"Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world -- such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word."
- Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion.
There are 2 schools of thought in dealing with cases when religion conflicts with logic, rationality, science and reality. One is to pretend that said conflicts do not exist and to either paper over or ignore them, or to undertake contortionist feats that even an escapologist would be proud of and proclaim that 1 + 1 = 3. My contentions with such approaches have previously been explored at length.
The other school of thought is to abstractify religion, treat it as figurative, metaphorical or symbolic, or to segue into a modern, politically-correct variant of the "all religions are the same" spiel. The above extract crystallises the problems with such an approach, and I will add that this perverts the original meaning of religion.
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Natures and Cultures of Cuteness
"The biologist Stephen Jay Gould has argued that Mickey's progressive juvenilization - what is known as neoteny - moved toward the features of his young nephew Morty. This was accomplished by an increase in eye size, head length and cranial vault size; Mickey's arms and legs and snout were thickened, his legs jointed, and his ears were moved back. This growth toward childhood, Gould contends, represents the "unconscious discovery" by Disney and his artists of the biological principles outlined by Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz [Ed: Infant/baby schema; Kindchenschema]. The attributes of cuteness described by Lorenz and other ethologists are the very features of infancy acquired by Mickey. These attributes are said to trigger "innate releasing mechanisms" of caring and the related affective responses of adults to children. A cute Mickey is more affectively involving, and more saleable, than a jealous, wisecracking rodent with a pointy snout. For this reason, Gould thinks, "the magic kingdom trades on a biological illusion - our ability to abstract and our propensity to transfer inappropriately to other animals the fitting response we make to changing form in the growth of our own bodies.
... Ultimately, I want to consider the representations of animals used by National Geographic Magazine [henceforth NGM] to elicit reader involvement in the National Geographic Society's [henceforth NGS] work. I am arguing that popular participatory science of the kind found in NGM cultivates cuteness in order to encourage specific kinds of involvement with the animals reproduced in its pages."
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The Panopticon - "The Panopticon ("all-seeing") functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who conducted surveillance from the privileged central location within the radial configuration. The prisoner could never know when he was being surveilled -- mental uncertainty that in itself would prove to be a crucial instrument of discipline."
I feel distinctly cheated. All my life, Singaporean secondary school mathematics teachers had led me to believe that this symbol:
was pronounced as "teeter". Now I discover that it's the Greek letter Theta, and "teeter" is the Singaporean mispronunciation of the British variant pronunciation.
