religion is narrative, a form of language and communication

The language of morality, love, and meaning for christians is christianity. The language of morality, love, and meaning for muslims is islam. The language of morality, love, beauty, and meaning for naturalists is materialism.

For an atheist to go to a devout christian and say christianity is wrong is like some white person telling me that the korean language is wrong. "The Korean language is bullshit!", he shouts. How offended would I be?

"Why is korean wrong?! You're wrong!! English is wrong!"

Just like how there is no point in going around debating who has the best language, there is no point going around debating who has the best religion/worldview, even if you can prove your worldview is the better one.

Religion like language is ultimately a tool, a means to an end.

The best way to approach a korean person is to speak his language. Likewise, the best way to approach a christian is to speak through his language, christianity and its narratives. Try framing what you want to get across using christian narratives and vocabulary. That I believe, is the most effective way we can start building bridges between us rather than destroying them.

See below for an example in a different context:

We are reluctant to change our worldviews For the most part, when we are confronted with a challenge to our worldviews, we react by rejecting it out of hand. This is due to the dissonance of this new worldview to the one we already possess. Rather, what we prefer is to confront worldviews that coincide and amplify our own. However, on occasion we do change. This is when we confront a worldview that overlaps our own in certain critical respects and then veers in a different direction. An example of this sort of worldview change is found through the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Starting in the 1950s, King found an America - particularly the South - that was mired by Jim Crow laws that kept African Americans in a second form of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law to everyone—not just to people of European descent. King took on the monumental task of challenging the shared community worldview that allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and for segregation to seem natural. This was no easy project. As argued above, people are inclined to be conservative in changing their worldviews. But this does not mean that it is impossible.

Dr. King was the perfect candidate for instigating worldview change by overlap and modification. This is because Dr King overlapped with much of the dominant white culture: (1) by being an ordained minister in the Baptist Church; (2) he was a man of intellect as evidenced by his doctorate from Boston University; (3) he led marchers non-violently singing religious hymns familiar to most Americans. In these ways, his worldview was like theirs.

On the other hand, what he was suggesting was racial equality and integration, which was not a part of the dominant culture’s shared community worldview. But when mainstream America watched the scenes on their televisions of these non-violent protestors being savagely beaten by armed police, being bitten by vicious police dogs, and physically assaulted by fire hoses, then Americans began challenging their personal worldviews. In 1964 a major civil law was passed while in 1965 the voting rights bill was passed. Both pieces of legislation would never have occurred had not there not been a dramatic shift in the personal worldviews of most Americans. It took a crossover figure like Dr. King to effect such a change through the overlapping worldview and modification approach.

- Michael Boylan

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

- George Bernard Shaw

beauty as a sexist tool

Early on, I was in love with beauty. I don't feel less because I'm in the presence of a beautiful person. I don't go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], "Oh, I'll never be that beautiful!" What a ridiculous attitude to take!—the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, they don't go [crying], "Oh, I'll never be that fast, I'll never be that strong!" When people look at Michelangelo's David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, "Wow! That is fabulous." When you see a beautiful person: "How beautiful." That's what I'm bringing back to feminism. You go, "What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!"

- Camilla Paglia

expanded consciousness

…I feel that the Sixties have not been fully understood. That is, the Sixties were looking for a fully expanded consciousness, and that's what the drugs were doing. The drugs were a means for the Sixties to expand the mind. But unfortunately the drugs turn on you. Drugs turn on you. And I think that that was one of the problems of my generation, the loss of the visions and the knowledge obtained by the most daring members of my generation through their drug experiences. They damaged their brains, and they never came back. In fact, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac said a few months ago on Entertainment Tonight about the founders of that band that he feels very lucky to be in good condition, because when he goes to see them—he went like this [knocks on forehead]— "They're not the same people I knew once." And I think that's true of many people I know. Some of the most brilliant minds I know did not continue in academe, the ones I talk to still. The drugs gave vision, but they deprived the person of the ability to translate those visions into material form. I feel lucky I never was attracted to drugs. I am an addict of my own hormones, obviously, my own adrenalines! So, I thank God, that's why I'm alive today to be telling the story, or trying to tell the story.

So what I'm saying is that what happened in the Sixties, "the mind's liberation" in the Sixties, was something that has never been fully documented. The psychedelic element of the Sixties is a joke today, like Donovan or tie-dye shirts and so on. I'm saying it was no joke, okay? I'm saying that that was one of the most creative moments in Western history, the moment of that clash between Western religion and Eastern religion. I'm not a practicing Hindu, I'm not a practicing Buddhist, I'm not a practicing Catholic. But for me as a Catholic that coming together of all those world-religions at that moment was profoundly liberating. I feel that we hear it in Jimi Hendrix's guitar, we hear it in the music of the Sixties. That story has never been fully told. I want to do that. I can sense in my students for the last five years, I've been sensing, when I talk about the Sixties to my students, they all are listening, they're listening very intently. Something is happening. The whole Sixties thing is returning through the students of today. I feel very, very hopeful about the end of the century and the millennium, very hopeful.

