Eiadeo, I agree. Ideologies (e.g., Marxism) can compete with religions. But it cannot compete with science (despite Marxism's efforts in that regard), or at least the "scientific method." But it can compete with the ideology of science, a kind of non or extra scientific "template" for action commonly referred to as "scientism".
I do think that ideology can pass itself off as a cultural system. I'm thinking of the "culture" of Chicano-ism during the 60s-80s in the southwest. This was a set of ideals, myths, values, symbols, etc. that (as meritorious as it may have been) emerged within a short time, not a culture that takes many generates to evolve. And there are differences in psycho-social depth between ideology and culture: ideologies are very consciouis, providing explicit guidelines (i.e., prescriptions and proscriptions) for behavoror whereas authentic cultures have roots deep in the subconscious and are acted upon implicitly.
Some religions (Buddhism) do not contridict science. It is possible for them to exist together peacefully.
By all means, but this applies mainly to the philosophical-meditative forms of Buddhism. The popular "religious" forms believe in all kinds of spirits, demons, quasi-gods, etc. I see them as populist perversions of true Buddhism. But, then, I also tend to see Christianity to comprise forms of the perversion of the teachings of the teacher, Jesus.
I agree with you there. I have read all sorts of sh!t about deities and whatever. That's what initially made me turn away from Buddhism.
i think the third way is philosophy its split between religion and science
Ouspensky's Tertium Organum, written in 1911, was published in New York in 1922 and within a few years became a best-seller in America and made him a world-wide reputation. Intended to supplement the Organon of Aristotle and the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon, Tertium Organum is based on the author's personal experiments in changing consciousness; it proposes a new level of thought about the fundamental questions of human existence and a way to liberate man's thinking from it's habitual patterns. A New Model of the Universe, a collection of essays published earlier in Russia, was published in London in 1930. But Ouspensky will be chiefly remembered for In Search of the Miraculous, published posthumously in 1949 and later in several foreign languages under the title Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. This work is by far the most lucid account yet available of the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff, and it has been a principal cause of the growing influence of Gurdjieff's ideas.
Ouspensky was a mathematician and mystic who played the St. Paul to Gurdjeff's Christ, taking the occult and often unintelligible notions of the master and making them palatable, if no more comprehensible in works such as In Search of the Miraculous--Fragments of an Unknown Teaching and The Fourth Way.
Unlike St. Paul, however, Ouspensky eventually lost faith in his master. Perhaps as his answer to Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, Ouspensky founded the Society for the Study of Normal Man and developed his own following. Ouspensky is likely to remain a favorite among New Agers since he wrote books with titles like The symbolism of the tarot: philosophy of occultism in pictures and numbers and Tertium Organum: the third canon of thought: a key to the enigmas of the world, an attempt to reconcile the mysticism of the east with the rationalism of the west.
Re: A third alternative
Cyracuz wrote:It seems to me that our debates over the problem of existence in it's many forms are conducted as a religion vs science stand off.
There is the religious way of understanding the world.
Then there is the scientific way of understanding it.
For my part, I fit neither. This leads me to wonder if it's appropriate to add a third way. The intuitive way of understanding the world.
I realized recently that my intuition has always been my guide, and so I've been bouncing between a scientific and a relious world wiev.
Any thoughts?
You can probably guess my response !
I think you'd like a nice balance between what is true, and what you'd
like to be true.
Eori says of Cyracuz' last statement: "I think you'd like a nice balance between what is true, and what you'd like to be true.
I ask: Isn't that true of all of us? But it doesn't guarantee that we will be wrong.
Dys, thanks for the nice overview of G and O.
pseudokinetics wrote:i think the third way is philosophy its split between religion and science
I reckon it's aside from the two.
JLNobody wrote:Eori says of Cyracuz' last statement: "I think you'd like a nice balance between what is true, and what you'd like to be true.
I ask: Isn't that true of all of us? But it doesn't guarantee that we will be wrong.
Dys, thanks for the nice overview of G and O.
JL, you are right, we'd all like that, but I think knowing the difference between "what we know" and "what we wish" is important if we want to increase the sum total of human knowledge and capability.
Eorl
Humans do have the capacity to turn their wishes into truth. I do not think that the world we live in today has come to be without the push of wanting to realize our dreams.
Come to think, there is only one way, and science, religion, ideology and all those things are just different shoes. They have an effect on how you walk, but the direction you wish to go still has to come from you.
That is why, as many have said before in this thread, intuition has to lay at the base of all these different modes of exploration.
I see people wearing religious shoes shuffling towards the darkness of ignorance and superstition.
To be fair though, perhaps those who wear only the shoes of scientific inquiry don't see the beauty of the colours beside the road.
Eorl
I too see all kind of people stumbling in darkness.
But even science can be conducted out of ignorance and superstition. The Manhattan project was initiated because there was fear among allied forces that the nazis were developing a nuclear bomb.
Even before that, in the days when the link between electricity and magnetism was being discovered, scientists failed to connect the two because they had the superstition that the energy moved in straight lines.
Serious research is being conducted today concerning the possibilities of time travel. How is that for superstition?
