly those revolving around carbohydrates, on again, off again.
yeah i was thinking more about this aspect youre talking about. i wanted to think more about it before posting, but basically when you strip out the mystery-symbols from religious systems, you’re forcing people to find them elsewhere, willy-nilly, wherever they can from what’s going on around them. this means that archetypal forces are going to become fixed onto mundane things like terrorism, patriotism etc.
it’s interesting that in a way religion helps to prevent this from happening. it keeps the sacred sacred, and theres a clear(er) separation from worldly events, which we are increasingly lacking now
it’s interesting that in a way religion helps to prevent this from happening. it keeps the sacred sacred, and theres a clear(er) separation from worldly events, which we are increasingly lacking now
———————————————
and thus………..
LITERALISM!
I think you’ve come full-circle here.
yeah i know. i think my mind has officially turned into one great big fucking pretzel… just when i think i’ve got something down solidly, i see how it can all contort around and present me with a totally new level of understanding. fucking amazing.
you know what they say:
when your mind turns into one great big fucking pretzel, EAT IT!
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