Just another Blog @ FCS site
Today is the last day of September!
We will continue to talk about religion.
I will want you to take a test this week- more precisely by the end of next week. You have a week to do it. I want you to go to Seterra and take the Asia Map quiz. I will give the first 5 minutes of each class starting today for you to take it.
You need to take it until you have at least a 95% This is my first attempt and you can see I’d need to take it again. I will ask you to
Today you will have some independent time to work. I do believe in options and don’t need you all to be doing the same thing.
Here is terracotta warriors activity for LongForm reading.
Happy Friday!
Think about your favorite sport. What are the yin and yang forces which, when put together, make the sport so much fun and challenging.
Look around the room you are in and see how many yin/yang relationships you can see. List them.
What do you think are the pros and cons of a religion or philosophy in which the “God” is not perfect?
Today is the first day of Fall! Sept. 22. Today we will look at Confucius after we review the Nature of Man is Evil.
As you read last night, Legalism promotes the notion of strict law and order and harsh, group punishments, ideas that influenced Qin Shi Huangdi’s oppressive and centralized rule.
In the news today, Canada is having an election for premier. Canada’s system is different than the United States’. The head of government must call an election every 5 years. But hoping for a bigger majority, the Premier, Justin Trudeau, only waited two years.
The premier is equivalent to Prime Minister in the UK or Australia. For in these three countries, the Queen of the United Kingdom is the Head of State. And the Premier is the Head of Government. That’s why the Queen is on the Canadian $20 bill. In the United States, the President is both the head of state and head of government.
Here is an infographic to better explain Canada’s system:
We will start class by exchanging blog/ reading blogs. Please read and comment on two other blogs.
Today we will explore religion and belief. You can adjust the lexile (reading) level. As a general rule of thumb here is the lexile range by grade.
I came across these two posts on my Twitter feed about this article.
The basic point is that we humans have just arrived and that we are barely ripple on the geologic ocean of time.
I was struck by the notion that we have no way of actually knowing if dinosaurs created civilization. Though some scientists are starting to try to figure this out. From the article:
and this:
Sept 15
Today you have two tasks. Take a look at the Einstein quotes about religion.
A few terms, first.
Atheist– from the Greek. It means, without God. Atheists do not believe in God and are quite sure about it.
Agnostic– from the Latin it means, without Knowing. Agnostics claim neither faith nor disbelief. They feel it can’t be known.
Theist– One who believes in God.
Albert Einstein was likely agnostic. Read his two letters.
Now take a look at this:
Even though I was raised Catholic, for most of my adult life, I didn’t pay religion much heed. Like many scientists, I assumed it was built on opinion, conjecture, or even hope, and therefore irrelevant to my work. That work is running a psychology lab focused on finding ways to improve the human condition, using the tools of science to develop techniques that can help people meet the challenges life throws at them. But in the 20 years since I began this work, I’ve realized that much of what psychologists and neuroscientists are finding about how to change people’s beliefs, feelings, and behaviors—how to support them when they grieve, how to help them be more ethical, how to let them find connection and happiness—echoes ideas and techniques that religions have been using for thousands of years.
Science and religion have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to sooth, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. And studying these technologies has revealed that certain parts of religious practices, even when removed from a spiritual context, are able to influence people’s minds in the measurable ways psychologists often seek.
My lab has found, for example, that having people practice Buddhist meditation for a short time makes them kinder. After only eight weeks of study with a Buddhist lama, 50 percent of those who we randomly assigned to meditate daily spontaneously helped a stranger in pain. Only 16 percent of those who didn’t meditate did the same. (In reality, the stranger was an actor we hired to use crutches and wear a removable foot cast while trying to find a seat in a crowded room.) Compassion wasn’t limited to strangers, though; it also applied to enemies. Another study showed that after three weeks of meditation, most people refrained from seeking revenge on someone who insulted them, unlike most of those who did not meditate. Once my team observed these profound impacts, we began looking for other linkages between our previous research and existing religious rituals.
Gratitude, for instance, is something we had studied closely, and a key element of many religious practices. Christians often say grace before a meal; Jews give thanks to God with the Modeh Ani prayer every day upon awakening. When we studied the act of giving thanks, even in a secular context, we found it made people more virtuous. In a study where people could get more money by lying about the results of a coin flip, the majority (53 percent) cheated. But that figure dropped dramatically for people who we first asked to count their blessings. Of these, only 27 percent chose to lie. We’ve also found that when feeling gratitude to a person, to fate, or to God, people become more helpful, more generous, and even more patient.
