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Post by megli on Sept 19, 2009 19:55:22 GMT -1
Are you saying that you believe these people were told by actual gods/demons to kill? Marvellous dramatised at the end of Euripides' play The Bacchae, which should be required reading for anyone thinking about deity. The bit where Agave realises she's ripped her own son's head off is one of may favourite moments of literature.
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Post by megli on Sept 19, 2009 19:57:10 GMT -1
Those of us who say we want relationship with the old gods will guess at the power that flowed through that mothers arms as she cut her baby’s throat, the rapture she would have felt and we will withstand the force of these and other feelings, including the feeble judgements of feeble people. If you really can only feel fear or repugnance then a/ you’re kidding yourself and b/ you’ve swallowed new age paganism whole.
Are you sure you mean that? As an experiment, change 'she' to 'he' and 'cut the throat' to 'rape'---surely a very terrible crime, but a lesser one than outright murder---and see how it reads.
Is a god any force that drives you out of your head and moral centre, and debases you to an egoless yet animalistically violent state?
The Greeks---as I say, especially people like Euripides---would have agreed with you. I neither agree or disagree, apart from to say that divine forces may be very terrible indeed and that moral agency lies with us not them. I sometimes feel the attraction of the buddhist view that we are potentially greater than gods because we can---with great difficultly---achieve perfect compassion, whereas gods are amoral self-pleasuring cosmic forces.
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Post by clare on Sept 19, 2009 20:03:47 GMT -1
Which bit?
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Post by megli on Sept 19, 2009 20:09:31 GMT -1
altered so it's more clear!
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Post by pencoed on Sept 19, 2009 22:51:40 GMT -1
to my mind a sacrifice is something only *you* - the person - can make, because your life is the only thing that you really possess to give. The manipulation of the lifeforce of another through the sorcerous act is something that has been going on for a *long* time, in many differnet cultures. i am aware of that For me this boils down to sacrificing time, which is a little bit of my life, and once offered can never be reclaimed. it is time i dedicate to the gods my time is sacrificed with sincerity i think it is the quality of the time which counts - i dedicate it to the gods
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Post by pencoed on Sept 19, 2009 23:12:40 GMT -1
Hi, to my mind a sacrifice is something only *you* - the person - can make, because your life is the only thing that you really possess to give. For me this boils down to sacrificing time, which is a little bit of my life, and once offered can never be reclaimed. sincerely, pencoed I thought that the ancient forms of sacrifice were more to do with making a contract binding. Certain members of the druid class had to be present, to make sure the ritual/sacrifice was carried out correctly in order to make it 'legal' with the Gods. Similar to a solicitor drawing up a legal contract between varies parties. I have to agree with LR, that giving up a bit of time is a bit weak to be classed as sacred time. It's a modern excuse & a lazy way out. Is it not also a way to ignore the past because that seems too extreme for todays sentimentalities? On a personal note, The Gods I feel demand far more than just a bit of time. thanks: what is demanded i will leave to the unseen powers - i will also give up certain things i like, another form of sacrifice, perhaps token sacrifice, but sacrifice nevertheless: as i am a polytheist, and this is a polytheist group, here is an anecdote: a group of villagers were debating the concept of sacrifice to their deity, in India; that evening the deity appeared to one of the villagers in a dream, it said: 'better a bucket full of the worshipper's blood than a thimble full of anyone (or anything) else's '. ultimately, i believe religious observance is between oneself and one's concept of deity, a private and intensely personal relationship ~ that is what i believe, it is my personal view on the subject.
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Post by pencoed on Sept 19, 2009 23:29:50 GMT -1
Is a god any force that drives you out of your head and moral centre, and debases you to an egoless yet animalistically violent state? the Bacchae had a terrific effect on me especially when i saw an actual theatrical performance of the play: the deity wreaks havoc because the people he encounters refuse or fail to acknowledge him - i think the moral is in the refusal to acknowledge the divine - something powerful beyond words - and the resulting tragic, awful consequences in the play?
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Post by megli on Sept 20, 2009 7:49:57 GMT -1
That's partly it, re: the Bacchae: it's also the point that Dionysus is completely and utterly amoral, a vast force simply not concerned with human rights and wrongs at all. It's not possible to extract a tidy moral ('acknowledge the gods and you'll be OK') because after all Cadmus acknowledges the new god eagerly and yet his life is completely and utterly destroyed. The irony is in the gap between the presentation of deity in human form on stage (which is how the greeks imagined their gods) and the actual brutally impersonal nature of said deity.
