"What does it say about self and identity that the body replaces itself with a largely new set of cells every seven years to 10 years, even every cell of your body and brain is different than ten years ago? Your current physical self did not exist 10 years ago, yet you existed 10, 20 and 30 years ago and you and your mind remember it clearly. This is in part why Buddhists and Hindus think so much about concepts such as soul, mind and reincarnation."
Someone posed this elsewhere, and part of my response is, "Science," including "Biology," are loaded terms that have been maneuvered in ways that misrepresent their significance. "It´s scientific, it´s a fact, so that it is reality and the truth" is a fair example of the exaggeration and abuse of "Science" that is actually an ideology called Scientism, that itself is similar in nature to Religious Fundamentalism. 
Freud´s pioneering work began to reveal insights from "Talk Therapy," including emotions and psychological defense mechanisms including repressed emotions. Freud, for his part, fainted at some of the things his professional student Karl Jung began to say on his way to transcending Freud´s anti-religious reductionism in nascent Transpersonal Psychology. In fact, Fundamentalist "Religion" as a source of conflict with the muddy parameters of "Science" in Scientism can reveal another influential area, business profiteering and market fundamentalism; environmentalism is an intense subject area zone that reveals X-ray-like the murky smokescreen. Matt Sleeth MD is a former Boston ER doctor who had an existential crisis and became an evangelical environmentalist. He has since made a niche for himself. Mitch Hescox was a coal industry executive many years ago, but became a minister and then head of the Evangelical Environmental Network. Both Sleeth and Hescox have assumed strongly literalist/Fundamentalist Christian religious stances, but fundamentally in relation to polluting and profiteering Big Business, not against Science. An interfaith survey can provide additional insight.
Gandhi is a well-known comparative historical religious example as an interfaith Christian-Hindu. Japan´s Seikaku Consumer Co-op also, based on the more indirect aspects of the Meiji Restoration and US post-WWII democratization. Joann Tall is a US Native American Oglala Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation who credits prophetic dreams and spiritual experiences with galvanizing her in activism against exploitative and destructive business incursions around uranium mining and incinerators. She was a mother of eight suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. In analyzing such dynamics, I find it necessary to contextualize all areas as forms of philosophy that are actually knowledge in relation to their phenomena domains. These raise equally key issues, like interdisciplinarity, reductionism, and emergent properties. One trail that emerges is that of modern empirical philosophy, with DesCartes and Kepler as famous chronological and human causal pivots that derive from efforts by Robert Grosseteste, Thomas of Aquinas, and Francis of Assisi. They, in fact, are tips of a historical psychosocial and cultural iceberg that leads back developmentally to the Father of Christian monks Anthony of the Desert, the Apostolic Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch, the first extra-biblical Christian Evodius, the Apostles led by Peter and Paul, and all in turn smoke-signals indicating the fire of Jesus/Yeshua. It is Jesus´ life mission, and message and its legacy in modern University-based society that allows can be represented and embodied by embellishing the Indian parable of monks and the elephant with full acknowledgments. It is Indian in its original conception, with a Buddhist text the earliest written articulation. The Rig Veda at earliest 1500 BC/E has such wisdom as, "Reality is one, though wise men speak of it variously." Yet, Christian monastic schools were first sustained in networks attempting Christian spirituality, then freed intellectually by Christian theism and empirical philosophy. Names like DesCartes, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein are widely unknown, as are Freud, Jung, and perhaps Joseph Campbell. Yet, the phenomenon of spiritual-religious experience has been studied by the likes of Lewis Morgan, Max Mueller, Rudolf Otto, and Mircae Eliade, and the Social Gospel from George Fox, Lucretia Mott, and FD Maurice to W Gladden and W Rauschenbusch to FD and Eleanor Roosevelts´ vision of the United Nations. Indeed, with pluralistic love of humanity based on God´s love through Jesus, FD and Eleanor Roosevelt have justified the image of Jesus and the elephant.
Corporate Big Business profiteering drives unsustainable modern sci-tech culture and its distractions from Climate Change and even bigger picture threats to Nature´s ecosystem services in the US and globally. The 2018 WWF Living Planet Report informs us of ongoing reduction in wildlife biodiversity, the Global Footprint Network that Earth Overshoot Day on biocapacity was 1986 and annually is before September, and the IPBES that almost 20% of pollinators are in danger of extinction. From impermanent features to environmentalism and philosophical contexts, "Science," "Religion" or Comparative Religious Studies, and "Business economics" are some key areas based on and/or embraced by modern Philosophy, a product of Christian monastic schools and concern about relation to God through Jesus and his commandments including "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and teachings like "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven (where? Within and among you.)" as in the Gospel of Matthew. Impermanence can alert us to the fragility and vulnerability of life, as in Buddhist wisdom. Hindu diversity and yoga can awaken us to colorful dynamic psychospiritual forces, along with other interfaith insights, say, from Native American wisdom. Christian love ultimately pervades all such reflections in having underlain modern University- and Human Rights-based society. What insights do you gain from such reflection? 
Corporate Big Business profiteering drives unsustainable modern sci-tech culture and its distractions from Climate Change and even bigger picture threats to Nature´s ecosystem services in the US and globally. The 2018 WWF Living Planet Report informs us of ongoing reduction in wildlife biodiversity, the Global Footprint Network that Earth Overshoot Day on biocapacity was 1986 and annually is before September, and the IPBES that almost 20% of pollinators are in danger of extinction. From impermanent features to environmentalism and philosophical contexts, "Science," "Religion" or Comparative Religious Studies, and "Business economics" are some key areas based on and/or embraced by modern Philosophy, a product of Christian monastic schools and concern about relation to God through Jesus and his commandments including "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and teachings like "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven (where? Within and among you.)" as in the Gospel of Matthew. Impermanence can alert us to the fragility and vulnerability of life, as in Buddhist wisdom. Hindu diversity and yoga can awaken us to colorful dynamic psychospiritual forces, along with other interfaith insights, say, from Native American wisdom. Christian love ultimately pervades all such reflections in having underlain modern University- and Human Rights-based society. What insights do you gain from such reflection? 
Comments
Post a Comment