Even very subtle actions—like moving together in time—can exert a significant effect on the mind. We see synchrony in almost every religion the world over: Buddhists and Hindus often chant together in prayer; Christians and Muslims regularly kneel and stand in unison during worship; Jews often sway, or shuckle, when reciting prayers together. These actions belie a deep purpose: creating connection. To see how it works, we asked pairs of strangers to sit across a table from one another, put on headphones, and then tap a sensor on the table in front of them each time they heard a tone. For some of these pairs, the sequence of tones matched, meaning they’d be tapping their hands in unison. For others, they were random, meaning hand movements wouldn’t be synchronized. Afterward, we created a situation where one member of each pair got stuck doing a long and difficult task. Not only did those who had been moving their hands in unison report feeling more connection with and compassion for their partner who was now toiling away, 50 percent of them decided to lend the partner a hand—a big increase over the 18 percent who decided to help without having just moved in sync.
The combined effects of simple elements like these—ones that change how we feel, what we believe, and who we can depend on—accumulate over time. And when they’re embedded in religious practices, research has shown they can have protective properties of sorts. Regularly taking part in religious practices lessens anxiety and depression, increases physical health, and even reduces the risk of early death. These benefits don’t come simply from general social contact. There’s something specific to spiritual practices themselves.
Today is Sept. 13. I hope you had a good weekend.
Sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and historians, like Cline, have also tried to define religion. Here are some other non-religious definitions of religion. I think they all have some truth in them, but like Cline’s list are not quite enough.
E.B. Tylor and James Frazer are two of the earliest researchers to develop theories of the nature of religion. They defined religion as essentially being the belief in spiritual beings. The reason religion exists is to help people make sense of events which would otherwise be incomprehensible by relying on unseen, hidden forces. It is how early humans made sense of ther world.
According to Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, religion is a mass neurosis and exists as a response to deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses.
Emile Durkheim created the field of sociology and wrote that “…religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” His focus was the importance of the concept of the “sacred” and its relevance to the welfare of the community. Religious beliefs are symbolic expressions of social realities without which religious beliefs have no meaning.
Marx wrote: “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.” Marx argued that religion is an illusion whose chief purpose is to provide reasons and excuses to keep society functioning just as it is.
The key to Mircea Eliade’s understanding of religion is two concepts: the sacred and the profane. Eliade says religion is primarily about belief in the supernatural, which for him lies at the heart of the sacred.
Stewart Guthrie argues that religion is “systematic anthropomorphism” — the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things or events. We interpret ambiguous information as whatever matters most to survival, which means seeing living beings. If we are in the woods and see a dark shape that might be a bear or a rock, it is smart to “see” a bear. If we are mistaken, we lose little; if we are right, we survive. This conceptual strategy leads to “seeing” spirits and gods at work around us. This is similar to Frazer and Tyler
Rejecting most anthropological, psychological, and sociological explanations of religion, E.E. Evans-Pritchard sought a comprehensive explanation of religion that took both its intellectual and social aspects into account. He didn’t reach any final answers, but did argue that religion should be regarded as a vital aspect of society, as its “construct of the heart.” Beyond that, it may not be possible to explain religion in general, just to explain and understand particular religions.
An anthropologist who describes culture as a system of symbols and actions which convey meaning, Clifford Geertz treats religion as a vital component of cultural meanings. He argues that religion carries symbols which establish especially powerful moods or feelings, help explain human existence by giving it an ultimate meaning, and purport to connect us to a reality that is “more real” than what we see every day. The religious sphere thus has a special status above and beyond regular life.
Does it matter whether we can explain and understand religion, even if only a little bit? Given the importance of religion to people’s lives and culture, the answer to this should be obvious. If religion is inexplicable, then significant aspects of human behavior, belief, and motivation are also inexplicable. We need to at least try to address religion and religious belief in order to get a better handle on who we are as human beings.
Over the weekend, you read an overview of the Cave.
Watch this version of Plato’s allegory in clay animation How does the visual representation give you a different perspective from reading the Allegory of the Cave?
Please respond to two of the questions. 1 of your choice and the last question on the list.
If the liberated prisoner goes back to the cave and tries to explain to his former fellow prisoners, what kind of reaction will he get? Why?
Describe other “caves” in modern life in which people might be “imprisoned” or feel “imprisoned”.
Answer by posting a comment below.