I bring this up not as a pointless digression into literature, but because I think in this thread we're edging around the 'Problem of Evil', which brings in ideas of moral responsibility and the tragic.
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Post by clare on Sept 20, 2009 8:23:23 GMT -1
Those of us who say we want relationship with the old gods will guess at the power that flowed through that mothers arms as she cut her baby’s throat, the rapture she would have felt and we will withstand the force of these and other feelings, including the feeble judgments of feeble people. If you really can only feel fear or repugnance then a/ you’re kidding yourself and b/ you’ve swallowed new age paganism whole.Are you sure you mean that? As an experiment, change 'she' to 'he' and 'cut the throat' to 'rape'---surely a very terrible crime, but a lesser one than outright murder---and see how it reads. Is a god any force that drives you out of your head and moral centre, and debases you to an egoless yet animalistically violent state? The Greeks---as I say, especially people like Euripides---would have agreed with you. I neither agree or disagree, apart from to say that divine forces may be very terrible indeed and that moral agency lies with us not them. I sometimes feel the attraction of the buddhist view that we are potentially greater than gods because we can---with great difficultly---achieve perfect compassion, whereas gods are amoral self-pleasuring cosmic forces. I don't know much at all about Euripides and so may make unintentional mistakes here, but I'm glad he agrees with me! Whether the act is rape, infanticide, Aztec sacrifice or strangling the cat it produces a huge amount of (for want of a better word) energy which can be focused towards an intent. aka magic. Sacrifice presumably is an exchange of something powerful for something powerful in return: a gods pleasure in your actions and thus approval of you (Abraham and Isaac) or rain or a good crop. Moral agency: yes. And no. It's unacceptable for us to do an Aztec sacrifice. It has a different meaning to us than it would have to the Aztecs and that meaning changed for them over a period of time. Context is everything. This is not to condone rape or infanticide or human sacrifice but to have some empathy with the perpetrator. IMO, those of us who recoil and say that we just simply could never ever imagine doing anything like THAT are kidding ourselves, and actually dehumanising ourselves and the Other of the perpetrator. Psychopaths have no empathy with their victims. If one is so out of touch with oneself that one can't imagine doing evil then there's a real psychological problem going on. If I can kill an animal for meat then I am capable of killing a person. We are all capable of killing a person unless we're severely physically ill. Whether that's a right action; whether the gods that demand this are worthy of following that's all up for debate.
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Post by clare on Sept 20, 2009 8:27:11 GMT -1
And if you're not capable of killing an animal then you're not hungry enough.
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Post by dreamguardian on Sept 20, 2009 9:15:12 GMT -1
I thought that the ancient forms of sacrifice were more to do with making a contract binding. Certain members of the druid class had to be present, to make sure the ritual/sacrifice was carried out correctly in order to make it 'legal' with the Gods. Similar to a solicitor drawing up a legal contract between varies parties. I have to agree with LR, that giving up a bit of time is a bit weak to be classed as sacred time. It's a modern excuse & a lazy way out. Is it not also a way to ignore the past because that seems too extreme for todays sentimentalities? On a personal note, The Gods I feel demand far more than just a bit of time. thanks: what is demanded i will leave to the unseen powers - i will also give up certain things i like, another form of sacrifice, perhaps token sacrifice, but sacrifice nevertheless: as i am a polytheist, and this is a polytheist group, here is an anecdote: a group of villagers were debating the concept of sacrifice to their deity, in India; that evening the deity appeared to one of the villagers in a dream, it said: 'better a bucket full of the worshipper's blood than a thimble full of anyone (or anything) else's '. ultimately, i believe religious observance is between oneself and one's concept of deity, a private and intensely personal relationship ~ that is what i believe, it is my personal view on the subject. I wasn't pointing fingers Just making an observation
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Post by megli on Sept 20, 2009 9:22:11 GMT -1
Those of us who say we want relationship with the old gods will guess at the power that flowed through that mothers arms as she cut her baby’s throat, the rapture she would have felt and we will withstand the force of these and other feelings, including the feeble judgments of feeble people. If you really can only feel fear or repugnance then a/ you’re kidding yourself and b/ you’ve swallowed new age paganism whole.Are you sure you mean that? As an experiment, change 'she' to 'he' and 'cut the throat' to 'rape'---surely a very terrible crime, but a lesser one than outright murder---and see how it reads. Is a god any force that drives you out of your head and moral centre, and debases you to an egoless yet animalistically violent state? The Greeks---as I say, especially people like Euripides---would have agreed with you. I neither agree or disagree, apart from to say that divine forces may be very