- Camilla Paglia

in draft: asian art

For many in China, marriage is about social obligation, not a matter of personal love, which is a Western idea. Similarly, perspective is abnormal in non-Western traditions of art. Perspective assumes that the human eye is the measure of the world.

avant-garde art

At the time, Manet’s Olympia was extremely controversial and was rejected by the Salon establishment. Because the nude is wearing small items of clothing: the orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, these items accentuated her nakedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture-also another sex symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

Olympia immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic photos were controversial when they first came out. It can be argued that Mapplethrope’s photos had a similar effect on the art crowd that Manet's Le Deeuner sur l'herbe had with the Salon establishment. While rosy nudity was permissible in academic Salon paintings of Greek and Roman themes, the fiat, sallow flesh tones of Manet's nude female picnicker disturbed first viewers by a harsh contemporary realism and immediacy. There is no attempt to soften or idealize. This sexual flesh is frankly available and unromanticized. The casual air with which Manet juxtaposes brazen open-air nudity with the raffish workaday costume of the two young intellectuals, lost in discourse, is exactly the tone of many of Mapplethorpe's photos, where libertines pose in relaxed moods amid the bizarre discontinuities of their sexual underworld. The original shock of Manet's painting is surely reproduced, with the greater explicitness of our age, in Mapplethorpe's extraordinary photograph, Man in Polyester Suit, with its large black penis poking from an otherwise fully clothed torso. Finally, Manet goaded respectable sensibilities by the cool, appraising look on the face of his nude woman, who, like his self-possessed courtesan Olympia, meets our eyes without apology or embarrassment. She is practical, efficient, a bawdy woman of the world who knows her market value. She has, I submit, the same unsentimental sexual efficiency as Mapplethrope’s jaunty sadomasochists.

Mapplethrope’s distinction at the time was that he revived the idea of the avant-garde at a moment when it seemed buried forever. The avant-garde tradition was terminated in the Sixties by pop art, which closed the gap between high and low culture. The art world since then had, in my view, sunk into naked hucksterism and puerile mini-fads, a toy-train rat race of mediocrity and irrelevance. American creative energy was flowing instead into popular culture, which was sweeping the world.

- Camille Paglia

the authenticity ethos

Authenticity is a matter of genuineness, a hallmark of the unalienated original self. In his brilliant book Sincerity and Authenticity, literary critic Lionel Trilling identifies the ethos of authenticity, of individual impulses that are expressed freely and spontaneously without concern for propriety or others' reception. This value is associated with the 1960s—the generation to which many of today's college faculty belong—and the rejection of convention. It abounds in such mid-twentieth-century literary classics as The Catcher in the Rye, with its disparagement of "phoniness"; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with its search for "quality"; or On the Road, with its rejection of conformity and its celebration of spontaneity. A logic of authenticity seeks a singular self, a unique individuality that does not change or yield according to circumstances. The roots of this ethos can be traced through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and thought, from Emerson's notion of self-reliance back to the roots of Protestant Christianity, in which a person's history and family become irrelevant to the notion of the soul, and all that matters is individual faith, not ritual action.

The authentic self is often characterized by solitude. Groups are anathema to the authentic self, because participating in a group requires compromise, while authenticity requires consistent loyalty to one's own principles. As Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents, because we are members of society, individuals can never attain complete happiness, for we must always compromise our desires. The authentic self therefore celebrates separation of the person from society. It is distrustful of convention and even of success, since achieving worldly success means meeting the expectations and desires of the populace at large. Vincent van Gogh was the perfect authentic self: he had his own distinct, original style, suffered during his lifetime for his singularity, and was never commercially successful.

For authentic selves, the concepts of originality and authorship are critical. Since each self is unique, so are its words. In the celebration of authenticity that began in earnest in the eighteenth century, each text had to have a singular author. Authorship might have to be "authenticated" in order to ascertain precisely the identity of the originating individual.

Authentic individuals are especially prominent among the literary and musical geniuses whose oeuvre is perceived to have bubbled up spontaneously from their souls.' Unlike in earlier times, their inspiration was not thought to derive from a muse or from God; their creativity came from the internal inspiration of the writer or artist herself or himself. As these moments of inspiration "are increasingly credited to the writer's own genius," writes Martha Woodmansee, "they transform the writer into a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product. Wordsworth was the quintessential author, forever emphasizing his originality and creativity. And because authors are originators, they own rights to their work." Johann Gottfried von Herder's view, which guided this idea of authenticity, was that "one ought to be able to regard each book as the imprint of a living human soul. " Thus it is not just possible but essential to trace the book back to its originating soul.

- Susan Blum

God is dead, truth is dead. There are only multiple truths, depending on perspective. What is then important is our perception of reality. Because reality is determined ultimately by our mind.

Also, man is born without sin but is then corrupted by society and civilization. Parents, politicians, and preachers are hypocritical moral figures. Thus to be truly moral, one must look to nature and to one's heart for moral guidance and not to authorities such as the family, the state, and religion.

This I believe is the central essence of the authenticity ethos.

On a different note, let me say one thing. We can posit that objective standards of beauty and morality exist because biologically we are essentially built the same way. We are motivated and driven by the same desires. Gender roles are not socially constructed. They are a direct result of our biology and our genes. Our taste in art is not socially constructed. Humans tend to find similar things beautiful (a sunset vs. a pile of poop). Our moralities are similar (rules against incest, murder, and theft are found in all cultures). These things might not be "truths" to an alien species that come across our planet, but these are essentially truths for us, because we have been built to love, want, and desire the same things.

The reason why we have religion, family, and the state is because we need them. Communism forgot this. Communism was based on a false belief in human nature.

In an age of science, religion and myth are still relevant because science can not address the universal God-shaped hole in our hearts. We humans have evolved to seek fulfillment regarding questions of spirituality, meaning and purpose. But just because we have this need, does not mean that the object of this need exists. Nevertheless, we have this need and we have to address it, even materialists and atheists. Like their religious counterparts, they have their own mythic narratives that they believe in.

Can we ever know and experience the true reality? We begin our search for meaning with this question. Once we have found a narrative that sufficiently addresses this question of reality, then we have found our reality. Is this the true reality? Probably not, but by then, we don't care.

confucianism

To the successful American, the sense of his own greatness is quite unrelated to the people surrounding him, and certainly he does not feel that it depends at all upon the community of his origin. The dream of the ambitious person is to have the world at his feet, not at his side.

- Francis Hsu