terrible indeed and that moral agency lies with us not them. I sometimes feel the attraction of the buddhist view that we are potentially greater than gods because we can---with great difficultly---achieve perfect compassion, whereas gods are amoral self-pleasuring cosmic forces. Whether the act is rape, infanticide, Aztec sacrifice or strangling the cat it produces a huge amount of (for want of a better word) energy which can be focused towards an intent. aka magic. Sacrifice presumably is an exchange of something powerful for something powerful in return: a gods pleasure in your actions and thus approval of you (Abraham and Isaac) or rain or a good crop. Moral agency: yes. And no. It's unacceptable for us to do an Aztec sacrifice. It has a different meaning to us than it would have to the Aztecs and that meaning changed for them over a period of time. Context is everything. This is not to condone rape or infanticide or human sacrifice but to have some empathy with the perpetrator. IMO, those of us who recoil and say that we just simply could never ever imagine doing anything like THAT are kidding ourselves, and actually dehumanising ourselves and the Other of the perpetrator. Psychopaths have no empathy with their victims. If one is so out of touch with oneself that one can't imagine doing evil then there's a real psychological problem going on. If I can kill an animal for meat then I am capable of killing a person. We are all capable of killing a person unless we're severely physically ill. Whether that's a right action; whether the gods that demand this are worthy of following that's all up for debate. I appreciate your points Clare, but I think this is a very very murky area. As to the occult release of energy by violence, well, it's all very Dennis Wheatley. I'm inclined to a Dawkins-esque view that strangling a baby or a cat or raping someone doesn't actually release any 'energy' (what kind of energy?!) whatsoever, other than in the disturbed person's tragically deluded or wicked mind. But then, I don't believe in magic. You say: Context is everything. This is not to condone rape or infanticide or human sacrifice but to have some empathy with the perpetrator.Quite so---that's how I feel everytime I read about Auschwitz. I'm mean, OK, so it was a bit naughty, incincerating all those millions of people and performing diabolical medical experiments on them---but well, different times, eh!? In the Nazi world view, it all made perfect sense, and our moral positions are of course only culturally-authoritative constructions. Now, I realise, as you explicitly say, that you're not condoning anything. And indeed, it's quite true that we mustn't split and 'other' people who perform monstrous acts, getting them to carry our own inner burden of wickedness, so that we can feel pure and self-righteous. Yes, we are all capable of very wicked things, and it's self delusion to think otherwise. But, on the other hand, there's a threat of social constructionism here; the idea that people aren't responsible for their actions if those actions are validated by the state or the thought-world of the time. I don't believe that if your culture tells you gassing jews is right that it becomes right for you to do so, and that you can't as a result be condemned. The story of Sophie Scholl makes moving reading in this context. This is all bargain basement Jungianism I suppose.
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Post by littleraven on Sept 20, 2009 9:35:20 GMT -1
my time is sacrificed with sincerity i think it is the quality of the time which counts - i dedicate it to the gods There is no difference between the time you 'sacrifice' and the time given up to any other particular activity you may enjoy partaking of. There is no difference in the time you 'sacrifice' to the time given up to the parishioner sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning. This isn't sacrifice, if anything it's nothing more than an observance and something of a base requirement if any kind of serious intent is desired.
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Post by dreamguardian on Sept 20, 2009 9:36:19 GMT -1
... Quite so---that's how I feel everytime I read about Auschwitz. I'm mean, OK, so it was a bit naughty, incincerating all those millions of people and performing diabolical medical experiments on them---but well, different times, eh!? In the Nazi world view, it all made perfect sense, and our moral positions are of course only culturally-authoritative constructions. Now, I realise, as you explicitly say, that you're not condoning anything. And indeed, it's quite true that we mustn't split and 'other' people who perform monstrous acts, getting them to carry our own inner burden of wickedness, so that we can feel pure and self-righteous. Yes, we are all capable of very wicked things, and it's self delusion to think otherwise. But, on the other hand, there's a threat of social constructionism here; the idea that people aren't responsible for their actions if those actions are validated by the state or the thought-world of the time. I don't believe that if your culture tells you gassing jews is right that it becomes right for you to do so, and that you can't as a result be condemned. The story of Sophie Scholl makes moving reading in this context. This is all bargain basement Jungianism I suppose. To think that medical science, techniques & it's huge advancements here in the UK are based & developed from those Nazi medical experiments. Now that IS a moral can of worms. I'm not sure Clare was saying it's OK to do those things but to recognise we're all capable of doing them.
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Post by potia on Sept 20, 2009 9:39:36 GMT -1
Those of us who say we want relationship with the old gods will guess at the power that flowed through that mothers arms as she cut her baby’s throat, the rapture she would have felt and we will withstand the force of these and other feelings, including the feeble judgments of feeble people. If you really can only feel fear or repugnance then a/ you’re kidding yourself and b/ you’ve swallowed new age paganism whole. and If I can kill an animal for meat then I am capable of killing a person. We are all capable of killing a person unless we're severely physically ill. Whether that's a right action; whether the gods that demand this are worthy of following that's all up for debate. To me there is a huge differnce between acknowledging that I am probably capable as I am currently of killing an animal or someone threathening me and mine is one thing. To feel anything other than total horror at the idea of killing my own child is not something I can do. I can not feel empathy for those that deliberately harm their own children. I can only assume that there is something about their mental health that allows them to do something that I can not understand.
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Post by littleraven on Sept 20, 2009 9:42:31 GMT -1
Yes, we are all capable of very wicked things, and it's self delusion to think otherwise. But, on the other hand, there's a threat of social constructionism here; the idea that people aren't responsible for their actions if those actions are validated by the state or the thought-world of the time. I don't believe that if your culture tells you gassing jews is right that it becomes right for you to do so, and that you can't as a result be condemned. The story of Sophie Scholl makes moving reading in this context. As an aside, I wonder what would have happened to Sophie Scholl and people like her outside of the specific context. I suppose we're talking along the lines of things likes Maslow's hierarchy here. I can't recall the name of the experiment, but in the 1950s there was experiment in an American university into how people would challenge their ethical standpoint under dire circumstances. It was very much in response to the common Nuremburg defense of 'following orders'. What they did was they got students to partake in an experiment, under the understanding that to pass their course they would *have* to complete the experiment in full. They would give electrical shocks to people (who were obviously not seen and faking the shock). It was found that the vast majority of students were prepared to give potentially lethal shocks. Something to bear in mind when considering human capability, and that it's nto always an extreme thing.
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Post by littleraven on Sept 20, 2009 9:49:39 GMT -1
As to the occult release of energy by violence, well, it's all very Dennis Wheatley. I'm inclined to a Dawkins-esque view that strangling a baby or a cat or raping someone doesn't actually release any 'energy' (what kind of energy?!) whatsoever, other than in the disturbed person's tragically deluded or wicked mind. But then, I don't believe in magic. But a question arises, if you believe in Gods, spirits et al then why not a belief in magic? That kind of energy is essentially the energy of the soul.
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Post by Adam on Sept 20, 2009 10:06:14 GMT -1
But, on the other hand, there's a threat of social constructionism here; the idea that people aren't responsible for their actions if those actions are validated by the state or the thought-world of the time. I don't believe that if your culture tells you gassing jews is right that it becomes right for you to do so, and that you can't as a result be condemned. The story of Sophie Scholl makes moving reading in this context. This is all bargain basement Jungianism I suppose. Woahh... this is taking the original (real life) example all way too far here. I told that story for one purpose and for one purpose only... to counter the absurd suggestion that comes up again and again that if someone's God commanded them to kill and they failed to resist, they were somehow weak. "Oh if a god appeared to me and told me to kill, they had jolly well have a damned good reason"... meh... The experience of your God... the *direct* experience of you Gods... as attested again and again.. destroys ones neat social constructions of reality... it is all encompassing and all possessing. This lady was indeed in a state of rapture, she had "witnessed" the transformation of her child from a weak human mired in sin to a truly radiant spiritual being. Morality didn't come into, relative or otherwise... she had done nothing but followed the word of her beloved and transformed her child, elevating it to the status of an angel. When she knew what she had done, her world was more totally destroyed than anyone here can possibly fucking imagine and would ever, I hope, wish on anyone. I'm almost sorry and feel disrespectful to the poor lady's memory (I doubt she is still alive) that I ever used her story as an example.
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Post by littleraven on Sept 20, 2009 10:20:29 GMT -1
When she knew what she had done, her world was more totally destroyed than anyone here can possibly fucking imagine and would ever, I hope, wish on anyone. I'm almost sorry and feel disrespectful to the poor lady's memory (I doubt she is still alive) that I ever used her story as an example. I don't think it disrespectful at all, I think that her memory can be retold in such a way is *entirely* respectful. The fact that it's a real world example brings it out of our theoretical musings and into the context of *people*.
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